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Bourdieu’s Rules, Flaubert’s Style, Mallarmé’s Game:
The Rules of Art and the ‘‘Unmasking Turn of Mind’’
Oleg Gelikman
Analysis of the interpretative element which is inherent even in positivistic research belongs among the current tasks of hermeneutics.
—Peter Szondi, Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics
1. A Question of Attitude: On Bourdieu’s Style of Reasoning
Even a quick look at Pierre Bourdieu’s career would confirm the impression that the only rule he consistently followed was that of making himself into an exception: A normalien trained in philosophy, he pursued a
career in social science; a member of the intellectual elite, he attacked the
attributes of its cultural superiority with nearly religious zeal; welcomed into
the metropolis, he fled to a North African village to gather material for his
pioneering theory of practice; having absorbed the highly intellectualized
Parisian ways of thought, he made their exorcism the premise of his critique
I would like to express my gratitude to Neil Hertz, Wallace Martin, Jacques Neefs, Jeffrey
Mehlman, and Richard A. Macksey. Their generous suggestions, comments, and insights
turned writing (and rewriting) this essay into an education in the rules and art of criticism.
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boundary 2 32:3, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press.
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of anthropology. I recall these well-known instances of his lifelong poetics
of exception so as to put in relief an exception to it. Bourdieu’s Baudelairean passion for ‘‘anywhere out of the world’’ should not blind us to the fact
that his entire theoretical enterprise is grounded in the dominant discursive
practice of his generation—the hermeneutics of suspicion.1
Before it was called ‘‘hermeneutics of suspicion,’’ demystification
went under the names of genealogy (Nietzsche being a case in point), positivism (as in Hyppolite Taine’s ‘‘milieu, race, moment’’), or the ‘‘unmasking
turn of mind.’’ In a seminal 1926 essay, Karl Mannheim defines the latter as
‘‘a turn of mind which doesn’t seek to refute, negate or call in doubt certain
ideas, but rather to disintegrate them.’’ Significantly, he goes on to contrast
this turn of mind with skeptical doubt:
Unmasking of lies has always been practiced; the unmasking of ideologies in the sense just defined, however, seems to be an exclusively modern phenomenon. In this case too, the fact that the socialpsychical function of a ‘‘proposition’’ or an idea is unmasked doesn’t
mean that it is denied or subjected to theoretical doubt—one does
not even raise the question of truth or falsehood. What happens is,
rather, that the proposition is ‘‘dissolved’’: we have to do here . . . with
an attitude toward theoretical communications which neglects the
problem of truth and falsehood and seeks to transcend their immanent theoretical meaning in the direction of practical existence.2
In conformity with Mannheim’s description, there emerged a standard criticism of the sociology of knowledge, namely, an accusation that it cannot
engage with the cognitive structure of its objects. Thus, Theodor Adorno
in Negative Dialectics: ‘‘Sociology of knowledge fails in the face of philosophy, substituting its social function and conditionedness by interest for its
truth content, not entering into that content’s criticism but acting indifferently
towards it.’’ 3 Though here Adorno speaks of works of philosophy, he applied
the same argument when attacking the sociology of art, since, for him, all
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1. Bourdieu explicates the logic of his professional and intellectual engagements in one
of his last writings, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2004). Consistent with his earlier statements, he stresses the dissimilarity between his intellectual
stance and that of the other members of his generation—Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault,
Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida.
2. Karl Mannheim, ‘‘The Problem of a Sociology of Knowledge,’’ in From Karl Mannheim,
ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 65–66.
3. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973),
197.
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valid art transcends the boundary of the aesthetic sphere in the direction of
philosophy by means of nonconceptual truth-content encrypted in its formal
principles.
If reduced to a bare-bones sketch, Adorno’s critique of the sociology
of knowledge amounts to the following argument: the focus on the ‘‘extratheoretical’’ function (Mannheim) prevents the sociology of art from grasping
the dynamic specific to the sphere of art production; consequently, it can
explicate neither the content of a given work of art nor the historical fluctuations in its aesthetic value. Yet it is easy to see that Adorno’s critique can be
circumvented if we distance ourselves from the individualistic notion of the
work of art at its center. He is right to claim that the sociology of knowledge
cannot engage with the content of any one work of art. But if we dispense
with Adorno’s belief in the individuality of aesthetic form as a category basic
to any type of inquiry into art, his objections would no longer apply to the
sociology of art.
Further, in response to Adorno’s critique, one could defend the sociology of knowledge in its functional variant by showing that, when triggered
by a recurrent hermeneutic deficiency in the cognitive structure of the analyzed phenomena, it is a legitimate, useful, and even necessary explanatory tool. For example, the persistence of misreading, misinterpretation, or
misrepresentation of a given text cannot be attributed to its content without
falling into an extreme version of linguistic idealism. Hermeneutic anomalies of this sort require identification of a factor extraneous to the artifact in
question. Needless to say, identification of such an anomaly presupposes
a diachronic perspective that alone could justify calling a hermeneutic pattern anomalous. Hence, as long as demystification does not offer itself as
a global explanatory tool and concerns itself with serial phenomena manifesting a clear-cut pattern of distortion, it is likely to remain worthwhile and
compelling. Here as elsewhere, restricting the scope of a hypothesis boosts
its validity.
Had the blend of explanation and critique in Bourdieu’s sociological
studies of art been any less distinct, assessing—or even being influenced
by—his work in this area would have been an exercise hopelessly foiled by
the protean, some say inconsistent, nature of his theorizing.4 Fortunately,
there is something constant about his work on aesthetics: as if replying to
Adorno’s critique recalled above, Bourdieu’s analyses consistently manifest
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4. See, for example, Jon Elster’s argument that, in Distinction, Bourdieu had explained
the social determinants of taste ‘‘twice over’’; see his ‘‘Snobs (Review of Bourdieu’s La
Distinction),’’ London Review of Books 3, no. 20, November 5, 1981, 12.
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the virtues Adorno deemed forbidden to the sociology of knowledge: those
of analyzing the content of works of art, of addressing the immanent variables underlying the fluctuations in aesthetic value, of treating the sphere
of art production as an autonomous field.
As even casual readers of his works would know, Bourdieu’s sociology achieves the integration of critique and explanation by making distortion—illusio or denegation, in Bourdieu’s terminology—a global property
attributable to, and often constitutive of, agents, fields, and artifacts alike.
What follows is a case study of the effects that his version of the ‘‘unmasking
turn of mind’’ had upon his critique of literary criticism and his explanation
of literary texts such as Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale and
Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘‘La Musique et les lettres’’ in The Rules of Art. The
critical intention of this essay is to assess the conditions that must be fulfilled for this style of reasoning to yield valid claims, as well as to describe
the decrease of its explanatory power that occurs when these conditions
are ignored. My strategy in carrying out this task is twofold: first, exposing
the defects internal to the structure of Bourdieu’s argument about the social
constitution of art (sections 2 and 3); second, questioning the applicability
of his argument to the texts he set out to critique (sections 4 and 5).
2. The Road to The Rules of Art :
Genesis as an Escape from History
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
In ‘‘The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic’’ (1987), Bourdieu expresses confidence that ‘‘the question of the meaning and the value of the
work of art, like the question of the specificity of the aesthetic judgment,
along with all great problems of philosophical aesthetics, can be resolved
only within a social history of the field, a history which is linked to a sociology
of the conditions of establishment of specific aesthetic disposition (or attitude) that the field calls for in each one of its states.’’ 5 This declaration would
be little more than a standard ‘‘unmasking’’ claim if not for Bourdieu’s avowed
intention to resolve rather than dismiss what he calls the ‘‘great problems of
philosophical aesthetics.’’
Since Bourdieu wants to resolve the problems of aesthetics by means
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5. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘‘The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic,’’ in Analytic Aesthetic, ed.
R. Schusterman (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 150.
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of ‘‘historical anamnesis,’’ 6 much of his argument depends on what he understands by history and his ability to demonstrate that his re-actualization of
the past is more than an arbitrary rewriting of it in the service of his critical agenda. His first attempt to meet this exigence comes in the following
statement: ‘‘The philosopher’s analysis of essence only records the product of the real analysis of essence which history itself performs objectively.
History does this through the process of autonomization within which and
through which the agents (artists, critics, historians, curators, etc.) and the
techniques, categories, and concepts (genre, mannerisms, periods, styles,
etc.) which are characteristic of the universe are invented.’’ 7 From what he
says here, I conclude that, by itself, the field of art production poses no problem whatsoever, because its history is a critical, self-reflexive process—it is
the inadequate recording of this self-analysis by philosophers that generates the problems he wishes to resolve. But if the history of aesthetic practice indeed were as clear-cut as this, a critical strategy far less complex than
the one advocated and practiced by Bourdieu would suffice.
Complicating the above assertion of the self-critical nature of history,
Bourdieu maintains that, during the formation of the autonomous artistic
field, the invention of its illusio (insider’s tacit belief in the self-evidence of
his or her perception of the given universe of public life) and the inscription of critical analysis into the field’s history occur side by side. However,
when the field achieves full autonomy, its illusio begins to function as the
dominant form of reflection required for intellectual or practical access to the
field. Thus, Bourdieu is fully justified in making a skeptical estimate of the
chances his own theory of field formation has to distinguish between history
as a necessary delusion and history as critical self-analysis: ‘‘Far from leading to a historical relativism, the historicization of the forms of thought which
we apply to the historical object, and which may be the product of this object
[i.e., confronting historical record with the possibility that forms of reflection we use to put it together can be impure, contingent, self-perpetuating,
misleading, invested with the social function], offers the only real chance of
escaping history, if ever so little.’’ 8
If Bourdieu’s ambition to supply a substantive, rather than unmasking, critique of aesthetics is to succeed, he must provide us with a reliable
means of distinguishing between the delusional and self-critical tendencies
of historical process. To put this in his idiom, we need the analytical tools that
6. Bourdieu, ‘‘The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic,’’ 149.
7. Bourdieu, ‘‘The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic,’’ 151.
8. Bourdieu, ‘‘The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic,’’ 156.
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would allow us to bring the forms of thought engendered by the aesthetic
object back to their historical objectivity, to break the enchanted circle in
which objects are constituted through the very means of reflection that they
engendered. However, the formula of the escape from history offered by his
sociology falls short of answering this need: how can he write that the forms
of knowledge ‘‘may be’’ the product of their objects, precisely when the efficacy of his historical anamnesis depends on the clarity with which sociology
(unlike philosophy, literary criticism, history, etc.) would grasp the difference
between those forms that are and those that are not? Moreover, doesn’t
the very idea of finding a genesis for pure aesthetics reintroduce the transparency of the historical process that he vigorously denounces as always
being in the service of illusio? In sum, unless we are able to understand how
escaping from history is different from falling into it all over again, Bourdieu’s
ability to practice this difference remains mystical. In other words, even as
‘‘The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic’’ portrays history as an oscillation between the practical genesis of reality and its imaginary construction
in illusio that renders inoperative the methodology of most humanities, it
offers virtually no neutral ground from which one could address the anxiety
such concept of history provokes. Having all but eliminated the possibility
of explaining the critical practice he demands from his audience, Bourdieu
seems to have left his readers empty-handed. Yet this is not the case.
The strength of Bourdieu’s thinking, most evident in Esquisse d’une
théorie de la pratique (which appeared in revised form in English as Outline
of a Theory of Practice),9 comes precisely from his refusal to overtheorize
the practical and his denunciation of certain ‘‘scientific’’ methods as socially
motivated efforts to invest objects of research with the hermeneutic depth
that is ontologically foreign to them. So the hesitations of his formula, his
‘‘may be’’ and ‘‘if ever so little,’’ may be less the evidence of the tautological
structure of his categories or a sign of self-doubt than a deliberate refusal
to offer a generalized theoretical statement on a practical issue that has to
be resolved on a case-by-case basis. I would speculate that this is why his
preliminary statements on the sociology of the aesthetic in ‘‘The Historical
Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic’’ had to culminate in a magnum opus that reads
more like an extended case study. Thus, far from being a foray into the foreign territory of literary criticism, Bourdieu’s genetic (in his sense) analysis
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9. Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1972; repr., Paris: Seuil, 2000);
Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
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of L’Éducation sentimentale is a litmus test of his earlier schematization of
the relations between aesthetics, history, and social reality.
3. The Peripety of Reading, or the Sentimental
Mis-education of Sociology
C’est en lisant qu’on devient liseron.
—R. Queneau, an epigraph to Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art
The inclusion of a chapter entitled ‘‘The Historical Genesis of a Pure
Aesthetic’’ in the The Rules of Art (1992) confirms the continuity of Bourdieu’s full-scale treatment of the ‘‘literary field’’ with the 1987 article discussed in the preceding section. The reappearance of the constellation
of ‘‘denegation,’’ ‘‘neutrality,’’ and ‘‘anamnesis’’ in his reading of Flaubert’s
masterpiece proves that the methodology sketched out in the earlier article
has not suffered significant transformations in the interim. In accordance
with the theory of illusio as the general basis of social interaction, Bourdieu’s
overall argument in The Rules of Art claims that neutrality, being a derivative of denegation, defines the mode of the social existence of fiction and
sets the stage for the genetic anamnesis: ‘‘What indeed is this discourse
which speaks of the social and psychological world as if it did not speak of
it; which cannot speak of it except on the condition that it only speaks of it
as if it didn’t speak of it, that is, in a form which performs, for the author and
the reader, a denegation (in the Freudian sense of Verneinung) of what it
expresses? And should we not ask if the work on form is not what makes
possible the partial anamnesis of deep and repressed structures.’’ 10
Initially, it appears that in The Rules of Art, Bourdieu delivers on his
ambition to set his enterprise apart from the purely ‘‘unmasking’’ sociological
readings of literature by taking into account the specific referentiality of fic-
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10. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans.
Susan Emanuel (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 3.
‘‘Qu’est-ce en effet que ce discours qui parle du monde (social ou psychologique)
comme s’il n’en parlait pas; qui ne peut parler de ce monde que sous la condition qu’il n’en
parle que comme s’il n’en parlait pas, c’est-à-dire dans une forme qui opère, pour l’auteur
et le lecteur, une dénégation (au sens freudien de Verneinung) de ce qu’il exprime? Et ne
faut-il pas se demander si le travail sur la forme n’est pas ce qui rend possible l’anamnèse
partielle de structure profondes, et refoulées’’ (Les règles de l’art: genèse et structure du
champ littéraire [1992; repr. Paris: Seuil, 1998], 20).
Hereafter, The Rules of Art is cited parenthetically as RA. The first parenthetical number
will refer to the English translation; the second, to the original French.
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tion. To this end, he places much emphasis on denegation. But the introduction of denegation as the master concept controlling both the referentiality
of fiction and the scene of reading brings about a necessary question: is
denegation, as he presents it, an adequate concept for grasping the fictionality of literature, provided that we accept his refusal to choose between the
real world and its aesthetic representation as the referent of literary work? 11
In the above passage, Bourdieu argues that literature both expresses
and evades the social practice out of which it speaks, expresses by evading
(since, in his theory of the field, the reality of social games is sustained by the
collective evasion) and evades by expressing (the specific power of literature
is to exhibit the collective belief as the fragile basis of the efficacy of social
interaction that, in the interest of this efficacy, must remain repressed).
So far, his use of denegation repeats rather than resolves the dilemma by
making the alternatives (social reality or freestanding aesthetic illusion) into
mutual conditions of possibility: to express, the literary must evade, but it
cannot evade without expressing. Since his causal chain makes codependent the internal-formal (‘‘inherent’’) and external-functional (‘‘imputed’’) features of works of literature, the conceptual basis of his anamnesis is able
to include and capitalize upon the most traditional literary distinction on the
books, namely, between form and content. As we shall have an occasion
to verify apropos of his reading of L’Éducation Sentimentale, Bourdieu systematically employs the category of form in order to differentiate between
realist fiction as a misleading illusion of reality of the depicted social universe and as a proto-scientific representation of the symbolic mechanisms
responsible for the construction of social reality as such.
Though he does not explicitly say so, I assume Bourdieu thinks that
prior sociological readings, from Taine’s to Lucien Goldmann’s, failed to
make the above connection between the aesthetic and social import of the
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11. As Michel Deguy points out in his review of Distinction, Bourdieu never elaborates his
understanding of Freud’s Verneinung; see his ‘‘La haine de la philosophie,’’ in Choses de
la poésie et affaire culturelle (Paris: Hachette, 1986), 144. Such reticence would be more
forgivable if we were dealing with a more straightforward psychoanalytic notion. Such is
clearly not the case with Verneinung. The situation is exactly the same in The Rules of Art,
where Verneinung once again is central to the argument and yet remains untheorized. On
my reading, the problem with Bourdieu’s use of it lies in his identification of Verneinung
with euphemism and sublimation evidenced in the following statement (to which I shall
return): ‘‘The putting-into-form operated by the writer functions as a generalized euphemism and the reality de-realized and neutralized by literature that he offers allows him to
satisfy a desire for knowledge ready to be satisfied by the sublimation that literary alchemy
offers to him’’ (RA, 32/69, translation modified).
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literary form because they lacked a proper understanding of symbolic capital. For the first time in the history of human sciences, my method permits,
Bourdieu seems to say, coalescence of the ludic logic of symbolic capital
and the formal procedures of fiction in the structure of homology, in which
the latter will be a true but—alas for literary critics!—denegated version of
the former. Thus, when it comes to literature, the task of the Bourdieuian
sociologist is to overcome the constitutive denegation of literature (together
with the methodological specificity of literary criticism that perpetuates this
denegation by scholarly means) and break through to the unobstructed view
of social reality of literary enterprise. Rather than yielding to the seductive
promise of Bourdieu’s theory, let us pause to reflect upon the key assumptions underlying the peculiar mix of anachronism and messianism that characterize the structure of his program:
1. The functioning of fiction in literature is the same as that of symbolic
fictions in the structures of collective belief.
2. The neutrality of fiction is the same as the denegation constitutive
of the illusio required for the maintenance of the field’s integrity.
3. Homology between the literary and other fields, especially the economic one, is strict, constant, and indubitable.
4. ‘‘Style,’’ ‘‘form,’’ and ‘‘content’’ are adequate concepts for grasping
the position of literary work within modernist artistic praxis from Flaubert to
Mallarmé.
These assumptions are clearly interrelated: assumption 2 specifies
the identity asserted in assumption 1: literary fiction is the same as the symbolic one to the extent that the efficacy of both is based on denegation.
Since each field is centered upon the illusion that its actors must internalize
in order to function, all fields are homologous to each other at least in this
respect (assumption 3). As constraints internal to the literary field, formalist notions (‘‘style,’’ ‘‘form,’’ ‘‘content’’) should be approached as denegations
constitutive of its illusio. Consequently, only if they are preserved in the form
‘‘native’’ to the field can they be unmasked as a hopelessly partial revelation
of their true function and context (assumption 4).
The above strategy is a remarkable conceit on Bourdieu’s part, since
it permits him to integrate the autonomy of the literary into the general theory
of the symbolic without submitting the face value he attaches to the literary
to any critique. By making the autotelic notions of literature into conditions
of the historical genesis of its field, he unconditionally validates the formalist
self-understanding of literature. Of course, he does so only so as to assert
the necessity of going beyond it toward the theory of the social fields as col-
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lectively held illusions. In other words, his critical strategy embeds a highly
questionable, and certainly partial, self-representation of literary enterprise
into a larger symbolic network and thereby spares this self-representation
the critique it is ripe for. Hence, the regressive and progressive movements
of Bourdieu’s critique are strictly interdependent, for it is only by regressing
to the formalist image of French literary modernity that he is able to unmask
this modernity in substantive, rather than merely functional, terms.
What if one could show that (1) the objects of Bourdieu’s analysis
in The Rules of Art escape the formalist straightjacket that the logic of his
‘‘style of reasoning’’ forces upon them, and that (2) they engage critically
with the very rules of art—homology and denegation—to which, following
Bourdieu, they must submit without reflection? Should such demonstration
succeed, his synthesis of formalism and functional demystification would
have to be declared a misrepresentation of the literary works he considers,
a nonintended reinforcement of the formalist self-representation of literature
he set out to undermine, and a misfired attempt to extend the scope of functional explanation of the ‘‘unmasking’’ type. In the two sections that follow
(the first on Bourdieu’s treatment of Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale,
the second on his commentary on Mallarmé’s ‘‘La Musique et les lettres’’), I
would like to demonstrate that the objects of Bourdieu’s commentary do in
fact defy the rules of art meant to be constitutive of them, and, moreover,
that these texts point to a more satisfying realization of Bourdieu’s ambition to rethink, in historically specific terms, the connections between social
action, symbolic universe, and literary history.
4. The Gambits of Homology: Mimesis and Adolescence
in Bourdieu’s Reading of L’Éducation sentimentale
What assures the susceptibility of L’Éducation sentimentale to the
sociological analysis Bourdieu has in mind? The Rules of Art offers two
answers. First, it is the sameness of the ‘‘structure’’ that, by dissimulating
itself, structures both social reality and fictional illusion: ‘‘If L’Éducation sentimentale . . . can be read as a story, it is because the structure which organizes the fiction, and which grounds the illusion of reality it produces, is hidden, as in reality, beneath the interactions of people, which are structured
by it’’ (RA, 14/38).12 Though I am deeply sympathetic to his opposition to the
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12. ‘‘Si L’Éducation sentimentale . . . peut être lue comme une histoire, c’est que la structure qui organise la fiction, et qui fonde l’illusion de réalité qu’elle produit, se dissimule,
comme dans la réalité, sous les interactions entre des personnes, qu’elle structure.’’
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‘‘segregationist’’ notion of fiction,13 the alternative he puts forth in this passage is unsatisfactory because it defeats his intention to pay tribute to literary illusion as such. By making literary fiction into an analogon of the socially
symbolic one (‘‘the structure which organizes the fiction, and which grounds
the illusion of reality it produces, is hidden, as in reality, beneath the interactions of people’’ [my emphasis]), Bourdieu risks reducing his fundamental
theoretical homology to a tautology, and thereby engendering yet another
case of the ‘‘literature as an empty vessel’’ problem endemic to prior sociological accounts. A more refined account of the structure of fiction, like the
one found in Thomas Pavel’s Fictional Worlds (his notions of ‘‘salient structure’’ and ‘‘isomorphism’’ offer viable alternatives to Bourdieu’s ‘‘structure’’
and ‘‘homology’’), would have allowed Bourdieu to satisfy better the principal
ambition of his study.
To say that Bourdieu’s theory of fiction is too crude to work together
with his theory of the symbolic is not equivalent to claiming that he has
no theory of fiction at all. On the contrary, the passage above makes clear
that he adheres to the idea that realist fiction wants to produce an illusion
of reality and nothing more than that. This assumption is highly questionable in the case of Flaubert’s masterpiece. Though it is self-evident that
L’Éducation sentimentale gets involved in mimesis of the socially sanctioned
patterns of linguistic reference to the events themselves (the realist code),
the meaning of this mimicking is by no means obvious. This meaning, I
would argue, begins to emerge only where Bourdieu sees it end, namely,
with the illusion of the reality of the social world inhabited by Frédéric
Moreau and company. In other words, where Bourdieu sees Flaubert investing his energies into a creation of the freestanding illusion of the social
world, Flaubert may be in the business of exposing the drive to produce such
an illusion—whether under the auspices of life, science, or art—as historically unavoidable and capable of yielding undesired, even counterproductive or self-defeating effects. Moreover, taking into account the relationship
between L’Éducation sentimentale and Bouvard et Pécuchet, I would go so
far as to suggest that L’Éducation sentimentale mimics the realist code even
as it employs, or better cites, it as an instance of its own—very different—
textual fabrication.
I realize that having saddled Bourdieu with the charge that his neglect
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13. ‘‘Segregationists’’ maintain that appropriate response to fiction presupposes interpretative procedures totally distinct from those employed when dealing with nonfictional
events. See Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: Oxford University Press,
1986), 12–25; 88–105.
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of a theory of fiction leads him to read Flaubert through the singularly inappropriate lens of formalist notions, I have raised the question of the difference that the presence of such a theory would make as to how L’Éducation
sentimentale figures in The Rules of Art. Without attempting a detailed
answer, I would like to offer some basic considerations that further reflections on the topic would have to take into account:
1. Since he sees style as a question of form, Bourdieu largely preserves Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of style as an aesthetic transcription of
individual idiosyncrasy that must be revealed as a subjectification of an objective social process. But the primary function of Flaubert’s style, unlike
that of the Romantic generation preceding him, is not aesthetic but cognitive and maieutic. That is to say, Flaubert’s style does not put ‘‘finish’’ on his
novel but opens it to critical engagement.
2. For Bourdieu, style is a universal glue holding together the scaffolding of Flaubert’s novel (story, plot, character, description). I think that,
historically, it is more accurate to see L’Éducation sentimentale as a liminal novel whose style erodes the stability of the structural units of its genre
(story, plot, character, description); such an interpretation would explain why
over the years this novel has been embraced by realist and experimental
writers alike.
3. Bourdieu’s formal understanding of style leads him to place L’Éducation sentimentale at the core of the genesis of pure art. However, a genetic
reconstruction of Flaubert’s style would show that his working methods,
his obsession with documented lieux communs, for example, consistently
led him to transgress the limits of mere artfulness under the pressure of
such concerns as legitimacy of democratic political authority; constitution of
social agency; leveling of stable social distinctions; realignment of relations
between religion, science, and politics; elevation of local dogmas into universal truths; the place of the past within a modern, future-oriented outlook.
This tendency will find even clearer expression in Bouvard et Pécuchet.
In short, I think that if, instead of uncritically embracing an anachronistic, formalist idea of realist mimesis, Bourdieu opted for a more stratified
interpretation of Flaubert’s style, a much denser and historically more accurate picture of Flaubert’s engagement with his epoch would emerge.14
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14. Such a picture already began to emerge in Flaubert scholarship. For instances of this
approach, see Antoine Compagnon, La troisième république des lettres, de Flaubert à
Proust (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983); Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973); Leslie Hill, ‘‘Flaubert and the Rhetoric
of Stupidity,’’ Critical Inquiry 3, no. 2 (Winter 1976): 333–44; Jacques Neefs, ‘‘La Figu-
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If, as I have argued above, Bourdieu’s attempt to subordinate L’Éducation sentimentale to his tautological notion of mimesis backfires, what
else does he employ to make sure Flaubert’s unruly text does not overflow
the carefully delineated limits of the sociological homology between literary
and symbolic fiction? Among several thematic controls working for Bourdieu’s reading, ‘‘adolescence’’ is the sociological safeguard that interests me
the most, since it brings together all the issues pursued here: the general
economy of fiction, the critical appropriation of the literary mode of enunciation, the friction between the texture of Flaubert’s writing and the analytical
ambition of Bourdieu’s ‘‘style of reasoning.’’
In contrast to the conventional idea of adolescence as the age of
high-flown but groundless idealism, a structural glitch marking and marked
by the retroactive insertion of the previously latent corporeality into the social network, Bourdieu’s theory affirms adolescence as critical power:
In addition, through Frédéric, Flaubert carries on the interrogation
into what makes adolescence a critical moment, in a dual sense. . . .
Frédéric does not manage to invest himself in one or another of
the games of art or money that the social world proposes. Rejecting
the illusio as a true illusion unanimously approved and shared, hence
as an illusion of reality, he takes refuge in true illusion, declared as
such, whose form par excellence is the novelistic illusion in its most
extreme forms (with Don Quixote or Emma Bovary, for example). The
entry into life as an entry into illusion of the real guaranteed by the
whole group is not self-evident. And novelistic adolescences, such
as those of Frédéric or Emma, who, like Flaubert himself, take fiction seriously because they do not manage to take the real seriously,
remind us that the ‘‘reality’’ against which we measure all fictions is
only the universally guaranteed referent of a collective illusion. (RA,
12–13/36)15
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ration réaliste,’’ Poétique 16 (1973): 466–76; and Dolf Oehler, Ein Höllensturz der Alten
Welt: zur Selbsterforschung der Moderne nach dem Juni 1848 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), trans. into French as Le spleen contre l’oubli: Juin 1848: Baudelaire, Flaubert, Heine, Herzen (Paris: Payot, 1996).
15. ‘‘En outre, à travers Frédéric, Flaubert porte l’interrogation sur ce qui fait de l’adolescence un moment critique, au double sens. . . .
‘‘Frédéric ne parvient pas à s’investir dans l’un ou l’autre des jeux d’art ou d’argent
que propose le monde social. Refusant l’illusio comme illusion unanimement approuvée
et partagée, donc comme illusion de réalité, il se réfugie dans l’illusion vraie, déclarée
come telle, don’t la forme par excellence est l’illusion romanesque dans ses formes les
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This passage encapsulates Bourdieu’s entire strategy of reading. The fact
that its final words return (RA, 34/71), virtually unaltered, as a conclusion
to his reading of L’Éducation sentimentale in the ‘‘Prologue’’ to The Rules
of Art confirms this assessment further. Setting aside the homological flattening accomplished by Bourdieu’s use of such concepts as illusion, real,
and referent, let us simply remark the rapid multiplication of identifications.
In these few lines, Bourdieu is making at least three assertions. First, he
identifies Frédéric’s double refusal—neither art nor money—with the orientation of critical stance as such. Second, he defines adolescence as the
refusal to accept the fact that social games are symbolic activity consecrated by the rules and rituals maintaining collective illusio rather than by
the individual intuitions of pertinent values or ideals. Third, he posits the
‘‘adolescent’’ rejection of illusio as the cause of Frédéric’s, Emma Bovary’s,
and Flaubert’s own compensatory overestimation of literary illusion as true
in virtue of being explicitly declared. Rather than arguing for the validity of
these propositions, he presents them as self-evident facts of reading. As
we shall see below, the reason for this intrusion of (what he excoriates in
others as) ‘‘pure reading’’ into his own discourse has its source in the epistemological privileging of the in-between fundamental to his account of social
agency.
In The Rules of Art, the adolescent as a revolutionary, a key figure
in the Napoleonic phantasmatics of nineteenth-century French literature,
from Stendhal to Hugo, is cast into the role of an unconscious critic acting out the ambition of the sociological prise de conscience without being
able to fulfill it (as Bourdieu’s own reading will). In Georges Bataille’s terms
(themselves derived from Marx’s discussion of 1848), Bourdieu wants to
replace the adolescent as an eagle—‘‘Revolutionary idealism tends to make
of the revolution an eagle above eagles, a super-eagle striking down authoritarian imperialism, an idea as radiant as an adolescent eloquently seizing
power for the benefit of utopian enlightenment’’—with the adolescent as an
old mole (vielle taupe), eating away the foundations of the ideological illusio, laying down the groundwork for the sociological overturning he cannot
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plus extrême (chez Don Quichotte ou Emma Bovary par exemple). L’entrée dans la vie
comme entrée dans l’illusion de réel garantie partout le groupe ne va pas de soi. Et les adolescence romanesques, comme celles de Frédéric ou Emma, qui, tel Flaubert lui-même,
prennent la fiction au sérieux parce qu’ils ne parviennent pas à prendre au sérieux le réel,
rappellent que ‘la réalité’ à laquelle nous mesurons toutes les fictions n’est que le référent
universellement garanti d’une illusion collective.’’
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effect.16 Bourdieu writes, ‘‘Frédéric—like all difficult adolescents—is a formidable analyst [analyseur ] of our deepest relationship to the social world’’
(RA, 33/71).
Before Bourdieu’s epic voyage into the land of literary criticism, not
many readers of L’Éducation sentimentale found ‘‘le jeune homme du Sens
qui en manque’’ either difficult or profound; on the contrary, Frédéric seemed
a rather shallow, easygoing character to most. What is the meaning of this
improbable makeover? Why does Bourdieu present adolescence as ‘‘un
moment critique’’? What rationale justifies his rating, in the order of increasing analytical potency, Frédéric, Flaubert, and himself as the agencies of
special reflexive power? As nearly everywhere in Bourdieu, the figure of
homology provides a simple, if not very satisfactory, answer: Frédéric is an
adolescent because he is always in-between women, professions, social,
and geographical spheres; since for Bourdieu exemption from the collective
belief in the reality of the game (illusio) is a hallmark of the authentic critical
stance, Frédéric’s malaise quickly becomes its personification. In addition,
Frédéric’s shuttling between what Bourdieu calls the ‘‘universe of art’’ and
the ‘‘universe of money’’ reveals incongruities brought about by the multiple
processes of autonomization (autonomization of the avant-garde within the
field of art, autonomization of the field of art within the field of cultural production, autonomization of the field of cultural production within the field of
the economic capital). These processes, as far as Bourdieu is concerned,
tell the true story of the period, and so does Frédéric’s double inconstance.
But since Bourdieu’s critical sociologist must soar above the selfperpetuating delusional fabric of social life in order to reach the neutral
ground from which to seize, expose, and collapse its ludic logic, he is destined to soar above Frédéric as well. Accordingly, in The Rules of Art,
Tseng 2005.7.11 13:07
16. Georges Bataille, ‘‘The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist,’’ in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1985). In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,
Marx characterizes the ‘‘methodic’’ activity of revolution as the grubbing of an ‘‘old mole’’
(Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader [New York: Norton, 1978], 514); the mole,
planted into French history by Marx, originally comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The
rhetorical and theatrical structure of Marx’s analysis needs to be interrogated in its own
right: does it achieve a mastery of the demagogic core of 1848 or submit to the very
phantasmagoric logic Marx wished to denounce? Jon Elster offers compelling reasons
to think the latter in Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (New
York: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de L’Homme,
1979), 101–3.
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Frédéric’s noncommitment exemplifies the lowest agency of the critical (he
criticizes the society by acting); Bourdieu’s analysis, the highest (he acts by
criticizing); and Flaubert is left in the ambiguous middle (since L’Éducation
sentimentale criticizes without acting, and Flaubert the writer acts without
criticizing in the properly sociological fashion). However, in the very process
of bringing off this homological reiteration of l’entre-les-deux as the originary critical instance, Bourdieu’s structuring reading of L’Éducation sentimentale begins to stall. The metacritical privilege of the in-between as the
locus of demystifying intervention has the following consequences for Bourdieu’s understanding of Flaubert’s novel.
First, the emphasis on the in-between leads Bourdieu to inflate Frédéric’s ‘‘critical’’ commitment to noncommitment—let us not forget that he
was ready to settle for the life of a provincial notary with Louise or to marry
Madame Dambreuse. Whereas Bourdieu argues that Frédéric refuses to
‘‘invest himself in one or the other of the games of art or money that the
social world proposes’’ (RA, 13/36), in Flaubert’s novel Frédéric succumbs
all too easily to the seductions of art publishing (Arnoux), banking (Dambreuse), politics (Deslauriers), dissolute bohemian life, ‘‘patrician adulteries’’
(Madame Dambreuse), and so forth. Whereas in Bourdieu social games are
sustained by the illusion of their reality, in Flaubert they are also undone by
it; hence, Frédéric’s eventual retreat from all of his pursuits.
Second, it allows him to treat art and commerce as stable social
games within the structure of an equally stable opposition. Flaubert’s plot,
on the other hand, consistently and deliberately plays up the instability inherent to the domains of art and money (Arnoux’s descent from high art to
the commercial ‘‘art’’ of pottery; Pellerin’s abandonment of painting in favor
of photography; Madame Dambreuse’s disinheritance; Frédéric’s sudden
wealth and subsequent losses at the stock exchange).
Third, it grounds Bourdieu’s repression of the Revolution from his
analysis. While he probably sees the Revolution of 1848 as a decorative
element meant to enliven the narration of the story, within the structure of
Flaubert’s novel (and beyond, notably in Marx’s account of these events)
it constitutes a major instance of the collapse of an antithetical logic like
the one operative in Bourdieu’s basic opposition between the universe of
culture and the economic field. In the text of L’Éducation sentimentale, the
Fontainebleau episode, with its superimposition of nature upon history, myth
upon reality, sadism upon sentimentality, coincides with the June events
of 1848. This narrative parallelism becomes a very telling allegory of Flau-
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bert’s understanding of the disruption of historical continuity as a vertiginous
moment in which opposites break out from the oppositions used to stabilize them.17
Fourth, Bourdieu’s pursuit of the critically neutral in-between renders
his argument vulnerable to the fictional designs of Flaubert’s novel. It does
so in at least two ways: a) within the distribution of the critical agencies organizing Bourdieu’s reading of L’Éducation sentimentale (Frédéric, Flaubert,
Bourdieu’s science de l’oeuvre), Flaubert ends up positioned in the critical
neutral middle that, by Bourdieu’s own logic, should have been his own; b)
in The Rules of Art (as was the case already in Esquisse d’une théorie de
la pratique), Bourdieu aspires to place his own argument beyond the alternatives of subjective and objective, existentialist humanism and inhuman
structuralism, pure reading of the literary aesthetes like Wolfgang Iser and
reductionist sociology of literature in Lukács’s vein. Yet, the allusions to the
‘‘charm’’ of the literary work (RA, 33/70), unproblematic confidence in the
work of form (RA, 32/70), reassuring reminders of the normalizing functioning of the l’illusion romanesque (RA, 12–13/36; RA, 34/71), numerous references to the resurgence of economic interests in the realm of symbolic
‘‘disinterestedness’’—all these indicate that in the course of his exposition,
Bourdieu slides between the poles of these oppositions rather than genuinely surpassing them. His programmatic self-exemption from the opposition (between the anarchic and the determinist, the pure and the vulgar, the
individual and the collective, etc.) often leads to the pathetic return of one of
its terms. Witness, for instance, how, in the following passage, he momentarily grants Flaubert the artist the redemptive powers with respect to Flaubert the man that the theory of the literary field has previously demystified
as illusory: ‘‘But the author of Sentimental Education is precisely someone
who knew how to transform the ‘inactive passion’ of Frédéric into an artistic
project. Flaubert couldn’t say: ‘Frédéric, c’est moi.’ By the very act of writing
a story which could have been his, he negates [the possibility] that this story
of a failure could be the story of the person who wrote it’’ (RA, 26/58–59;
translation modified).18
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17. For a commentary on Marx’s writings on 1848 that pursues the consequences of this
collapse, see Jeffrey Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1977); as for Marx’s use of the notion of class in his account
of these events, see Michel Henry, Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, trans. Kathleen
McLaughlin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 102–5.
18. ‘‘Mais, l’auteur de L’Éducation sentimentale est précisément celui qui a su convertir en
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In addition to staging a striking resurgence of Sartre’s critical categories (artistic project as a conversion; the act of writing as a transcending
negation),19 this description of Flaubert’s authorship opts for a rather disingenuous understanding of the proverbial ‘‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’’ But
Flaubert is neither more nor less Emma than he is Frédéric, or any other element of his fiction, and to assume that such differences can be meaningfully
made is a relapse into the kinds of reading that even the ‘‘scholastic’’ literary
critics tend to question. A similar relapse occurs when Bourdieu aligns the
teleology of writing with the promise of sociological revelation:
The putting-into-form operated by the writer functions as a generalized euphemism and the reality de-realized and neutralized by literature that he offers allows him to satisfy a desire for knowledge ready
to be satisfied by the sublimation that literary alchemy offers to him.
. . . Imposing form also means respecting formalities, and the
denegation that literary expression performs is what permits a limited
manifestation of truth which, put otherwise, would be unbearable. . . .
A sociological reading breaks the spell. . . . The form in which literary
objectification is enunciated is no doubt what permits the emergence
of the deepest reality, . . . because that is the veil which allows the
author and the reader to dissimulate it and to close their eyes to it.
(RA, 32–33/69–70; my emphasis)20
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projet artistique la ‘passion inactive’ de Frédéric. Flaubert ne pouvait pas dire ‘Frédéric,
c’est moi.’ En écrivant une histoire qui aurait pu être la sienne, il nie que cette histoire d’un
échec soit l’histoire de celui qui l’écrit.’’
19. Here is another instance of Sartre’s ghost visiting Bourdieu: ‘‘Writing abolishes determinations, constraints and limits constitutive of social existence . . .’’ (L’écriture abolit les
déterminations, les contraintes et les limites qui sont constitutive de l’existence sociale . . .)
(RA, 27/60). With Sartre turning up on many crucial junctures of the book, one has to wonder whether The Rules of Art should not be read as a failed exorcism of his spirit from
Bourdieu’s ‘‘system.’’
20. ‘‘La mise en forme qu’il [the writer] opère fonctionne comme un euphémisme généralisé et la réalité littérairement dérealisée et neutralisée qu’il propose lui permet de satisfaire une volonté de savoir prête à se contenter de la sublimation que lui offre l’alchimie
littéraire. . . .
‘‘. . . Mettre en forme, c’est aussi mettre des formes, et la dénégation qu’opère l’expression littéraire est ce qui permet la manifestation limitée d’une vérité qui, dite autrement,
serait insupportable. . . . La lecture sociologique rompt la charme. . . . La forme dans
laquelle s’énonce l’objectivation littéraire est sans doute ce qui permet l’émergence du
réel le plus profond, . . . parce qu’elle le voile qui permet à l’auteur et au lecteur de le
dissimuler et de se le dissimuler.’’
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Here, a prefabricated critical opposition between form and content allows
Bourdieu to decide what form does and means in L’Éducation sentimentale,
and hence to graft the ‘‘spell-breaking,’’ truth-unveiling sociological reading
onto a deluded formalist one, without ever putting in question the viability of
the latter with respect to Flaubert. But in grounding the sociological exactness of L’Éducation sentimentale in Flaubert’s preoccupation with form,
Bourdieu is betting on the wrong horse: first, because Bourdieu’s ‘‘form’’
is Flaubert’s content (Frédéric’s shuttling between the universes of art and
money could never count as a formal articulation from Flaubert’s point of
view); second, because Flaubert’s ‘‘style’’ exposes the preoccupation with
the ‘‘genesis and structure of the literary field’’ as an attempt to seize and
stabilize the dynamism of the social through an image or a vision; finally,
because one of the tasks of Flaubert’s writing is to render the very idea of the
final revelation of the ‘‘unbearable’’ truth of social existence ludicrous. The
contamination of Bourdieu’s project by a distinctly Flaubertian problematic
comes to a crescendo when he declares that solely through the work of fiction one could live the reconciliation of the irremediable social antagonisms:
‘‘The immediate compatibility of all social positions which, in ordinary existence, cannot be simultaneously (or even successively) occupied, between
which one has to choose, and by which, whether one wishes or not, one is
chosen—it is only in and by literary creation that one may live that immediate
compatibility’’ (RA, 26/59). At this point, one is tempted to exclaim ‘‘Madame
Bovary, c’est Bourdieu!’’
The formula concluding Bourdieu’s reading of L’Éducation sentimentale—‘‘To objectivize the novelistic illusion [this is what Flaubert does according to Bourdieu], and especially the relation to the so-called real world it
assumes, is to remind ourselves that the reality against which we measure
all fictions is merely a recognized referent of an (almost) universally shared
illusion’’ (RA, 33–34/71)—looks like a vindication of the critical potential of literary fiction, since it reminds us that, ultimately, the real itself is only a referent of a symbolic fiction. But this impression is deceptive. In fact, this formula
confines novelistic fiction to reaffirming the referential stability of the social
symbolic order. Such restriction is incompatible with Flaubert’s project as I
understand it, for Flaubert’s style seeks nothing less than to demonstrate
that because the symbolic needs such fictional reminders and affirmations,
the stability they afford can never be anything more than fictional. Unlike
Bourdieu’s ‘‘unbearable’’ and ‘‘disenchanted’’ truths of the social, Flaubert’s
writing promises relief from the urge to solicit their comfort.
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To sum up our analyses: in the process of articulating the critical
structure (‘‘adolescence’’) designed to submit Flaubert’s fiction to the rigors
of sociological commentary, Bourdieu’s argumentative resources are infiltrated by the very agency (which, provisionally and inadequately, may be
called Flaubert’s ‘‘style’’) from whose misapprehension they draw their clarifying powers. In other words, Bourdieu’s refusal or inability to treat L’Éducation sentimentale as anything but an objectification of a social process program the sabotage of the ultimate ambition of The Rules of Art. Instead of
a superior type of sociological reading promised to his readers, Bourdieu
offers a fascinating mélange of formalism he denounces in literary critics
and the historicism he usually finds too crude.
From the point of view external to Bourdieu’s reading, Frédéric’s failure to invest in social reality and Flaubert’s minute detailing of his hesitations are less a manifestation of the structure of the literary field as an
autonomous sphere of pure art than a critical account of how apprehension of social reality fits into the operations of everyday, anonymous consciousness. Contrary to Bourdieu’s thesis, the critical power of Flaubert’s
novel resides not in its embrace of adolescence as a withdrawal from the
real world that, like the phenomenologic époche, bares the formal structures of consciousness corresponding to the mechanisms of socialization
(illusio, sens du jeu, habitus, position taking) but in the destabilizing effect
of Flaubert’s ability to bring out the cognitive costs of such an investment by
means of his ‘‘style,’’ while all along refusing the comfort of an alternative to
the ineluctable bêtise of the social existence.
5. Bourdieu’s Conversion: Mallarmé and
Denegation in The Rules of Art
Tseng 2005.7.11 13:07
Bourdieu’s ‘‘science of the work of art’’ is meant to expose the preoccupations of literary criticism with formal distinctions and aesthetic quality
as a game internal to the field of cultural production. By referring works of
art to the original context of their production, his analysis seeks to restore
to them genetically what has been expropriated from them temporally, that
is, their embeddedness in the ideas, notions, and practices common at the
time. The traditional attributes of literary criticism—technical vocabulary,
techniques of evaluation, above all the practice of pure reading distinct from
its commonplace twin—are to be revealed as functions of historical time
(manifest in the obliteration of contexts) and social space (since it induces
literary critics to envisage art as a separate sphere of inquiry and produc-
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tion). How one would put this militant program in action is what The Rules
of Art sets out to demonstrate.
Contrary to what readers of his earlier works might expect, Bourdieu’s analysis of the ‘‘genesis and structure of the literary field’’ is an outcome of a conversion. Moreover, the manner in which this sudden change
of belief came about is shocking to anyone who followed his transformation
from a normalien into a hardworking sociologist filling his book with results
of the statistical research—it happened while he was reading a literary text.
The scandal of conversion is further magnified once he informs his readers
that the text in question is a passage on the rules of the literary game in
Mallarmé’s ‘‘La Musique et les lettres’’:
As for becoming aware of the logic of the game as such, and of the
illusio which is its bedrock, I long believed that it was somehow excluded, by definition, by the fact that this lucidity would make the literary or artistic undertaking into a cynical mystification or a deliberate
trickery [supercherie]. So I thought, until I happened to really read
[lire vraiment ] a text by Mallarmé that expresses well, though in a
very obscure manner, the objective truth of literature as fiction based
on collective belief, and the right we have to save literary pleasure
against all kinds of objectivation:
We know, we captives of an absolute formula, that, of course,
there only is what is. But to thrust the bait [le leurre] aside
forthwith, under a pretense, would reveal our inconsequence,
denying the very pleasure we seek; for that beyond is its
agent [en est l’agent ], and what I would call ‘‘instrument’’ [‘‘le
moteur ’’] of our pleasure, if I didn’t disdain to perpetrate in
public the impious dismantling of fiction and consequently of
the literary mechanism—to display the principal piece or nothing at all. But I venerate the way in which, through a deception [par une supercherie] and at what forbidden height, the
height of thunderbolts, we lack the awareness of what up there
explodes.
Why should we do this?
It is a game. (RA, 274/450–51)21
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21. ‘‘Quant à la prise de conscience de la logique du jeu en tant que tel, et de l’illusio qui
est à son fondement, j’ai longtemps cru qu’elle était exclue, en quelque sorte, par définition, du fait que cette lucidité ferait de l’enterprise littéraire ou artistique une manifestation
cynique, ou une supercherie consciente. Cela jusqu’à ce que je vienne à lire vraiment un
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This passage is rather famous; hardly any Mallarmé scholar has failed to
comment on it. Since the game it deals with proves irresistible to the progress of commentary and interpretation, it is emblematic of the meaning of
Mallarmé’s entire project. It is in this highly charged context that Maurice
Blanchot refers to it in ‘‘The Myth of Mallarmé,’’ Jacques Derrida in ‘‘Horslivre,’’ Bertrand Marchal in La Religion de Mallarmé.22 I invoke these peripheral matters in order to highlight the strategic value of Bourdieu’s choice of
quotation: if he manages to show that his analytical categories control and
defeat those of Mallarmé, much recent literary theory would follow suit.
Since in the lines immediately preceding the quote Bourdieu emphasized that the insight into the limits of the self-theorization of literature did not
occur until he really read Mallarmé’s text, let us follow the dynamics of his
reading closely, all along keeping in mind the distance from the ‘‘pure reading’’ that Bourdieu must observe in order to maintain the coherence of his
overall argument in the book. To begin with, this passage objectifies the truth
of literature in its modern, disenchanted form. In congruence with the axioms of Hegel’s Aesthetics situating modern art as inaccessible and hence
in need of salvaging (if not salvation), in ‘‘La Musique et les lettres’’ Mallarmé
mediates between these two irreconcilable propositions: on the one hand,
the modern age devours all unreflexive forms of transcendence (au-delà)
such as God, Sovereign, or the alexandrine; but on the other, the need for
transcendence persists inasmuch as the functionality and coherence of the
social body is still entangled, largely by inertia, in these very fictions. Bourtexte de Mallarmé qui exprime bien, quoique de manière obscure, et la vérité objective de
la littérature comme fiction fondée dans la croyance collective, et le droit que nous avons
de sauver, envers et contre toute èspece d’objectivation, le plaisir littéraire:
Nous savons, captifs d’une formule absolue que, certes, n’est que ce qui est.
Incontinent écarter cependant, sous un prétexte, le leurre, accuserait notre inconséquence, niant le plaisir que nous voulons prendre: car cet au-delà en est l’agent,
et le moteur dirais-je si je ne répugnais à opérer, en public, le démontage impie de
la fiction et conséquemment du mécanisme littéraire, pout étaler la pièce principale ou rien. Mais, je vénère comment, par une supercherie, on projette, à quelque
élévation défendue et de foudre! Le conscient manque chez nous de ce qui là-haut
éclate.
A quoi sert cela—
A un jeu.’’
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22. Maurice Blanchot, ‘‘The Myth of Mallarmé,’’ in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 39; Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 57; and Bertrand
Marchal, La Religion de Mallarmé (Paris: José Corti, 1988), 488.
PQ: No specs
for footnote
extract. OK as
set?
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dieu sees this as the fundamental dilemma of the late nineteenth century—
the function of art in the postreligious society—which expresses itself in Mallarmé’s language through an opposition between his desire to save literary
pleasure and the realization that the fiction of transcendence it has as its
principle can no longer be sustained. This means that literary fiction can no
longer be experienced as anything but an artifice covering up a void left by
the withdrawal of the stable institutional structures of production and evaluation. Mallarmé’s reaction to this antinomy of modern art is a double gesture, a sort of parodic dialectic: first, by constructing what Bourdieu names a
‘‘negative theology’’ of literature, Mallarmé acknowledges with great sobriety
the artificial, that is, the functional nature of all transcendences. Far from
being reflections of the metaphysical structure of the world, they are nothing
but expressions of the finite, historically limited symbolic orders. But, argues
Bourdieu, rather than following through on his insight that modern society
reduces literature to an artifact or shared belief, that is, at best, a faint trace
of the archaic symbolic rituals, Mallarmé perversely perpetuates the illusion
that production of literature still constitutes a significant social practice: ‘‘He
cannot resist devoting himself to the pyrrhonic games of verbal pyrotechnics; and this with no other purpose than to produce, for his own pleasure,
the illuminations of verbal fireworks capable of masking by their splendor
the emptiness of the sky in which they burst’’ (RA, 276/454). Like Descartes,
who shielded himself from hyperbolic doubt with the fiction of self-certain
consciousness, Mallarmé, a reader of Discours de la Méthode, seeks refuge
from the ‘‘exquisite crisis’’ of the symbolic economy brought about by industrialization, democratization, and secularization, this holy trinity of the Third
Republic, in the ‘‘aesthetic equivalent of cogito’’: ‘‘yes, literature exists since
I can rejoice in it’’ (RA, 276/454). In Bourdieu’s reading, the second movement of Mallarmé’s dialectical dissolution of the crisis manages to erase the
critical lucidity evinced in the first one: by opting to admire the human faculty
of self-deception, Mallarmé institutes linguistic fetishism, cynical because
it knows it covers up a void, and egoistic because self-serving, as the only
proper response to the withering of the power of art in the prosaic age of
democracy. In sum, to play Mallarmé’s game is equivalent to choosing willful
self-deception over lucidity, fetishism over painful demystification, escapist
pleasure over down-to-earth sobriety, narcissistic satisfaction over the sacrifice exacted by the scientific awareness of the historical genesis of one’s
position. Finally, Mallarmé’s game authorizes the perpetuation of the literary guild through hypocritical obscurantism where candid resignation from
letters is in order.
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The reader should have no trouble discerning the parallels running
between Bourdieu’s reading of L’Éducation sentimentale and ‘‘La Musique
et les lettres.’’ In both cases, we witness the same strategic use of the concept of denegation, the same confidence in the ability of sociological analysis to unveil the ‘‘unbearable’’ truth dissimulated by the literary artifice, the
same paradoxical use of literature as a vanishing mediator that both confirms Bourdieu’s insights and allows itself to be taken hostage by them. But
in both cases, as well as in Bourdieu’s entire epistemology, the triumph of
sociological science over literary art is bought at the price of the regressive
mystification of the latter.
In a manner reminiscent of the repression of 1848 from his commentary on L’Éducation sentimentale, Bourdieu ignores two key statements
made by Mallarmé in the passage he quoted. First, the meaning Mallarmé
gave to the formula he qualified as absolute—‘‘We know, we captives of
an absolute formula, that, of course, there only is what is’’—is never clarified. This ontotautological formula constitutes Mallarmé’s acknowledgment
of the post-metaphysical position of modern consciousness: since ‘‘there is
only what there is,’’ the moderns cannot delude themselves by returns to
legendary origins in the manner of, say, Wagner. In Mallarmé, the salvaging
of art is premised on the acknowledgment of nothingness, not on its cynical dissimulation. This nothingness, a necessary product of modern ontotautology, is not simply absence, impotence, or void as Bourdieu assumes.
Emptied of metaphysical belief in the ontological reality of our thoughts, the
literary mechanism reveals itself, for the first time in history, as an instrument of our pleasure and a principal part of social intercourse. The twilight
of the gods sets the scene for the emancipation of the social from myth,
not regression into a personalized version of it. The democratic age ushers
in the world of generalized fictioning operative in and as economics, politics, media, and aesthetics. This is why Mallarmé claims that it is inconsistent to deny all delusion, to point to the place where hypocritical denegations and cynical self-mystifications will be dispelled by the sober discipline
of the method. Since this type of overcoming of fiction can take place only
in the name of another fiction, such flat-out denial of delusion (‘‘le leurre,’’
also trap or bait), were it serious, would deprive itself of the very means of
its pleasure and fall into the very trap it wants to neutralize. Mallarmé’s text
places the overcoming of the literary by science, this archetypal scene of
The Rules of Art, in the beyond—the knowledge of whose irreality is the very
principle of his version of the modern self-consciousness. From this point
of view, Bourdieu’s reading is peculiarly premodern in its program (since he
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refuses the consequences of the ontotautological formula and assumes his
sociology can free us from its grip) but modern in its practice (Bourdieu’s
contribution as the first sociologist to treat the generalized fictioning as the
‘‘moteur’’ of the social is in no way diminished by these analyses; quite the
contrary). However, it is inconsistently modern, since he continually employs
the very means (to his critical pleasure) he never stops excoriating in others:
means such as ‘‘pure reading’’ evident in his textual montages; outdated
conceptual tools such as ‘‘form,’’ ‘‘content,’’ ‘‘character’’; singularly inappropriate assumptions about the function of representation in modern writing
(he equates representation with objectification, denegation, or straightforward narcissistic gratification).
Second, Bourdieu’s reading fails to take notice of the exclamation
that concludes Mallarmé’s brief exposition of the ‘‘absolute formula’’ of modernity, namely, ‘‘we lack the awareness of what up there explodes.’’ The
structural inconsistency characteristic of the partial understanding of the
centrality of fiction in the postreligious society with which Mallarmé opens
his discussion finds its equivalent in the lack of awareness he evokes at the
end. It is in thinking that one could abolish fiction once and for all, lay bare or
objectify the very mechanism of the social, that religion returns, and thereby
stalls the progress towards the conscious, deliberate, reflexive, and hence
genuinely modern forms of social intercourse (Mallarmé’s lien sociale). In
Mallarmé’s ambitious program, the task of letters is to supplement the lapse
of reflexivity (‘‘we lack the awareness . . .’’) operative in positivist, religious,
or aesthetic overcoming of the central void structuring the experience of the
modern by bringing down to earth, and thereby democratizing, the symbolic
powers of language, which had for centuries staged a superhuman spectacle in the sky above. A literary game (and there is nothing cynical here) is
a means of this reappropriation of the symbolic, since it can already function
as the modality of existence that no longer needs a transcendent authority
in order to derive pleasure or believe in its own reality (this is the source of
Mallarmé’s emphasis on syntax, since the latter represents an immanent
articulation of discourse). The immanence of Mallarmé’s ‘‘fêtes solitaires,’’
which Bourdieu understood as the precious isolation of the aesthete, in fact
forms a prelude to the reorganization of the social that the central nothingness of the modern imposes and invites.
I would like to conclude by suggesting that Mallarmé’s reflections on
the (literary) game, on the one hand, and Flaubert’s writing, on the other,
had such a drastic and ambivalent effect on Bourdieu because they install literature—as Mallarmé’s Lettres, that is, as a generalized economy of Fiction
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encompassing representation both symbolic and literary—in the very place
that Bourdieu’s ‘‘science of the work’’ wishes to claim. More importantly, in
this contested neutral place where Bourdieu wants to see the sobriety of
science lead us to the demystified view of social reality, Mallarmé and Flaubert project the game that would put in question the finality of various cognitive syntheses (moral, aesthetic, scientific, religious). The fact that they do
so without any revelatory or redemptive claim accounts at least in part for
the enigmatic actuality that still adheres to their texts. Responding to this
enigma by means of ‘‘unmasking,’’ at least in case of Bourdieu’s The Rules
of Art, seems only to reinforce it in the end.