Praxis Series
Romantic Circles

Philosophy and Culture

"Contention and Contestation: Aesthetic Culture in Kant and Bourdieu"

Manu Chander, Brown University

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Notes

1 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.
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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.
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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).
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4 On the distinction between these two adages, see Ferry 48-53.
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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).
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Romantic Circles Praxis Series
Series Editor: Orrin N. C. Wang
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