Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

CLASSLESS TASTE
It would be perverse not to read Bourdieu’s analysis of social being as an
indictment of a system in which the freedom of some depends conceptually and
practically on the unfreedom of others. The indictment is a radical one—more
radical, indeed, than the responses Bourdieu himself seemed able to imagine,
forms of pressure on the political institutions of the very system whose working
he criticized. For example, he remarked in a dialogue with artist Hans Haacke
that
there are a certain number of conditions for the existence of a culture
with a critical perspective that can only be assured by the state. In
short, we should expect (and even demand) from the state the instruments
of freedom from economic and political powers—that is, from
the state itself. 7
The absurdity of this suggestion is evident. Apart from the continual failure of
schemes for “democratization of the arts” such as those advanced in the United
States by well-meaning foundations and government agencies like the National
Endowment for the Arts, schemes which never succeed in expanding the arts
audience much beyond a well-educated and relatively well-off minority, it is odd
to find such a self-contradictory suggestion by a writer who has analyzed the
functions of the “state nobility” within the apparatus of domination.
But Bourdieu’s own theory explains the limitations their social position places
on the capacity of intellectuals to draw the furthest consequences of their own
ideas. Exercise of their power as the possessors of “cultural capital”—socially
legitimated knowledge, degrees, institutional connections, mastery of certain jargons,
etc. yielding “a profit in distinction” (p. 228)—requires their maintenance
of belief both in the autonomy of their field of activity and in their unique fitness
to exercise it. Despite what one can fairly call Bourdieu’s heroic attempts to
overcome the social blindspots inherent in his own social position, even he was
unable to imagine a politics born outside of the existing political languages and
institutions, in which a professional thinker like himself might play a relatively
minor role—a politics ultimately centered not on the transformation of the state
but on its abolition. 8
It is hard today for anyone to imagine a politics capable of reorganizing present-day
society on a sufficiently radical level to do justice to Bourdieu’s
indictment. But it is not impossible, and the alternative, the unbounded continuation
of the present order of exploitation, war, and ecological destruction, is
both unlikely and frightful to contemplate. If we make the effort to imagine a
7 P. Bourdieu and H. Haacke, Free Exchange (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 71–2.
8 For a brief discussion of the limits of Bourdieu’s theory of class, see P. Mattick, “Class, capital
and crisis,” in Martha Campbell and Geert Reuten (eds), The Culmination of Capital: Essays on
Volume III of Marx’s Capital (London: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 31 ff.
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