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Philosophy and Culture"Contention and Contestation: Aesthetic Culture in Kant and Bourdieu"Manu Chander, Brown University
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Notes1 While
Foucault is by no means the only "structuralist" against
whom Bourdieu positions his sociology of culture, he is, I
would argue, the most important figure, for, as I discuss
below, Foucault's theory of culture is in many ways in line
with that of Bourdieu. Thus, by reducing Foucault to a
"structuralist" whose work reflects the same problems as
more obvious targets (such as the Russian formalists and
statistical analysts), Bourdieu is able to distance himself
not only from "pure" structuralists, but also from every
shade of structuralist analysis that competes with his
own. 2 I am, for
the sake of brevity, eliding two separate points of
analysis in Bourdieu's work when I suggest that the theory
of position-takings critiques the substantialist
presumptions of aesthetic genius and of aesthetic judgment
(or taste). The critique of genius is primarily concerned
with cultural production, while the critique of the theory
of aesthetic judgment is primarily concerned with cultural
consumption (the former critique is the project of The
Field of Cultural Production, while the latter is the
project of Distinction). In both cases, Bourdieu
emphasizes positionality over substance, relationality over
autonomy. See especially Distinction 230-232,
where Bourdieu discusses the homology between the
production and consumption of cultural goods. 3 See,
for example, Martin 9; for a more unequivocal remark about
the label, see Foucault's statement, "I have never been a
Freudian, I have never been a Marxist, and I have never
been a structuralist" (Foucault 437). 4 On
the distinction between these two adages, see Ferry
48-53. 5 This
sense of necessity more closely reflects Kant's earlier
claim in the Analytic of the Beautiful that "there
must be coupled with [the judgment of taste] a
claim to subjective universality" [ es muß
damit ein Anspruch auf subjektive Allgemeinheit
verbunden sein ] (51; my italics). |