Bourdieu's refusal. (French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu)(Pierre Bourdieu and Literary History) John Guillory.

Abstract: French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has not been seriously received by literary critics in the US because his sociology is deemed incompatible with American social and cultural theory. American readers reject his reduction of social action to self-interest. Others think that his concept of human motivation is characterized by reductionism and pessimism. Moreover, literary critics refuse to acknowledge Bourdieu's theory that social change does not arise from individual or collective action.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 Duke University Press

And this is that famous human freedom which everyone brags of having, and which consists only in this: that men are conscious of their appetite and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined. - Spinoza

Plus ca change. . .

Of the several reasons one might offer for the belated reception of Pierre Bourdieu's work in the U.S. academy - the uncertainties of translation, the difference of the French intellectual scene, the discrepancy between the publication order of his books in France and in the United States, the notorious difficulty of his prose - none explains the suspicion, even hostility, with which his work has often been greeted. Surveying the most typical misapprehensions of Bourdieu's theoretical positions, Loic Wacquant reminds us, much in the spirit of Bourdieu, that the reception of any foreign oeuvre is mediated by "structures of the national intellectual field.(1) The interesting question raised by this point is why the same field that permitted so favorable a reception of Derrida or Foucault, especially in the humanities, should have occasioned so different a response to Bourdieu. Wacquant observes in concluding his study that the severity of Bourdieu's "reflexive sociology," which spares neither itself nor any other intellectual project exposure to the cold illumination of its analysis, provokes intense uneasiness among his readers. This uneasiness must be very great indeed, if the same readers who assimilated poststructuralist thought without being too disturbed by what some consider to be its "nihilism" find Bourdieu altogether too bleak. Yet even this account may not go far enough in registering what might be called a refusal of Bourdieu's sociology as simply incompatible with the project of much social and cultural theory in the United States.(2)

I would like to take this refusal seriously as the occasion of advancing both an analysis and a defense of what is perceived as most problematic in Bourdieu's work. This is a question not so much of how Bourdieu has been misunderstood as of how the refusal of his sociology constitutes precisely that understanding of Bourdieu called forth in the U.S. intellectual field. Let me acknowledge at the outset, then, exactly what Bourdieu's American readers refuse: his apparent reduction of social action to self-interest, in the form of the accumulation of "capital," and, further, his implicit foreclosure of any action that transcends individual interest or has progressive social change as its end. It will not do simply to argue that this understanding of Bourdieu is a misunderstanding, that concepts such as habitus or le sens pratique were intended from the beginning to supersede the notion of a "self' consciously calculating its interests. Even Bourdieu's most sympathetic readers, while granting his anticipation of the typical misreadings of his work, record a sense that his account of human motivation is profoundly reductive and pessimistic. Speaking for many, Edward LiPuma wonders how, given the terms of Bourdieu's analysis, any individual can "produce forms of thought that expose and threaten the reproduction of the class structure" (Calhoun et al., 24). It is only too easy to come away from Bourdieu with the impression that he offers a completely determinist social ontology, expressed in a fail-safe mechanism of "reproduction."(3)

Whether Bourdieu's sociology can be accurately characterized in such terms is not my primary concern here, although I hope to dislodge some assumptions underlying this response. My immediate objective is to consider the possibility that his refusal can be taken as an index of certain properties of the "national intellectual field." What seems to have troubled Bourdieu's U.S. readers most is the implication that social change cannot be the conscious and intended effect of individual or collective action. I argue that the very vehemence with which his perceived determinism is rejected can be said to express by contrast an intellectual ethos of voluntarism. If there is any doubt about the prevalence of this ethos in recent years, let me offer the emergence of cultural studies as a sufficient exhibit. Lawrence Grossberg's statement concerning the ends of this project would elicit broad consensus in the humanities and in some of the social sciences: "Cultural studies is a rigorous intellectual - even academic - practice which seeks to produce better knowledge of the political context of the world, knowledge which opens up new and hopefully progressive possibilities of struggle and transformation."(4) In lieu of a fuller account, I shall rely on a perception that few would now contest: it has become increasingly important to justify academic practice by asserting it as the vehicle of political transformation. We need not decide whether it is such a vehicle, or even whether it should be, to recognize how important it has become to foreground the motive of political change in academic practice.

Now it is worth remarking, before proceeding any further, that Bourdieu's sociology in no way denies the ubiquity of struggle or the fact of social change. Bourdieu offers at least an implicit descriptive theory of social change, to wit, the failure of reproduction. But he would say that such change is an effect of struggles that do not usually have as their conscious end the progressive transformation of society implied in the cultural studies project. Most change, in Bourdieu's terms, is the effect of struggles within fields that never cease to be determined by the principles of the field, even when what constitutes power or value in the field is being contested. Bourdieu's theory also allows for change as the result of struggles between fields as they interrupt or interfere with each other, but again, these struggles are not necessarily undertaken with progressive, transformative ends in view. Sometimes, of course, they are. However, one must wonder at the reductiveness of a social theory that speaks of change only as an effect of socially transformative agendas.(5) Such a concept of social action constructs it as the altruistic complement to the calculating self-interest imputed to Bourdieu's social agents. Both conceptions evacuate the large area of social action for which the motives of action are not so clearly or consciously conceived. In any case, the relegation of social change to the sphere of individual motives, good or bad, should arouse our theoretical suspicions, for it encourages a descent from the rigor of analysis to the rhetoric of praise or blame and thus links voluntarist discourse to an even less credible moralism.

Still, we are scarcely prepared yet to defend Bourdieu's consideration of the issue. All we can do at the moment is to specify what the refusal of Bourdieu in the U.S. academic field tells us about this field: its conception of change is modeled on a very old idea of social transformation that it has nevertheless repudiated in its nineteenth-century, revolutionary form. The revolutionary project has now been parceled out to the New Social Movements in their opposition to particular forms of domination: racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on. What is the relation, then, of an academic discourse that analyzes the social realm to the New Social Movements themselves, which must proceed on the assumption that things can be changed? This question has no simple answer, if an analytic account of social phenomena is expected to demonstrate what determines states of affairs.(6) Literary and cultural critics would like to believe that vanguard theoretical discourses can lead to transformative struggles, by which the various forms of domination can be brought to an end. Envisioning such a transformation has a necessary place in thought, but it does not describe how change will take place in the future or has taken place in the past. Raising social change to consciousness, or rationalizing it as a theoretically informed practice, is a project whose realization should not be confused with the mode of change in social reality.

Shall we say, then, that what Bourdieu's American readers find lacking in his sociology is this project? Whether or not it is truly absent from his work, it would certainly appear that Bourdieu's sociology is given over to a descriptive analysis of social actions that in the end (whatever the intentions of the actors) always reconstitute structures of domination. This reconstitution occurs even within and through the process of social change, which appears to have an attenuated significance by comparison with the recurrence of these fundamental structures of domination. Thus Bourdieu's readers come away with the (mistaken) impression that for him there is never any change at all, only "reproduction." But a better way to put it is, after all, in French: Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

The French maxim raises a question somewhat deeper than Bourdieu's supposed inclination to a cynical view of human things. The recurrence of structures of domination despite manifest change is an undeniable fact of history. This question is discussed in sympathetic but not uncritical terms by the sociologist Craig Calhoun, who rightly sees it as related to the tension in Bourdieu's work between "what sorts of categories should be taken as historically specific and which as transhistorical" (Calhoun et al., 82). The tension corresponds roughly to the difference between an anthropology making universal claims about human societies and a sociology addressed to the historical question of "modernity" as the epoch characterized by continuous social change.(7) Calhoun proposes that the very rapidity of social change, which seems to have accelerated with the transition to a "postmodernism," may have prevented theorists from considering to what extent certain fundamental social relations might be reproduced despite the pace of change and behind the screen of its spectacular show. In its favor, Bourdieu's sociology draws attention to the reproduction of structures of domination. I would agree with Calhoun that by under-elaborating the relation between social change and reproduction, Bourdieu arouses the suspicion that he "is saying something more trans-historical and anthropologically invariant about human actors than he lets on" (Calhoun et al., 71). While the strong emphasis on "social integration and stable reproduction" (Calhoun et al., 82) is a tendency in Bourdieu's sociology, it is not a necessary assumption.

I propose to argue that the tension Calhoun identifies between the transhistorical and the historical in Bourdieu is related to his under-theorizing some aspects of modernity as an epoch of continual change - specifically, the economic per se - while extensively elaborating other aspects, primarily the cultural. It will require some time (and the reader's patience) for me to evince the relation between this distribution of theoretical labor and the signal tension Calhoun observes. The question cannot be resolved simply by asserting that Bourdieu has neglected some relevant areas of social life. He may have done so, yet he has never claimed to produce a total theory of the social but only to construct theory as an analytic aid. Which domains of the social Bourdieu chooses to explore, and to what extent, is no doubt determined in ways (e.g., the biographical) to which we can have only limited access. But the question of the distribution of his theoretical labor is raised in an especially vexing way by one of the three chief concepts in his sociology, capital (the others being, of course, habitus and field). Given the problem I have just remarked, it is all the more striking that the concept most resonant with historical implication is also insistently transhistorical in Bourdieu's usage. The forms of "symbolic capital" are present for him wherever there are social relations, but Bourdieu offers no independent or correlative analysis of capitalism as an economic or social system. As Calhoun shrewdly remarks, Bourdieu's account of capital lacks "an idea of capitalism" (Calhoun et al., 68). Nor would it be possible to dismiss this problem by observing that the idea of capitalism has been elaborated elsewhere, as in Marxism. That idea is arguably missing in Marx, too; his concept was, after all, capital. Capitalism, as the union of social and economic systems, is even today as controverted a theoretical construct as it is an ongoing reality.

If Bourdieu is not really interested in the theory of capitalism (which seems dubious), he is certainly interested in modernity. Calhoun points out that Bourdieu's account of the multiplication and autonomization of fields is decisively oriented toward the analysis of modern society. It powerfully evokes the themes of classical sociology (Durkheim's anomie or Weber's rationalization) as well as more recent developments in social theory, such as Habermas's "uncoupling of system and lifeworld" or Luhmann's "differentiation of society." It is not just that Bourdieu's sociology lacks a historical account of capitalism that would complement his account of modernity or counterbalance his transhistorical concept of capital. The very choice of this concept to define the stakes of the "field" compels us to consider the absence of an account of capitalism deliberate. I will argue that Bourdieu refuses the problematic of capitalism - which is to say that this refusal is, in his own terms, both determined and strategic, a move in the game of sociology.

The risk in this strategy is more immediately evident than the possible gain. It seems perverse to construct the most universal account of social action by means of a concept that signals a definite historical epoch and, worse, constantly invites Bourdieu's readers to identify his construction with the rational calculation of behavior in the capitalist market. His lexical choice risks echoing the universalization of market behavior, which Western economists have been only too enthusiastic to affirm (indeed, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, to elevate to an anthropological universal). The terminological confusion troubles even his most sympathetic readers. Calhoun, for example, wonders if, after all, Bourdieu is unwittingly guilty of economism: "The motive force of social life [in Bourdieu] is the pursuit of distinction, profit, power, wealth, and so on. Bourdieu's account of capital is an account of the resources that people use in such pursuit. In this sense, despite his disclaimers, Bourdieu does indeed share a good deal with Gary Becker and other rational choice theorists" (Calhoun et al., 71).

Calhoun goes on to concede the justice of Bourdieu's rejection of the charge of economism but qualifies this concession by noting that rational choice theory is probably more sophisticated than the version of it that Bourdieu is rejecting; at least, it is no longer dependent on constructing every social action as though a fully free and conscious mind confronted the world with unlimited knowledge about possible choices. But I am less concerned with reaffirming the difference between Bourdieu and rational choice theorists such as Becker, or even Elster, than with understanding the stakes in the strategic appropriation of the concept of capital.(8) We can acquire a preliminary sense of them by noting a certain paradox both in rational choice theory and in Bourdieu's sociology. For rational choice theorists, as indeed for "free-market" economists generally, the market is the site of a certain idealized freedom; there, individual agents are free to pursue their interests, to "maximize utilities." The freedom from constraint (i.e., from government interference) is also experienced in the market as a freedom of the will. The ideology of the free market has thus never dispensed with an essential voluntarism, which undergirds the methodological individualism of economics (one might invoke here both F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman as representative of mainstream free-market economics). From the viewpoint of economics as a science, however, the freedom of the will is merely notional. In the aggregate behavior of the market's free agents, economic science discerns regularities that, insofar as they are determinable, can be said to be determined. For economics, the market is like nature, the object of increasingly mathematical description and prediction. At the same time, the quasi-religious faith of this science is that all is for the best when the market is left in its natural (i.e., "free") state. The more ideologically committed free-market economists give no indication at all of recognizing the contradiction in asserting a freedom that their science disallows, but this may be the kind of philosophical question in which economists have long since lost interest.

As a social science, sociology too aspires, as Durkheim said, to treat social facts as "things"; like economics, it is forced to confront the ancient antinomy of freedom and necessity (usually updated in social theory as that of agency and structure) in its account of social action. Bourdieu hopes to overcome this antinomy - the alternatives of "social physics" and "social phenomenology" - and perhaps he does. But the durability of these ancient powers is such that his sociology continues to give the impression of reducing social life to implacable necessity. Because we are dealing with an immemorial binarism of thought, we can see why Bourdieu's account of social action in terms of symbolic capital can be confused with the individualist and voluntarist market ideology he so obviously disdains. The antinomy has the uncanny capacity to flip any social phenomenon from one pole to the other. This paradox of Bourdieu's reception suggests that his "determinist" sociology is being read as the mirror image of Western economics, for which the universalization of the market is nothing less than the maximal extension of human freedom.

I hope by this point to have established a certain understanding of the response to Bourdieu in the United States: the perception of his determinism, or economism, has as its cultural or ideological referent a voluntarism whose context is ultimately the free market. But this context need not be openly acknowledged as a condition of reception, and indeed it cannot be without calling into question the tendential voluntarism that the refusal of Bourdieu shares with economics. For this reason the misunderstanding of Bourdieu expressed in the charge of economism is always also an understanding, in that it suggests that the refusal of Bourdieu in the U.S. academy is in a deep way related to his own refusal of the problematic of capitalism, of the market in material as opposed to symbolic goods. We return, then, to the question raised above: If Bourdieu's appropriation of the concept of capital is to be read as something other than an index of his tendency toward economism, we have to consider the possibility that his disinclination to specify further the relation between capital and capitalism has a strategic value for him. The stakes of his appropriation of economic concepts are in any case very high.

Contest of the Faculties

In his Outline of a Theory of Practice Bourdieu makes the claim that "the theory of strictly economic practice is simply a particular case of a general theory of the economics of practice."(9) In strategic terms, this claim might be seen as an argument for the greater "generality" of sociology itself in relation to the discourse of economics. Sociology would then have to wrest the language of the economic away from its inherence in the "particular case": "Economic theory has allowed to be foisted upon it a definition of the economy of practices which is the historical invention of capitalism" ("Forms of Capital," 242). It has not been sufficiently appreciated that from Bourdieu's point of view economic discourse is a defective, anticipatory version of sociology. Thus Bourdieu can definitively say that "my theory owes nothing, despite appearances, to the transfer of the economic approach. And I hope one day to be able to demonstrate fully that, far from being the founding model, economic theory (and rational action theory which is its sociological derivative) is best seen as a particular instance, historically dated and situated, of the theory of fields" (Invitation, 120). We may have difficulty imagining such a revolution in social science now that economics seems to have so successfully subordinated the other social sciences, establishing itself at once as a "science" on the natural-scientific model and as the most powerful academic presence in the domain of policy making. Yet if Bourdieu's hypothesis is correct, it will go a long way toward recasting the relation between economics and sociology as something more than a "contest of the faculties," despite being first of all such a contest. This question, in my view, goes much deeper than the common objection that symbolic or cultural capital is merely a metaphor, or an extrapolation from economic behavior, a charge that fails to grasp the social reality of the symbolic form or the extent to which Bourdieu regards sociology as a challenge to the very entitlement of economics to the language of exchange.

With this question in mind, we can take a closer look at the implications of the distinction between the general and the particular economies of practice. In his early anthropological work Bourdieu describes "archaic" (or premodern) societies as structured predominantly by a general economy of practice, regardless of whether there also exists a market for the exchange of material goods. What is most crucial to grasp about this general economy is that it operates in such a way as to "prevent the economy from being grasped as an economy" (Outline, 171). To conceive the principle of social action in the general economy (what Bourdieu calls le sens pratique) by analogy to the rationality of the capitalist market is to miss precisely the sense in which the "practical logic" of archaic societies utterly refuses the rational calculation of the market without ceasing to be a kind of economic practice. Only in this refusal can symbolic capital be constituted as such. The concept of capital must be understood in this usage as expressing a refusal of the calculus of accumulation and even as an implicit negation of "material" capital as a description of exchanged objects. The general economy is a negation of the particular; this is a rather different relation between the two terms than that of genus to species.

One might ask whether the form of material capital needs to become the object of thought in order to be negated. Bourdieu's answer, of course, is that the notion of practice entails no necessary reflective consciousness. Habitus, as a "structuring and structured structure," does not require its ends to be posited in thought to operate as a kind of "rationality." Rather, it is an embodied rationality (this is different too from an unconscious rationality, which would presumably look just like rational calculation, only "unconscious"). An important matter hinges on this question, since only the historical circumstance of rationality's development as a fully conscious process of thought (the instrumental rationality of the market) yielded a language-the economic - by means of which the rationality of the general economy could be recognized, after the fact, as a form of economic rationality. For the same reason, it was only when the form of material capital became a ubiquitous social fact that one could see that the general economy was constituted by the very negation of the form of material capital. This irony brings capital back into relation to the historical order of capitalism by making capitalism the condition for both the understanding and the misunderstanding of "economic practice" in precapitalist or noncapitalist societies. The negation of market rationality in premodern practice curiously precedes market rationality itself (or the universalized condition of commodity exchange). One might say, then, that the "idea of capitalism" is not developed in Bourdieu but that it is always implied in the description of the general economy of practice in archaic societies as a "reversed" or denied economic practice.

We will return presently to the motif of reversal. It is necessary first, however, to clarify a difficulty that arises at this juncture: everything recounted thus far leads us to believe that just as archaic societies are defined by the prevalence of the general economy or symbolic capital, so the dominance of the particular form of economic capital - material capital - has to constitute modernity itself. The very categories of the general and the particular, or the symbolic and the material, appear to be closely associated, if not identified, with the epochal concepts of the archaic and the modern. In fact, this identification is a misreading of Bourdieu, although his terminology elicits it for reasons as yet unstated. Let us pose the question that emerges here as clearly as possible: Why does symbolic capital seem constitutively primitive, when Bourdieu everywhere calls attention to the existence of such capital in the modern world, preeminently in the sphere of artistic production but pervading every practice associated with the concept of "distinction." Is one to construe those spheres of the social (or fields) in which symbolic capital is accumulated at one or more removes from the market in material goods as residual, as carrying over into modernity the same capital form, indeed the very economic form, that defines archaic societies? This would seem to be confirmed by every instance of what Bourdieu calls "consecration" in modern artistic production. The refusal of a strictly economic valuation of cultural products might be said to invoke a primitive relation to the products of labor: "The denial of the economy and economic interest which, in pre-capitalist societies, was exerted first in the very area of 'economic' transactions, from which it had to be expelled in order for 'the economy' to be constituted as such, thus finds its favored refuge in the domain of art and 'culture.'"(10) This theme is echoed in much the same terms in The Rules of Art: "The trade in 'pure' art belongs to the class of practices where the logic of pre-capitalist economy survives."(11) Yet the meaning of "survival" can hardly be less straightforward. Assuming that we avoid the temptation to project the practices of our own society on those of our predecessors, would we not make the converse error by construing as residually primitive every sphere of society not simply expressive of the overt rationality of the market? To be sure, we have rejoined here classical sociology's problem of the relation between traditional and modern society, which requires a rather different interpretive schema than the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Theories of capitalism are concerned with the emergence of the "restricted economy," as well as with the extension of market rationality into other domains of social exchange. But even the most ambitious rational choice theorists have not reduced every domain of the social to the quantifiable practice of maximizing utilities. If all social action were nothing but market behavior, then economics could give us a full and adequate account of the social. There would be no need for sociology at all.

The appearance of symbolic capital within modernity thus leads one to ask what kinds of archaic social relations subsist within capitalism and what the mode of subsistence is.(12) Theories of modernity and modernization have often entailed as a corollary the necessity of recognizing as apparently archaic many social forms, not only the "refuge" of art but much else besides, from the conspicuous archaism of religion to the highly ritualized practices of corporate culture. I say that these forms are "apparently" archaic because it cannot be that they exist as pure repetitions of premodern practice, without relation to the central fact of the capitalist market. It was just the ambition of classical sociology to demonstrate the refunctioning of premodern categories of "status," for instance, around the economic division of class that constituted the space of its deviation from a Marxist political economy (the preeminent example would be Weber, but one may cite Simmel and Veblen as well). Nonetheless, the question of the archaic remains a deep puzzle in social theory; it gives rise to the ambiguity of Bourdieu's categories of general and particular economic practice, at once a distinction between genus and species and the terms of a mutual negation. Only in a society that declares its difference from all others, that apprehends itself ecstatically or tragically as under the sway of the particular social form of the capitalist market, can the antinomy of the general and particular economy emerge.

This question is either illuminated or further complicated in Bourdieu's essay "The Forms of Capital," where he defines three categories of capital: economic, cultural, and social (the latter referring to the network of familial and other institutional relations constituting social advantage of some sort). This taxonomy is at a slight tangent to the larger antithesis of symbolic and material capital, since symbolic and cultural capital are not precisely equivalent concepts. In Outline of a Theory of Practice symbolic capital is given the specific content of "prestige" or "honor," while cultural capital seems best exemplified elsewhere in Bourdieu's work on the educational institution (Reproduction, Homo Academicus), where it refers as much to knowledge, skills, or competence as to the honor or prestige that the possession of this capital can command. Cultural capital is certainly a species of symbolic capital generally, but it is a form of symbolic capital certifiable by objective mechanisms ("Forms of Capital," 247), most importantly by the credentializing function of the school. In The Wizard of Oz, for example, we know that the Scarecrow has more than proven his intelligence and that he has acquired considerable symbolic capital based on that personal embodied quality. He only lacks, as the Wizard says, a diploma. It is the curious property of the diploma to certify his intelligence to those who may not be familiar with the Scarecrow's accomplishments.

As good a sociologist as the Wizard, Bourdieu gives such mechanisms a crucial role in the narrative of modernization, since their emergence partly usurps the space of practical logic in its purely embodied form, reproducing the unequal distribution of capital over successive generations through institutions that work according to a principle somewhat like inheritance.(13) Hence the status concept of nobility can continue to model the possession of cultural capital (or distinction) even when that capital is acquired by inheriting not "blood" but access to educational institutions or cultivated social venues. The differentia specifica of cultural capital would seem to be its convertibility into material capital, and vice versa. This convertibility raises the limit on the accumulation of capital, which is no longer confined to the embodied form (as it presumably was in archaic societies). In retrospect, we can recognize at least an implicit articulation of capitalism to modernity in the invention of new forms of accumulation that overcome the limits of embodied prestige or symbolic capital and that include, above all, money itself, for which there is perhaps no limit of accumulation and which can be converted in certain circumstances into forms of cultural and even symbolic capital. In foregrounding accumulation as the end of social action, Bourdieu's conception of capitalism seems closer to that of Immanuel Wallerstein, for whom capitalism is the regime of the endless accumulation, than to that of Marx.(14)

Only with the condition of convertibility can symbolic capital take the more recognizably modern form of cultural capital. It is worth insisting on this point, for the sake of reiterating the difference of symbolic capital in premodern society. There the denial of the very economic process of conversion constitutes symbolic capital as such. This denial can be so total as to govern even the exchange of material goods, which anthropology has long taught us to view in terms of gift exchange, or "potlatch." One sees why Bourdieu is so eager to rebut the charge of economism, which assumes that the point of all social action is simply to convert symbolic into material capital. His vehement rejection of rational choice theory reveals his intense theoretical investment in exploring the conditions of nonconvertibility, constraints on convertibility, or resistance to convertibility. Hence he expresses considerable disdain for Becker's well-known "human capital" theory, which always "reduc[es] the universe of exchanges to mercantile exchange" ("Forms of Capital," 242). It is as though Bourdieu were responding not so much to the social depredations attributed to capitalism's reduction of social relations to market exchanges as to the way economic theory takes that reduction as an accurate picture of social life generally. Yet the fact that Bourdieu's contempt for rational choice theory is expressed in response to the consistent tendency of his readers to confuse his argument with that very theory compels us to recognize his social theory as the mirror image of rational choice theory.

Once again we are impressed by how close the misunderstanding of Bourdieu's work is to its understanding. Nowhere is this point more evident than in the curious similitude between rational choice theory's development of a "game-theoretic" model of social action and Bourdieu's consistent preference for the analogy of the game. The philosophical example of Wittgenstein lies behind Bourdieu's use of this term, but that example may well be invoked in the background of rational choice theory, too (as in Elster's work). The analogy of the game increases the tension between sociology and economics for Bourdieu, since capital is consistently described in Marxist political economy as embodied or accumulated labor, set to work in a definite social relation in which productive labor is employed to further the accumulation of capital. These terms are still authoritative for Bourdieu - in "The Forms of Capital" he defines capital as accumulated labor - but they are not his usual terms. Labor may be the inner truth of social practice, but practice appears more often in Bourdieu as play, a move in a game, the "game of culture." In analogous fashion, rational choice theory renders the neoclassical economic problematic of maximizing utilities into quasi-cultural terms, in the form of game theory. What are we to make of this similitude? It is just here, if anywhere, that we shall have to distinguish rational choice theory (and economic discourse) from its mirror image in Bourdieu. What we will discover, looking into the two mirrors, is that the image of the market in the one finds its most effective reversal as art in the other. By implication, we shall not be able to take Bourdieu's ruthless reduction of the domain of art at face value; indeed, his sociology is compelled continually to return to the question of the aesthetic precisely in order to settle accounts, as it were, with the discourse of economics.(15)

Let us begin, however, by briefly recalling Bourdieu's description of archaic practice, which demonstrates that what appears to us as mere play (gift exchange, ritual practices) does a certain kind of work. When the general economy is conceived as the game of accumulating symbolic capital, practice is represented as both work and play. But understanding any particular practice is like looking at the surface of a solid figure - one side will present itself by occluding the other - and for Bourdieu the facing side is more often than not play, conceived under the general category of "competition" or a move in a game. To imagine a practice that is nothing but play (on both sides) or nothing but labor (on both sides), one has to enter fully into the universe of the capitalist market. There indeed we find a domain of practice that appears to be labor and nothing but labor - or better, "abstract labor," exchanged for a value that does not admit of accumulation for the laborers themselves. Play here approaches the zero degree. These players have no capital to play with; they have no embodied symbolic capital, and only their labor time has a market value. Analogously, it is only in this capitalist society that there is something like pure play or "abstract play," if we can allow that term to invoke the major topos of aesthetic discourse as it descends from Kant and Schiller to Bourdieu himself: "The world of bourgeois man, with his double-entry accounting, cannot be invented without producing the pure, perfect universe of the artist and the intellectual and the gratuitous activities of art-for-art's sake and pure theory" ("Forms of Capital," 249). The antinomies of work and play are thus linked to the discourses of the economic and the aesthetic, and this link has important consequences for Bourdieu's development of a sociology that aggressively appropriates key concepts of economic discourse.

One can see that a tendency in Bourdieu's sociology favors elaborating practice as a form of play whose inner truth is labor against an economism that would either reduce all practice to the explicit labor of accumulation or conceal the fact of labor altogether by representing all social action as play, as in game theory. Bourdieu's hybrid conception recognizes the complexity of social practice, its identity as both labor and play, but it may well be that capitalist society has sorted out labor and play to such a degree that they exist at specific social sites in a very pure state: pure labor in Taylorized wage labor, pure unproductive play in the passive mass-mediated consumptions of "leisure." Bourdieu's greater interest in complex forms of play than in mass-media consumption directs him inevitably and repeatedly in his career to the domain of art and high culture. He is more interested in an activity such as museum going, for example, than in watching television, because aesthetic play in the former context is more interestingly complex, a labor (or game) of accumulating symbolic capital that refuses the crude calculations of market rationality. One might contrast the scene of museum going with that of the video game, which, as in the game-theoretic models of rational choice theory, gives us the simplest possible model of social action, explicitly directed toward the accumulation of profit in the mimetic form of a score. The end of museum going cannot be reduced to such a quantifiable measure of its profitability, and hence its very resistance to conversion into such terms must be seen as incorporated into the experience itself, as the sign of its innate complexity. It shares this quality of complexity with certain archaic practices, and thus a kind of rhyme between archaic practice and these complex social spaces in modernity is produced. This is why the archaic peasant's unproductive ritual can seem like "art-for-art's sake" and art like religious experience: "The world of art, a sacred island, ostentatiously opposed to the profane, everyday world of production, a sanctuary for gratuitous, disinterested activity in a universe given over to money and self-interest, offers, like theology in a past epoch, an imaginary anthropology obtained by denial of all the negations brought about by the economy" (Outline, 197).

What I am calling the rhyme between archaic and certain complex modern practices depends for its force, then, on the striking contrast of such practices with the overt calculation of market rationality. These practices hold the market at a distance but of course do not cancel its reality or effects. All cultural capital may be ultimately convertible, by however complexly mediated a process, into economic capital. If, as I have tried to show, Bourdieu is especially drawn to the most complex social practices, then the same tendency conversely requires that the capitalist market play the role of simplicity itself, that it operate, in other words, according to the reduced and reductive principle of what Marx called "naked self-interest." The market will then be like a point of reference at the center of a complexly divided social space. Bourdieu's investment in specific social fields is directly proportional to their distance from this point, with art and the institutions of culture lying at the farthest remove and the school and the family closer in. We can now see that the spatial distance of culture from the market corresponds to the temporal distance of archaic practice and that this correspondence accounts for the rhyme between them. The distance to the center, the social space that must be traversed for cultural or symbolic capital to be converted into economic, is the space in which a long and complex game is played and in which the tactic of delaying convertibility may yield the best profits in the end. Bourdieu's sociological work brings to light the identity of this game as an economy, exposing the "denial of the economy" as the move on which the game is founded. But it also enters into the spirit of this denial, into culture's repudiation of "a universe given over to money and self-interest." This universe is contracted to a point in Bourdieu's sociology, and in this way he maintains nothing less than an aesthetic distance from the market itself.

Salon des refuses

I have now drawn attention, by what may seem an altogether too oblique itinerary, to an otherwise puzzling absence in Bourdieu's social theory: despite the fact that it relies so heavily on the concepts of capital and the market, his work is distinguished by the relative lack of commentary on economics, as an elaborated discourse, or on the economy, narrowly defined. There is a market in Bourdieu, but there is no history of capitalism; no theory of the commodity or of surplus value; no conceptualization of money or financial instruments; no banks; no corporations; no price theory; no stocks or bonds; no monopolies; no business cycles; no inflations, depressions, or recessions; no taxes or deficits; no international trade or currency exchange; no Fordist or post-Fordist modes of production. All of this, Bourdieu would be entitled to respond, is the matter of economics, not sociology. We are nevertheless forced to acknowledge that the contraction of the economic domain in Bourdieu to the dimensionless singularity of the market is the effect precisely of the commanding position of the market at the center of his social universe. Everything is either falling toward this center or struggling to escape its attraction. The impression of economic determinism conveyed so powerfully by Bourdieu's work is at least in part an effect of the market as absent cause. The market structures social space into "classes," which appear in turn like nature, in the sense that they are always given in his account of social action.

Even as the market is contracted to a point, what is antithetical to the market is expanded into a world, the "economic world reversed." Bourdieu's is the first major sociology since Simmel's to focus so intensively and lingeringly on the domain of the aesthetic, and like Simmel's it is deeply, though less directly, obsessed with the market. In its interest in the aesthetic, it stands in partial contrast to the work of Durkheim and Weber, who developed the discursive field of sociology primarily through the study of religion. But the rhyme between art and religion should hint at the stakes of Bourdieu's discursive strategy, which maps the social world to define once again, like the founders, the discursive territory of sociology. In the remaining pages of this essay I would like to draw out some implications of Bourdieu's interest in art, with particular reference to his most recent volume, The Rules of Art. This analysis will be facilitated by first situating the domain of art within the map of Bourdieu's social space, which can be resolved into four different markets:

1. The general economy of archaic or premodern or "nonmarket" societies, in which a practical logic prevails and in which the economy in the narrow sense is "socially repressed." The form of capital here is preeminently honor. Its accumulation is limited by its dependence on embodiment, and the conditions of its convertibility into economic capital are severely constrained.

2. The capitalist market proper, in which the preeminent form of capital is material goods or money, whose accumulation is virtually unlimited. Social interest in accumulation is expressed overtly, as it becomes the object of rationality in its "instrumental" or calculating form.

What Bourdieu calls the "market of symbolic goods" gives us two other markets with somewhat different principles:

3. A mimetic market, where cultural capital is accumulated. In this market there is no attempt to conceal the mutual convertibility of cultural and material capital; on the contrary, agents are deliberately and even enthusiastically interested in reconstructing cultural spheres as practices of rational accumulation and assured convertibility. This market corresponds to the advancing frontier of commodification, which seeks to regularize and manipulate the convertibility of cultural goods and embodied qualities, even the most accidental, such as physical beauty.(16) In the same way, wealth is convertible directly into prestige or honor, as in "lifestyles of the rich and famous." Within the mimetic market we also find Bourdieu's objective mechanisms, such as the school, which make possible ever greater accumulations of cultural capital and thus a higher rate of convertibility. In certifying qualifications or competences, the school "guarantee [s] the monetary value of a given academic capital" ("Forms of Capital," 248). The mimetic market, with which Becker's human capital theory is concerned, is what gives rational choice theory its license to construct all social action as market behavior, as maximizing utilities.(17)

4. To the mimetic market Bourdieu implicitly opposes an antimimetic market, defining the realm of art but also that of science. In these fields (the "intellectual field," in the broadest sense for Bourdieu), where the "economic world [is] reversed," symbolic capital refuses to be assessed in economic terms. This refusal establishes a distance that must be traveled in order for conversion of symbolic into material capital to take place. Within the antimimetic market, the symbolic capital of honor or prestige can then reappear in a rather different mode than in the institutional venues dispensing cultural capital by means of objective mechanisms. This mode is linked to what Bourdieu calls "autonomy." I will suggest that Bourdieu is intensely interested in the antimimetic market's project of maintaining a distance from the capitalist market proper.

The significance of autonomy in this social mapping emerges in the following account of The Rules of Art, a summalike text that confirms the signal importance of the aesthetic for Bourdieu's sociology. But let us appreciate, before proceeding, the unusual perspective this focus gives us on contemporary society. If the aesthetic domain establishes a "rhyme" with archaic practice, this practice, as Bourdieu constructs it, looks very marginal at the present time. The unacknowledged legislators of the "world apart" may once have exerted their authority throughout Western high culture, but after the orgy of the eighties art scene, it may no longer be necessary to acknowledge their rules or possible to deny that the frontiers of commodification have greatly diminished art's "sacred island." Bourdieu's interest - this word should be emphasized in all its senses now - has always been in a certain construction of the aesthetic that finds its origin in the romantic period, is definitively theorized in Kant, and achieves autonomy in aestheticism, which then lays the groundwork for the avant-garde and for high modernism.

In short, a strongly invested construction of the aesthetic underlies the selection in The Rules of Art of its representative moment, the later nineteenth century; its representative author, Flaubert; and its representative text, Sentimental Education. The exemplarity of Flaubert's novel for delimiting the "genesis and structure of the literary field" is altogether too fitting, which is to say that it lends itself easily to Bourdieuian analysis. Sentimental Education offers us what looks like a sociological allegory avant la lettre, in which the protagonist, Frederic Moreau, is set to play the game of culture with a carefully assessed stock of cultural and material capital. At the same time, the novel itself is to be understood as the stake in Flaubert's own struggle in the literary field, his reworking of the "minor genre" of the realist novel into the aesthetic object whose autonomy (art for art's sake) Bourdieu identifies with the genesis of the literary field (Rules, 148). This excessive exemplarity is the index of a theoretical investment, since Bourdieu makes a certain dialectical advance through this text: he recovers from the same sociology of art that seemed to reduce the "love of art" to the accumulation of capital something that might be called, on the other side of this analysis, "love of art."

This is why, from the opening pages of the book, Bourdieu raises the possibility of the sociologist's identification with Flaubert: "One might think perhaps that it is the sociologist, in projecting questions of a particular sort, who turns Flaubert into a sociologist, and one capable, moreover, of offering a sociology of Flaubert" (3). Such an identification must be declined immediately, because it would render the sociologist superfluous; hence what is at stake in The Rules of Art is really the difference between Bourdieu and Flaubert, or between sociology and art: "It is a vision that one could call sociological if it were not set apart from a scientific analysis by its form, simultaneously offering and masking it" (31). One can hardly underestimate the extent to which Bourdieu is magnetized by this particular author and text and consequently challenged to assert a difference. Nor can one underestimate how important the moment of Flaubert's novel is to Bourdieu's understanding of the aesthetic generally. The derogated commercial genre that Flaubert elevates to a work of art thus exemplifies the principal claim of aesthetic discourse, to be "of the world and beyond it" (100). In its refusal to deliver only the pleasures of realist narrative, in its eagerness to offend the sensibilities of bourgeois consumers by representing the reality of the everyday in the most crafted and autoreferential language, Flaubert's avant-garde production goes so far as to refuse the demand for a vendible novel, which is to say that it engenders the literary field as such, art as such: "Art produces the effect of making the market disappear" (81). What is most important for Bourdieu in Flaubert's stance, however, is not just disdain for the market (which it shares with other high art forms, especially poetry) but the fact that the artwork that enacts this refusal is itself supremely accurate in its representation of the relation between culture and the market. This relation is indeed foregrounded in Sentimental Education and constitutes a kind of double reflexivity of subject and form. How is Bourdieu to demonstrate, then, that there is something that Flaubert does not know that sociology knows? At the least there will have to be something that Flaubert does not say and that sociology will have to say for him. But does this unsaid provide a sufficient reason for the discourse of sociology?(18)

These questions turn on the relation between the moment of reflexivity that gives birth to aestheticism (art for art's sake) and the moment of reflexivity in sociology, when that discourse acknowledges the social determination of the scientific field itself. Bourdieu's sociology seems dedicated to the ruthless exposure of art's claim to distance from the market. This claim is a generative illusio, the game of "loser takes all" (Rules, 21) that institutes the literary field as an antimarket, the "market of symbolic goods." The self-understanding of art as autonomous is thus itself determined by the effects of a social space structured by the market and by the distribution of capital in the division of classes. I shall not be concerned here with the particulars of Bourdieu's analysis of this determination or with what he calls the "historical genesis of a pure aesthetic," or with his interpretation of Flaubert's novel, which is not at stake in this argument. I propose to bring out the circumstance that if Flaubert's novel so precisely anticipates the terms of Bourdieu's sociology, then the assertion of sociology's difference will entail not only the "reduction" of art's illusio but a further identification of the sociologist with the artist.

But let us clarify first the specificity of the aesthetic discourse that is to be analyzed: despite Flaubert's sociological fidelity to representing the social structures that impel or impede individuals like "particles in a force-field" (9), he implicitly claims to have transcended the force field himself and to have established at the level of the formal artwork the very freedom that his represented social world denies to the characters he creates: "Writing abolishes the determinations, constraints and limits which are constitutive of social existence: to exist socially means to occupy a determined position in the social structure" (27). The question for Bourdieu, I believe, is whether this freedom, which sociology reduces to a determination in its analysis of the aestheticist movement in its sociohistorical context - Bourdieu will say that Flaubert's position-taking in the literary field is possible by virtue of a certain position he occupies in social space - is not a prefiguration of the more real freedom of science, which includes its reflexive moment in the analysis of its determination. Is such freedom any more real than that of the artist, the maker of a world apart?

We begin to see why the question of Bourdieu's relation to Flaubert is necessarily repeated (or prefigured) in Sentimental Education as the question of Flaubert's identification with Frederic. Yet it is important for Bourdieu that Flaubert is not Frederic: "One recognizes, here again, Flaubert's fundamental relation to Frederic as the possibility, simultaneously surpassed and conserved, of Gustave" (27). Flaubert creates Frederic as the figure of indeterminacy, suspended between all the possibilities - economic (business), cultural (art), or political (office) - but determined to none. Like Flaubert, he attempts to occupy "that indeterminate position, that neutral place where one can soar above groups and their conflicts" (26); but Flaubert intends to frustrate that intention and to exhibit his creature in the end as the figure of determined indeterminacy, as the figure who realizes the most likely possibility of his "neutral place," which is to squander his capital not in the artist's love of art but in the love of Madame Arnoux. Occupying roughly the same social position as Frederic - at "the geometric intersection of all perspectives" (100) - Flaubert can establish his freedom only by distinguishing himself from his creation, just as Proust does later with his fictional Marcel: "It is this liberating rupture, creative of the creator, that Flaubert symbolized in dramatizing, in the shape of Frederic, the powerlessness of a being manipulated by the forces of the field" (105).

Again, it is not my concern to assess the validity of Bourdieu's reading of Flaubert, and I have no doubt that literary critics will find Bourdieu's reading of Flaubert . . . reductive. But my point is to call attention to the structure of prefiguration that forces into the open the problem that motivates Bourdieu's reading of Flaubert and simultaneously troubles the reading of Bourdieu. For the freedom of Flaubert as novelist is like that of"Spinoza's God," who "remains immanent and coextensive with his creation" (112). Precisely because Flaubert is, in the real world, in much the same position as Frederic, Frederic remains always a "possibility . . . of Gustave": his fictional narrative does not become a fantasy of absolute freedom from social determination, and his "crazed love" for Madame Arnoux remains the analogue for the life of the artist, another version of determined indeterminacy. The difference between Gustave and Frederic is not the difference between freedom and determination, then, but the difference between what Gustave knows about Frederic and what Frederic knows about himself.

If we are indeed to move beyond the facile voluntarism of a less sophisticated aesthetics (in which artists are gods) or a less sophisticated politics (in which social agents are undetermined), we shall have to ask what freedom is won by such knowledge. To arrive at some sense of the answer to this question, let us first grant that the freedom of the artist is not merely a false freedom and is located, for Bourdieu, in the apparent formalism of art for art's sake. It is what he otherwise calls autonomy, which has nothing to do with the freedom of the will but is a historical condition of the literary field and therefore itself determined. Autonomy is an aspect of the development of fields, although this development does not necessarily define a progressive evolution. Rather, we must think of autonomy as an effect of increasing social complexity and of differentiation within fields.(19) Discussing the figure of Manet (analogous in this context to Flaubert), Bourdieu locates the emergence of autonomy among those artists who "had to struggle to conquer their autonomy from the Academie. . . . the process leading to the constitution of a field is a process of the institutionalization of anomie, after which no one can claim to be absolute master and possessor of the nomos" (132). The freedom instituted by autonomy (or the "anomie" of the social totality) declares itself "the objective and subjective distance of enterprises of cultural production with respect to the market" (141), which again is not a godlike freedom but the determined indeterminacy of those who recognize that art is subject to this demand. It is the freedom of the salon des refuses, who reject those who reject them and who establish an antithetical market in symbolic goods. The point is not, then, simply to expose this freedom as unreal, when in fact the space cleared by the refusal of market demand is precisely the space in which social determinations can be explored without wholly acceding to market demand and in which many new possibilities for the development of art are created.(20) These possibilities endure even when, as with every avant-garde, the refuses are eventually embraced by the market itself. The point is that this freedom or autonomy is that of the knowledge differential between the commercial artist and the avant-garde, a differential that is extremely marginal and fragile and reaches its limit when autonomy is misrecognized as the absolute freedom of the artist or as the transcendence of the aesthetic domain.

It should be evident what kind of freedom is implied by Bourdieu's social theory: "It is within history that the principle of freedom from history resides" (248). The space in which Gustave and Frederic are both "possibilities" is a determined space. In retrospect, it was perhaps too easy for Bourdieu to withhold from the artist the full recognition that autonomy itself is determined, even though aesthetic discourse obviously misrecognizes its real autonomy as freedom from determination tout court. Autonomy misrecognized reinstates the error of voluntarism in the aesthetic realm, as in every other. Bourdieu's struggle with this question produces in his argument something like a dialectical turn, provoked by a reconsideration in The Rules of Art of the old accusation that social agents in his theory always seem to act with conscious calculation (the converse, as we have seen, of the accusation of economic determinism). This question is particularly vexed in the context of a highly differentiated, relatively autonomous social space such as the literary field, where the choices of artists who have refused the market will always look compromised if they are seen as calculated to acquire an alternative symbolic capital. Bourdieu is concerned "above all to exorcise the alternatives of innocence or cynicism which carry the risk of introducing into the analysis - and especially into the reading made of it - antagonist visions of the daily struggle at the heart of the intellectual field, that of exalted celebrants, usually applied to the great of the past, and that of a Thersites who arms himself with all the resources of a second-rate 'sociology' in order to discredit rivals by reducing their intentions to their presumed interests" (272).

Bourdieu goes on to invoke Spinoza's solution to the dilemma: "to substitute the often rather melancholic joys of the necessitating vision for the perverse pleasures (always ambivalent and often alternating) of celebration and denigration." Indeed, Spinoza seems very much behind Bourdieu's insistence that "reminding ourselves of the historical determinations of reasoning may constitute the principle of true freedom" (311). The question is whether this anamnesis is nothing other than "science," which is to say that it is not art. On this point Bourdieu arrives at a curiously revisionist insight, admitting that until he understood a certain text by Mallarme, he did believe that being "aware of the logic of the game as such" could only "turn the literary or artistic enterprise into a cynical mystification or conscious trickery" (272). But perhaps the revisionist moment is itself staged, as it seems to posit a Bourdieu who forgets or does not understand the Spinozist import of his own theory. Mallarme plays with the possibility of dismantling the whole enterprise of making art by calling it a "fiction" and ends by simply stating that "it is a game," which is to say that the making of art is itself art. Mallarme argues, in Bourdieu's explication, "both the objective truth of literature as a fiction founded on collective belief, and the right we have to salvage, in face of and against all kinds of objectification, literary pleasure" (275).(21) The objectification of art by sociological analysis cannot diminish the pleasure of literary art, except perhaps for unimaginative and moralistic readers.(22) So we have come full circle, to affirm the "love of art" whose inner truth as a symbolic economy was asserted in one of Bourdieu's earliest works, The Love of Art. The question about conscious calculation is resolved by recognizing all social action as like art, in that it is founded on illusio, or belief in the game. Love of art is not so very different from love of life, or at least the willingness to live it.

Playing the literary game to win in no way cancels the work of making art as an expression of "the love of art." The same must be said for the sociologist's "reductive" analysis of the literary field, or of any other social action, insofar as it is complex and not simple. The experience of reading a fiction (or the experience of any work of art) is itself the model for social action, in that it combines belief and disbelief, illusio and disillusio. Bourdieu is saying neither that calculation is all that there is nor that calculation is really unconscious, but that social action is complex in the same way that making or consuming art is complex.(23) This dialectical move displaces the economic model of social action as conscious calculation altogether or, rather, confines it to the domain of the strictly and narrowly economic, the market of material goods. But can we not say (or confirm) that in so doing Bourdieu constructs his sociology precisely to produce this distance from the narrowly economic?

The strategy of distancing is at issue if science (the science of sociology) produces this distance even more effectively than art. The advantage to be gained from the more effective strategy is greater autonomy, or greater freedom, as Bourdieu explains straightforwardly in his interview with Wacquant: "When you apply reflexive sociology to yourself, you open up the possibility of identifying true sites of freedom, and thus of building small-scale, modest, practical morals in keeping with the scope of human freedom which, in my opinion, is not that large" (Invitation, 199). Science initiates a dialectical turn on art: as art gains its autonomy by refusing the market - the salon des refuses - so science gains its autonomy by insisting on the illusio of this refusal and bringing to light the market of symbolic goods. Only in a remotely Hegelian way is this dialectic detrimental to art. Bourdieu allows that "the literary work can sometimes say more, even about the social realm, than many writings with scientific pretensions," but "it says it only in a mode such that it does not truly say it" (Rules, 32). But is it not the case that this science, whose name is sociology, also repeats art's gesture of refusal by taking art as the object of its analysis, and not the economy? Is there no sociology of the market of material goods? One might reply in the spirit, if not the voice, of Bourdieu: What interest can there be in "naked self-interest" if it is as simple and shallow as art is complex and profound? The richness of the sociology of art is purchased, after all, at the expense of impoverishing economics, which shrinks to the dimensionless point of the market. In exchange for its cultural poverty, however (and perhaps it is satisfied with this deal), the market acquires the force of determination and the name of the real. It is the "unsaid" in the illusio of art. Of course, in discovering this unsaid - "Science tries to speak of things as they are," Bourdieu writes at the end of his book, "without euphemisms" - the science of sociology also betrays its own illusio: science "asks to be taken seriously, even when it analyzes the foundations of this quite singular form of the illusio which is the scientific illusio" (336). In the game Bourdieu plays, I would say that the name of art is staked in a contest of sociology with economics, and if Bourdieu is destined to lose this game, he will at least be seen in the end to have been on the side of the artists.

1 Wacquant, "Bourdieu in America: Notes on the Transatlantic Importation of Social Theory," in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 246.

2 Wacquant discusses typical critiques of Bourdieu's work at length. It is not my intention to respond to these criticisms, many of which have been addressed by Bourdieu himself. The refusal I speak of here is indicated as much by the relative lack of Bourdieu's influence in the United States as by published critiques of his work. It is too soon to tell whether the recent spate of translations will alter the situation.

3 LiPuma's view is shared by a number of commentators in the Calhoun volume. On the side of the social sciences, Jeffrey Alexander complains that Bourdieu "casts subjectivity in a determinate, antivoluntaristic form" and that the concept of habitus is only "a Trojan horse for determinism" (Fin de Siecle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason [London: Verso, 1995], 131, 136). On the side of the humanities, Bruce Robbins writes of Bourdieu's "deep, static pessimism" (Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture [London: Verso, 1993], 209). For a critique of Bourdieu as a "conservative and normative" thinker see Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 106. I confine my remarks here to the North American academy, but I might have written nearly as accurately of the "Anglo-American" scene. Some aspects of the ethos described above characterize both national milieus. For example, in a generally appreciative account Derek Robbins speaks of "an element of fatalism or, perhaps of reluctant cosmic conservatism" in Bourdieu (The Work of Pierre Bourdieu [Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991], 175). As one might expect, given the different development of British cultural studies, there has been considerably more interest in Bourdieu in the United Kingdom (and in Australia) than in the United States. See in this context John Frow's quite good account of Bourdieu in his Cultural Studies and Cultural Value (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 27-47. Frow nonetheless registers the sense that Bourdieu's theory "allows for no possibility of critique and social transformation" (43). This reading is too prevalent, despite Bourdieu's careful attempts to address it, to be dismissed as a misreading. In sociological discourse the charge of determinism usually goes by the name "functionalism," as exemplified in Durkheim or Parsons. I avoid rehearsing these debates in narrowly disciplinary terms, for the sake of an audience presumed to consist largely of those in the humanities.

4 Grossberg, "Toward a Genealogy of the State of Cultural Studies," in Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies, ed. Cary Nelson and Kilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (New York: Routledge, 1996), 133.

5 Indeed, a good deal of change has occurred in consequence of struggles undertaken to restore some previous state of affairs. But the conception of "social change" has been assimilated so entirely to a discourse of political voluntarism that even this fact has become difficult to see. Some of Bourdieu's work is concerned directly or indirectly with the significance of the sixties, May 1968 in particular (Homo Academicus, for example). It is not difficult to recognize his strong political investment in not taking the reactionary turn of so many French intellectuals in response to that decade's failed revolutionism. His later work attempts to see through the political voluntarism of the period to the structures reproducing the fundamental poles of dominant and subordinate groups. Whether or not Bourdieu's account of social reproduction is adequate, it certainly sets out from the fact of change.

6 My use of "determination" with reference to the social realm is to be distinguished from the concept of "causality" in the natural-scientific sense. Determinations constrain or enable particular social actions, which is to say that in the realm of the social there is a weak causality. I believe that this usage is congruent with Bourdieu's.

7 See, e.g., the opening chapter of Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 7-11.

8 For a general bibliography of rational choice theory see Peter Abell, "Sociological Theory and Rational Choice Theory," in The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, ed. Bryan S. Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 252-73. Rational choice theory assumes that a scientific theory of social action must be based on the simplest possible model, according to which human beings always act to "maximize utilities." Since Bourdieu responds most directly to Gary Becker, I derive my comments on rational choice theory from his work, specifically Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). In Human Capital Becker writes that his approach "follows modern economics and assumes that these investments usually are rational responses to a calculus of expected costs and benefits" (17). In The Economic Approach he argues that "market instruments perform most, if not all, of the functions assigned to 'structure' in sociological theories" and that "the economic approach provides a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behavior" (5, 14). Becker's remarks will give readers some idea of the stakes in Bourdieu's sociology and the present essay. In a "contest of the faculties," economics has for the most part displaced sociology. For Bourdieu's response to Becker see "The Forms of Capital," in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241-58; Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 123; and Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 46-8.

9 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology, 16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 177.

10 Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 133.

11 Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 148.

12 This would be a question of the "residual" in a larger sense than that intended by Raymond Williams, an epochal sense closer to Mauss or Bataille.

13 On the distinction between embodied and objectified capital see Bourdieu, "Les Trois Etats du capital culturel," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 30(1979): 3-6.

14 If symbolic or cultural capital can be given specific contents of prestige, distinction, and competence, Bourdieu further reduces them in "The Forms of Capital" to the single substance of "embodied" labor, which brings his theorizing into proximity with Marxism: "Capital is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its 'incorporated,' embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor" (241). This careful and perhaps surprising definition reproduces certain features of a Marxist account of capital without grounding the concept in the cycle of production, or "productive capital." Accumulation may imply "surplus value" but not necessarily the particular form of capitalism, the extraction of surplus value from wage labor. In fact, it may be better to invoke the paradigm of "mercantile" capital, in which surplus value is extracted from the process of circulation, to account for how embodied labor, in Bourdieu's sense, might enter into a cycle of accumulation (and therefore become capital).

15 Fredric Jameson speaks of Bourdieu's "blanket condemnation of the aesthetic as a mere class signal and as conspicuous consumption" (Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991], 132).

16 One might insert the observation that capitalism depends from the start on advancing the terrain of commodification, beginning with labor, which becomes a commodity proper in the market for wage labor.

17 See Alvin W. Gouldner's work on cultural capital, principally The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era (New York: Seabury, 1979). Scott Lash, in his contribution to Critical Perspectives, "Cultural Economy and Social Change," makes some interesting remarks that extend Bourdieu's work on cultural capital to the theory of the new class (Calhoun et al., 206-7). Lash points out the considerable basis in Bourdieu, particularly in Distinction, on which the terms of such a theory might be worked out.

18 "In short, I believe that literature . . . is on many points more advanced than social science" (Invitation, 208).

19 "In highly differentiated societies, the social cosmos is made up of a number of such relatively autonomous social microcosms, i.e. spaces of objective relations that are the site of a logic and a necessity that are specific and irreducible to those that regulate other fields" (Invitation, 97). The concept of autonomization entails a certain complication, which tends to be elaborated for Bourdieu with reference to fields other than that of the economy per se and which gives autonomy in such fields distance from economic determination. "Obviously, in advanced capitalist societies, it would be difficult to maintain that the economic field does not exercise especially powerful determinations" (Invitation, 109). Nevertheless, as Bourdieu's theory demands, the economic field is itself the site of autonomy, namely, a relative freedom from determination by the political field, and this freedom is quite real, too. Should we not say that it is expressed in nothing other than the form of rational calculation, that it is the autonomy of the market? This freedom is not absolute, of course - it is not a freedom of the will - but it is the signature of the epochal nature of capitalism that market freedom is identified with freedom tout court and, conversely, that the dominance of the economy over other domains of the social should signify unfreedom, or determination tout court. The importance of this point is brought out at the end of the essay.

20 "For bold strokes of innovation or revolutionary research to have some chance of even being conceived, it is necessary for them to exist in a potential state at the heart of the system of already realized possibles, like structural lacunae which appear to wait for and call for fulfillment, like potential directions of development, possible avenues of research" (Rules, 235).

21 I have argued elsewhere that the concept of pleasure is undertheorized in Bourdieu; its appearance here seems to me to belong to the revisionist moment in The Rules of Art. In Bourdieu's usage, pleasure is quite distinguishable from interest, which defines the project of accumulation. Capital can be accumulated and reinvested, but pleasures cannot. Rather, the interest of accumulation depends more often than not on the deferral of pleasures, sometimes even their permanent deferral, as when the accumulation of money capital becomes an end in itself. Thus the issue of pleasure raises an ultimately historical question, related to the argument made by Albert O. Hirschman in The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1977). If pleasure occurs when accumulation ceases and consumption begins, then human beings required the institution of very specific social conditions (namely, capitalism) to cultivate the habit of accumulation and to make consumption itself into an instrument of accumulation. Hence interest is not really generalizable in anthropological terms, and the question of what limits the accumulation of symbolic capital needs a much more historical treatment than is found in Bourdieu.

22 It should be evident now why Jeffrey Alexander's complaint that Bourdieu's theory does not allow for "altruistic behavior" or that his analysis of academics in Homo Academicus disallows "the possibility of sincerely held academic views" is so mistaken (151, 161 [n. 3 above]). Bourdieu's point is not that motives cannot be sincere but that one finds particular (no doubt sincerely held) views (position-takings) to be prevalent among those who share particular social locations. What is one to make of this fact? Well . . . sociology. Human beings are complex enough, Bourdieu is saying, both to believe in the game they are playing and to entertain a sense of its artificiality and fungibility.

23 It would take a more careful reconstruction of Bourdieu's itinerary than I can undertake in this essay to demonstrate this point, but it is my impression that the incorporation of Spinoza is late. In addition to the several moments in The Rules of Art when Bourdieu openly or tacitly invokes Spinoza (see 248, 272, 392), his appended conclusion to Critical Perspectives more or less translates his concepts of habitus, field, and capital into Spinoza's conatus, "a tendency" for social agents "to perpetuate themselves in their being, to reproduce themselves in that which constitutes their existence and their identity. . . . This I hold against a finalist, utilitarian vision of action which is sometimes attributed to me. It is not true to say that everything that people do or say is aimed at maximizing their social profit; but one may say that they do it to perpetuate or to augment their social being" (Calhoun et al., 274).

John Guillory is professor of English at Harvard University and author of Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993).