Angermüller, Derrida vs. Bourdieu

In the following, I will present a brief history of the rise and the decline of deconstructionist criticism in America. I argue that the reasons for its success over the New Critical tradition have turned out to be the grains for its own deconstruction in the late 1980s. In analyzing the sociopolitical and institutional aspects of deconstruction, I try to show why deconstructionists are more and more concerned with the criticism of society than with the criticism of literature. Yet what was initially a liberation for its practitioners has by now caused problems many literary critics and philosophers can no longer solve: the transformation of a ‘linguistic’ into a ‘political’ turn. Although it is true that the practice of immanent criticism (‘close reading’) was only partially accepted by deconstructionists (e.g. ‘free play’ deconstruction), in many cases they could not come to terms with the growing need to theorize sociopolitical aspects of the text. Using Bourdieu’s idea of the autonomization of the field of intellectual production I suggest that the crisis of deconstruction is a result of its self-generated theoretical implications and institutional effects.

In contemporary American criticism, ‘power’, ‘class’, and ‘history’ have become key words for the interpretation of literature. After two decades of deconstructive criticism, social and political questions have invaded the text. However, those who are the principal experts of how to deal with texts, i.e. philosophers and literary critics, are not necessarily the principal experts of social contexts. For this reason, Pierre Bourdieu’s approach has been taken up by some American critics as a way out of this impasse. Focusing on the social conditions of cultural production, he attempts to substitute the structuralist language model (e.g. deconstruction) by a sociological structuralism and avoid the constraints of a narrow conception of the text. Yet even though brilliantly elucidating the relationship between style and power, irony and reality, Bourdieu has not been responsive to the poststructuralist challenge to the representation of ‘reality’. An analysis of his reading of Flaubert‘s L‘éducation sentimentale reveals an unacknowledged paradox in Bourdieu. His analysis of the very mechanisms and principles producing meaning and ‘writing’ in fictional works collide with his idea of a ‘social reality as such’. I conclude that the denial of the ‘written’ raises indeed serious doubts as to the possibilities of meaningful statements that pretend to emanate directly from an alleged reality ‘out there’. After all, taking seriously the ‘political’ turn does not have to mean doing without the ‘linguistic turn’.

The history of Derrida’s reception in the United States is a textbook example of how a new theory fulfills the needs of an intellectual community at a time when an old paradigm is suddenly perceived as a dead end. In the 1970s, his reflections on the nature of the sign sounded the death knell for the New Critical paradigm and triggered a revolution especially in departments of English, French, and Comparative Literature. This intellectual reversal was based on a fairly simple idea: that meaning exclusively derives from the relations and differences between the signifiers, and not from signifieds, positive terms, or transcendental truths. Meaning comes right from within the system, the relations and differences of which, not some given ‘essence,’ produce its meaning. In Jameson’s words: ”The originality of Structuralism lies in its insistence on the signifier” (1971: 111). The structuralist idea of difference makes the text turn ‘flat.’

Derrida pits the referential aspect of the sign against the differential production of its meaning, with the idea of difference clearly winning. Both ideas - the privileged nature of the signified over the signifier and the arbitrary character of its meaning - clearly existed in Saussure’s structuralist linguistics. Derrida clarifies this apparent contradiction in Saussure by showing that the logocentrist layer of Saussure’s theory (the privilege of the signified) is ”a contradiction in Saussure’s scientific project” (1872: 71) and should be done away with. Since the meaning of a signifier is but the product of the difference with what it is not, the signified cannot claim any transcendental self-contained truth. Instead of being the origin (an externally constituted ’essence’) of the text, the signified is a product, the logical result of the différance of the signifiers. As a consequence, the privilege of the signified over the signifier turns out to be artificial; truth, reality, authorship, in short: all philosophy ”is essentially written” (Culler 1993: 48).

Many American critics of the 70s found this an appealing idea since they no longer had to indulge ”in the adulation of the author” (Spivak 1974: lxxiv). Barthes’s metaphor of the ‘death of the author’ swiftly came to be accepted as the programmatic statement of a new generation of critics unwilling to maintain the privileged role of the Cartesian subject. At the same time, the critique of humanist concepts such as ‘author’, ‘intent,’ and ‘consciousness’ was accompanied by a rigorous reconceptualization of the referential-transcendental reality the text had (supposedly) referred to. The text became a battlefield where the referents (‘reality’) and the rhetorical means of their ‘expression’ (such as ‘tropes’, ‘style’, ‘writing’) are in a constant struggle. The crisis of realism dovetailed with the end of the humanist project (cf. Barthes 1970) and paved the way for a rigorous reading practice highlighting the ”tension between rhetoric and logic, between what it [the text] manifestly means to say and what it is nonetheless constrained to mean .” (Norris 1987: 19).

During the 1970s, deconstruction replaced New Criticism and, in its aftermath, became the dominant paradigm of critical theory in the United States. To many critics at that time, New Criticism represented almost perfectly a traditional mode of criticism, a ‘metaphysics’ of meaning, ”a detour to truth” as one of Derrida’s translators put it (Spivak 1974: lxxiv). The New Critical agenda was founded upon two basic tenets that characterized it as a rearguard project in the early 70s. Firstly, for New Critics poems and novels were sacrosanct objects, never to be paraphrased and strictly distinct from the language of the critics. Poems and novels, having a moral value in their own right, demanded a proper respect that New Critics were eager to accept. Secondly, many New Critics were committed to a (mostly Christian) religious metaphysics. They believed that poetry, an organic whole, helped discover the moral universe hidden behind the structure of poetical language. As Norris remarks, the New Critical tradition was a ”whole metaphysics of language, where poetic and religious claims to truth are bound up together” (1982: 14).

This situation resembles that of late 19 ^th century French literary production where Baudelaire’s concept of L’art pour l’art shook up a generation of writers that ”had been locked into the question of the relations between art and reality, between art and morals” (Bourdieu 1992: 160). After the Second World War, the New Critics had become the representatives of the union of art, morals, and ‘reality’. From the 70s on, however, many American critics eagerly embraced Derrida’s dictum ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ (there is no ‘outside-text’, there is nothing outside the text) as a welcome invitation to dispense with New Criticism’s promulgation of American mainstream values. The New Critical position had become untenable for most of the younger generation. Attempts to subjugate criticism under any logic incompatible with its own began to be deemed as the pernicious influences of the lingering effects of ‘Western metaphysics.’ Derrida’s formula, by contrast, seemed to endorse a style of writing where the text became a gay field of innovation and experimentation in its own right. Critical activity was to be devoid of any immediate moral message and characterized by the ‘free play’ of its meanings and signifiers.

For some American critics Derrida’s formula became a welcome rationale for their intellectual activity to stop short of what happens beyond the pages of the books. ‘Free play’ deconstruction was hardly occupied with thorough analyses of the history and the social context of the literary text. In the early 1970s, Geoffrey Hartman, for instance, felt that an ”inferiority complex vis-à-vis art” that he associated with the New Critical agenda had to be overcome (cited in Norris 1982: 92). The solution for critics like him, was ”to throw off his ‘inferiority complex’ and enter wholeheartedly [...] into the dance of meaning” (ibid.). Accordingly, some critics felt that deconstruction ‘on the wild side’ (Norris) turned into what was soon rather condescendingly called ‘New new criticism.’

In all these cases, the structuralist language model is a means to break down the strict distinction between the inside (‘books’) and the outside (‘reality’). In this sense, ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ does not deny the existence of a reality beyond a book but, rather, postulates that reality, too, is (structured like) a sign: ”The system of the sign does not have any outside" (Derrida 1967: 332). The ‘outside’ (‘reality‘) becomes an ‘inside’ (‘reality, too, is written’), a postulate that explicitly pushed the critics beyond the small world of an academic library at Yale or Columbia and the constraints of narrow disciplinary boundaries.

What unified ‘free play’ and post-Marxist deconstruction [2] was a model according to which the signifier is no longer dependent on the signified. For post-Marxists as well as for ‘free play’ deconstructionists the ‘outside’ is not a substantive self-contained exteriority. They are engaged ”in something other than traditional humanistic interpretation” (Culler 1982: 20). In all the cases of structuralist [3] thought, the totality is seen as a system of signifiers with no positive terms: ”[T]he priority of the language model is maintained” (Jameson 1971: 112).

So in my view it is true that deconstructionists reject a clear privilege of reality over fiction because reality is not less ‘textual’ than fiction is, be the ‘text’ written or not. But probably even for the most zealous deconstructionists, meaning does not fall victim to the critic’s writing. Nor is reality generally seen as some evil ideology that has to be swiftly done away with in order to allow the unrestrained license of critical activity. Rather, criticism gave up the claim to immediately translate social reality and its value universe into textual form. Its task is no longer to unveil a hidden meaning of a poem or a novel, a meaning which could only represent the ”common sense and shared values” (Culler 1982: 19). Literature in the age of deconstruction ceases to be the sublime embodiment of some inherent moral superiority.

The crucial point of this development was to liberate one type of authors - literary critics - from the privilege of another type of authors - the ‘speaking subject’ (poets and writers) literary critics were writing about. The principal effect (or cause, depending on one’s point of view) of this magic liberation of the signifier from the signified was the liberation of the deconstructive critics from their literary and social objects. In fact, deconstruction has turned out to be a smart move to justify that the writing of literary critics is no less real or relevant than the texts to be ‘interpreted’. The ‘real’ meaning is no less a matter of the critics’ books than of the authors’ books or than - horribile dictu - of ‘reality’ itself. [4]

Positing the almighty critic has had the significant side effect that s/he managed to escape a society increasingly dominated by neo-conservative, fundamentalist or even reactionary tendencies. In the 1980s American critics in the deconstructionist mould were no longer bound by the constraints imposed by other ‘speaking subjects,’ by any universal truths, or, in short, by the world beyond their intellectual community. Deconstructionists began to defend ”the critic’s freedom to adopt a charged and ‘answerable’ style of his own in order to counter the weight of received opinion” (Norris 1982: 16).

This increasing distance from the values of the common sense correlated with deconstruction’s institutionalization and autonomization within the academic field. Since deconstruction, especially in the de Manian version (i.e. ”theory”), claimed to be a highly rigorous, technical and reproducible operation, it needed teaching and discipleship, which could only be guaranteed by autonomous institutional structures and mechanisms of reproduction following their own logic. Thus the liberating experience of the deconstructionist critic has to be seen against the backdrop of the increasing autonomization of the field of literary theory – especially in its deconstructionist mould - both vis-à-vis the field of literature and the social space as a whole. Not only does deconstruction claim the intellectual autonomy of the critic from, say, ‘family values,’ gradually it has become the institutionalized expression of a field with its own logic and syllabus: ”any determination of the political function of the [deconstructionist] literary critic, either from the left or from the right, is incompatible with the institutional autonomy of criticism” (Guillory 1993: 247).

Controlling the texts to be deconstructed rather than being controlled by these texts, the autonomous Derridean critic suddenly realized that the canon was dominated by a ‘metaphysics of presence’ and that even the canon itself may be an ideology crying for deconstruction. The critics had to reread Milton, Dickens and the classical tradition to dig up and eradicate the logo/phono/phallogocentric ruses of the Western tradition. This was certainly enough work for a couple of years, but after a while deconstructionists realized that it was not only Milton and Dickens who had succumbed to the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and phallocentrism. Toward the late 80s, the astonished critic founds him/herself in a whole society waiting to be deconstructed. It was no longer a problem of a couple of great books. As Guillory remarks, ”the thematization of the political always falls short of satisfying political demand just by being confined to the literary syllabus” (1993: 237). Western tradition and society needed to be addressed in their own right.

While the wave of deconstruction was still sweeping across the American continent, Derrida began to articulate the implications of a ‘something’ beyond the classical philosophers he had been busy deconstructing. Implicitly confirming Guillory’s line of reasoning, Derrida says about deconstruction’s institutional ramifications: ”the necessity of deconstruction [...] did not primarily concern philosophical contents, themes or theses, philosophemes, poems, theologemes, ideologemes, but, above all and unseparably, signifying frames, institutional structures, pedagogical norms or rhetoric, the possibility of law, of authority, of evaluation of representation in its own market” (Derrida 1990: 452). Derrida recognizes that the claim for institutional autonomy is an essential condition for deconstruction to ‘keep on rollin.’’ Since it attempts to dispense with ‘authorial intent’, the ‘common sense’, or ‘Western tradition,’ deconstruction is hostile to all interventions from without the intellectual community. In a way, deconstruction is the attempt to constitute an autonomous mode of intellectual activity, free of the constraints of religion, state, and market. Deconstruction is intrinsically bound up with the institutional conditions of its autonomy and rejects all forms of external (‘mainstream’) influence upon its own practice.

In a Bourdieuean perspective, deconstruction is the theoretical form of a sociohistorical configuration where intellectuals increasingly have to draw the legitimacy of their works from the recognition by their direct peers. With respect to late 19 ^th century literature, Bourdieu called such a development the emergence of a ‘restricted mode of cultural production’ that is always limited to a small community of ‘cultural capitalists’. A restricted cultural activity is high in legitimacy, but almost always low in commercial success (Bourdieu 1992: 165ff.).

From the early 70s on, changing relations between literary critics and the non-academic American mainstream triggered such a redefinition of the literary critic’s attitude toward his or her peers, objects, environments. From then on, the critic’s stance has been subjected to an ever radicalizing logic of distinction against bourgeois and Christian values. Nowadays, legitimate literary criticism in America requires (literary) intellectuals devoted to nothing but the logic of their own field. Too close relations with representatives of other fields (e.g. politicians, church leaders, capitalists) or big commercial success are suspicious because they call into question the intellectual’s independence and devotion. Accordingly, deconstruction is restricted to a small scholarly community and mainly done for its own sake; it is the theoretical form of an increasingly autonomous field both on an institutional and a theoretical level.

The increasing distance of Derridean intellectuals from the social mainstream has gone hand in hand with an obligation to be non-conformist or even ‘anti-bourgeois’. The necessity to highlight the growing autonomy of the literary field encourages literary critics to adopt the attitude of an intellectuel engagé . The increasing interest in distinctly political topics serves to underline the distinction of the practice of literature as an autonomous activity. This distancing between the politically committed intellectual and his/her ‘society’ seems to be turning literary criticism more and more into a social criticism. The prominence of social and political questions in the American discourse guarantees the ‘independence’ of the field of intellectual production against church, market, and state.

Consequently, from the mid 1980s on, Derrida as well as some of his American commentators have attempted to give deconstruction a ‘political touch’ by discussing the repressed other (e.g. the immigrant), violence, the question of human rights and so forth. From the early 90s on, Derrida’s books are preoccupied with downright social and political problems to a considerable extent (e.g. Derrida 1994, 1997) although it seems unlikely that the impact of this turn will be similar to that of Grammatology. The aporia of deconstruction is that political practice is ‘necessary, but impossible’. A basic tenet of deconstruction was that even despite Nietzsche’s, Heidegger’s, and maybe even Derrida’s powerful efforts to ‘go beyond metaphysics’ ”the destruction of metaphysics remains within metaphysics” (Derrida 1982: 48). Deconstruction defines language as a (more or less) ‘total’ ideology (especially in Great Britain with Althusser’s lingering influence) and tradition as a somehow fundamentally flawed social ‘something’ (following the Heidegger revival in the United States). Even the most rigorous deconstructionists cannot be too optimistic to ever get rid of the shackles of metaphysics as long as they remain within the limits of the text. That is why the ‘political turn’ has marked the beginning crisis of deconstruction – at least in its narrow version (‘free play’). In the long run, sticking too narrowly to the text means remaining within the gloomy hopeless state called metaphysics without ever going beyond: (social) criticism becomes ”necessary, but impossible”.

Yet, at a time when critics are more and more obliged to be engaged in social and political problems, when intellectuals are increasingly expected to offer concrete political analysis and solutions, saying ‘it’s the text!’ indeed appears a little defensive. Accordingly, critics have recognized an ”apparent detachment of much theory [i.e. deconstruction, J.A.] from overtly political question” (Guillory 1993: 176). The text becomes too restraining a category, a ‘prison house of language’ (Jameson); the social ‘something’ cries out for a more thorough treatment. A result of Derrida’s reception in the American literary discourse has been that what is finally perceived to be missing is not ‘close reading’ but social practice. The ironical consequence of the industrialization of deconstruction was that its theoretical implications led to its deconstruction in political terms. Thus to an increasing number of critics, a paradigm once again looks like a dead end: after the ‘linguistic turn’ (Rorty) the ‘political turn.’

Asserting the self-contained character of the text had a funny consequence: by rejecting the privilege of the transcendental signified, the autonomy that the Derridean vanguard critics - both ‘on the wild side’ and post-Marxists - claimed has led them to recognize that the very world, and yes, society, was metaphysical to its roots and thus in need of ‘sociological treatment’. From „there is nothing outside the text” to ”where’s the political?” [5] From the early 1990s on, many literary critics who started out as New New Criticism deconstructionists have become feminist, post-Marxist, or New historicist critics working on the problems of power, social change, and inequality. Yet the problem of many literary critics, it seems, is that they are not really experts of power and social change but rather experts of Milton and Dickens.

So it is time to see what an expert of the social says about the question of the text. The theory of Pierre Bourdieu has lately been received by many American literary critics as one of the most interesting approaches concerned with the problem of text and power (cf. Guillory 1993). [6] In the second part of this paper I explore what Bourdieu may contribute to the problems raised in the context of the decline of deconstruction. Central to the following discussion of his approach is the relation between the author’s literary form (Flaubert’s ‘ironical style’) and the referent (‘the real’) or, in more general words, the relation between ‘writing’ and the representation of ‘reality’. In the course of this paper it will become clear that, according to Bourdieu, in fiction (e.g. Flaubert) style and the real are always inextricably bound up with each other, whereas in sociology (Bourdieu) the representation of reality does not need to have recourse to the workings of writing.

Bourdieu’s discussion of Flaubert’s realism presupposes structuralist principles to explain the relation between text and (sociopolitical) context. Yet unlike structuralist linguists he starts out with the notion of fields constituted by the actors’ struggles for distinction. According to Bourdieu, the realist paradigm is a consequence of structural changes in the constitution of the field of late 19 ^th century French literature. The emerging realist novel is marked by seemingly minor distinctions in style, plot, and object that are crucial in order to understand its success in the field. Bourdieu’s reading of L’Éducation sentimentale by Gustave Flaubert (1965 [1869]) brilliantly explains the characteristics of Flaubert’s irony, style, and fiction by going back to the author’s need for distinction from the textual forms of the preceding generation. Reality as faithfully depicted as possible became a major subject for literary authors striving for legitimate forms of intellectual practice. Bourdieu (1992) is fascinated by the project of the realists because they want to give a most accurate picture of reality by using a most fictional textual form: the novel. According to him, the effect of the real created by these authors is the product of sophisticated stylistical skills playing with the expectations of the reader’s ‘common sense’. Flaubert has an excellent command of the ‘common sense’ and thus of the tropes and rhetorical means by which fiction is rendered ‘real’. Therefore, to be a good realist he has to be an excellent stylist as well. Bourdieu’s theory, however, avoids relying on such stylistical ‘tricks’. His theory is to deal with nothing but unmediated reality.

L’éducation sentimentale, like Madame Bovary , caused a great deal of controversy, even hostility, among Flaubert’s contemporaries. In 1857, Flaubert had had to go through a trial on the occasion of the publication of Madame Bovary. This novel had been deemed ”an atrocity against the moral and religious public” (see Flaubert 1965: 464 [dossier]). But after having been acquitted of the charges, he became one of the most influential writers of his time. Today, to understand why Flaubert’s work was so scandalous at that time it is necessary to carefully place contents and form of the novel in the historical context of its production.

1) As to the contents of the novel , the plot is centered around Frédéric, a young bohème prosperous enough to live off his fortune in Paris in the time before and after the revolution of 1848. Frédéric spends most of his time having affairs with women from diverse backgrounds, such as the artistic, the bourgeois, and the provincial milieu. The most characteristic feature of the figures are their mediocrity; the distinctive feature of the plot is its slowness. Frédéric never ceases to court one or several mistresses and due to his idleness experiences a gradual decline of his material situation. He is torn between the artistic and the bourgeois world and succeeds in neither of them. Frédéric, who is initially destined to become a high civil servant or entrepreneur qua his privileged origin, finally fails in his professional ambitions as well in his romantic plans. The tension that he epitomizes between the artistic-intellectual bohème and the grand monde remains unresolved.

What is striking is Flaubert’s minute and sophisticated description of this long non-event. He gives an extremely accurate representation of the time and its figures, who were taken from the ‘real life’ (M. de Camp in Flaubert 1965: 469 [dossier]). The description of seemingly minor details, such as the way of speaking, political background events, the artistic currents of the time, were accompanied by ”an accumulation of notes and papers”, interviews and thorough research (ibid.). In terms of his obsession with reality, he is a full-blown realist.

2) The formal aspect of the Flaubertian novel, his style, is perhaps what it is most famous for. As a result of an unusual amount of energy, the Flaubertian style is clear and precise, economically producing the desired effects. [7] The concise and skillful articulation of his observations, carefully placed between the actually spoken words of the figures, give a rich and lively touch to the text. Through these interventions, Flaubert skillfully evokes powerful overtones, which permits the impression of ‘actually being there’. This ‘effect of the real’ passes through these brief remarks; they seem to move the text close to the world presented.

Yet, although presenting reality as faithfully and detailed as possible, the author is never totally absent. This demi-presence can be seen in Flaubert’s frequent usage of the style indirect libre .[8] The distinction between spoken truth and written commentary breaks down; the author invades the words of his figures. The spoken words are taken out of their presentistic context and become written signifiers. Thus the style indirect libre could be compared to an alienation effect: The author deprives the words of their spoken character and inserts a distance between the words and the actual situation where they were uttered. In many cases, the effect of this technique is irony.

Given the revolutionary situation, where workers vigorously tried to assert their rights, the professor’s demand seems out of place, involuntarily ironical. This example illustrates that even in the case of highly emotionalized and politicized situations like the revolution of 1848 Flaubert is neither positively nor negatively attached to the universe he depicts. In Bourdieu’s words (1992: 139), his work is marked by ”a sort of dissonance, through which the ironical distance comes back in at every moment”. Flaubert’s attitude is always that of a critical observer who describes every detail he perceives without ever emotionally committing himself to this world. Flaubert’s irony results from this indifference towards the given universe of his society: The Flaubertian notion ”demands an attitude of impassibility, of indifference and of detachment, even of cynical nonchalance” (Bourdieu: 1992: 161). In mid 19 ^th century France, this apparent detachment was considered ‘cynical’ and ‘outrageous’ because the author was expected to be the harbinger of the values and morals of his society. Flaubert broke with this tradition and triggered a revolution that redefined both writing as form and literature as field.

In a nutshell, Flaubert is both close and remote from the reality he presents. He is close to reality because he renders it with an unprecedented even obsessional precision. But he is also remote because he, unlike his predecessors, does not identify himself with the point of view or the values of a figure or a group. This notion of realism means giving a picture of reality ‘as it is’ without emotional attachment. At the same time Flaubert’s realism crucially hinges on his rich and powerful style. Constantly on the brink of irony, this writing, without which his realism would be bloodless, even ‘unreal’, never lets the truth of the ‘spoken’ be fully in command. Irony through indifference: a writing where realism and irony enter a happy union.

Bourdieu suggests that Flaubert’s realism (‘contents’) is an effect of his style (‘form’). In other words, his analysis of Flaubert comes to the conclusion that the depiction of reality is always bound up with its textual form. In Flaubert’s realism, irony is what marks the author’s presence and thus the presence of his writing. The real is not just there; it is created as an effect of the style, through the author’s irony, in the act of reading and writing. Only by mutually constituting each other do contents and form create a meaningful representation of reality. At the end of this paper, I will show that Bourdieu’s position is different insofar as his sociological realism rejects form, writing, style, and irony. According to Bourdieu, reality can be rendered ‘as it is’.

Bourdieu’s point is that the reasons for this style and Flaubert’s success are not to be sought in the personal brilliance of the author but, instead, in the conditions of the intellectual production at that time. Bourdieu gives historical explanations of the battles and relations dominating and making possible the field of art and literature. This field is structured according to the forms of capital(s) of their carriers; there is always a -- real or potential -- conflict between the unequal participants of the game. On one hand, those who occupied a powerful institutional position (e.g. in L’Académie française or the French state) or who had considerable prestige and/or commercial success were the most likely to produce and reproduce the rules of the literary ‘game.’ On the other hand, there was an increasing reservoir of mostly obscure and young aspiring writers who by the lack of one or several forms of capital never succeeded in attaining the recognition and success they were striving for.

Bourdieu suggests that as a consequence of his social background, Flaubert’s position was highly privileged in both economic and cultural capital (1992: 124f). This ‘double bind’ of his real social position is the reason for the apparent indifference expressed in his novels. The irony of his style is a sublime expression of his position in between the economic and the intellectual. His objectively independent position enabled him to observe the social life surrounding him with distance and aloofness, an attitude that helped initiate a revolution in the field of literary production of his time. No longer did the writers consider themselves as the carriers of a moral message. Instead, they soon defined writing as a L’art pour l’art , i.e. as independent of any moral meaning or social commitment (cf. Baudelaire).

This turn toward the absolute has to be seen against the backdrop of the social changes in the field of intellectual production from the mid 19th century on. Due to the alphabetization of large parts of the population, an increasing number of young intellectuals came to Paris trying to make their living as writers or artists. Also, there were more and more mostly minor positions available where this proletarian intelligentsia could take advantage of their skills, e.g. journalists. Their increasing number forced the dominant writers of the field to seek their legitimation from their more immediate peers, which tended to be a small circle of highly knowledgeable insiders. High institutional positions, broad popularity or sweeping commercial successes were no longer sufficient to guarantee the writer’s cultural capital, that is the recognition by the other participants of the ‘game.’ At some time in the 1860s and 1870s the redefinition of the intellectual’s role brought about the restricted mode of cultural production, where commercial success was low but the profit of cultural capital high. The structural change of the field of literary production went hand in hand with the necessity of the artist’s total devotion to a pure, detached art for art’s sake.

With the field of cultural production ceasing to obey to general markets or the institutional logic of the state, legitimate cultural practice of the artist could no longer be attached to anything beyond the logic of his/her own restricted field. Flaubert’s ironical realism is one of the first crucial expressions of the restricted mode of production brought about by the intellectual’s autonomization. From the turn of the century on, the emergence of the restricted production of the devoted artists paved the way towards the total artistic autonomy of the modernist vanguard artist.

Bourdieu admires Flaubert’s style for his skillful ability to create the effect of the real. This effect ‘works’ because the reader as well as the writer applies common schemes of presuppositions and constructions for the generation of meaningful interpretations. According to Bourdieu, for an author to be understood by a reader it is necessary that both believe that the ‘game’ played in the field -- be it in the ordinary world, in literature or in science -- is worth it, has to be taken seriously by the actors. To support this argument, Bourdieu cites the example of Durkheim’s „logical conformism” (1992: 452), the basic agreement between the actors on the fundamental schemes of perception, without which there would be no meaning. The more or less universal agreement on these schemes is fundamental to the belief ( croyance) of the reality of the world, and, thus, to meaning in general. It is the fundamental belief of the participants of the ”games of society” in the reality of the game, ”a fundamental illusio, a belief in the reality of the world” (1992: 456) which is the origin of all meaningfulness. For meaning to be possible, there has to be a ”doxic experience of the common which a successful socialization provides. ” Without such a fundamental socialization, the „incorporation of shared structures” and the basic condition for the production of meaning would be missing. The actor would be unable to take these games seriously and could not enter the ”most real games of society, the world of the common sense.” (1992: 456). The incorporation enables the actor to structure everyday life, generate certain expectations and reduce the complexity of his/her world whenever interpretation is needed.

Flaubert has an excellent command of the underlying incorporated structures of the shared common sense. He skillfully plays with the reader’s anticipations, which gives his fiction its realistic touch. This magic reading experience, which relies exclusively on concrete and singular events, is possible because reader and writer have incorporated the same or similar meaning-generating schemes of perception. Reader and writer are united by a „ consensus on the sense of the world ” (1992: 457). This ‘common sense,’ like the habitus an incorporated structure, is what generates certain expectations within the reader which are consciously created by Flaubert. When he uses well known stereotypes, for instance, he makes the reader think to be on familiar territory but soon these anticipations are frustrated. Thus, in fact, Flaubert skillfully avoids entering the game of widely shared illusions. It is this sobering effect which creates Flaubert’s irony. By disappointing the anticipations of the common sense, Flaubert highlights its most general ideologies and ”makes [a new vision] pass from the unconscious to the conscious” (Marcel Proust in Flaubert 1965: 476 [dossier]). This half serious play is what makes his fiction „more real than what is immediately given to the senses” (Bourdieu 1992: 157). And it is this fundamental sobriety, irony, and detachment from the ordinary games of social life that made Flaubert’s work scandalous for his contemporaries and appealing for Bourdieu.

Yet, in the case of Flaubert, Bourdieu never speaks of reality but always of le réel (the real), or the effect of the real. According to Bourdieu’s terminology, the real is the reality of the fictional that has recourse to concrete histories and singular events. Since the functioning of the ‘effect of the real’ depends on the meaning-generating structure of shared schemes of perception, the fictional representation of reality is ultimately limited by the common sense: „This suggestive, allusive, elliptical form is what makes [...] the literary text deliver the structure, but by covering and stealing it from sight [mais en la voilant et en la volant au regard]” (1992: 458). The writer only creates the effect of the real; he does not have any scientific grasp of the objective social reality.

Thus Bourdieu makes a very clear distinction between a fictional and a scientific representation of reality. To say something about the sociologist’s Reality, it is necessary to be scientific, to objectively present the things, and not to have recourse to the singular event and a real that is merely the effect of latent structures of the common sense. Unlike the literary author, the sociologist is able to describe Reality objectively because s/he has a scientific grasp of the structure and history of the field. Literature, by contrast, is always caught in the ‘games’ that work only because they are taken seriously by the actors. Flaubert skillfully plays with the expectations of the common sense and never does without them. Despite all his precision and ironical realism, Bourdieu says, Flaubert lacks the sociological means to say anything objective about this reality. For a statement to be scientific, reality has to be represented by representative samples [ces échantillons représentatifs et représentationnels] ”that exemplify very concretely, like the piece of a tissue, the whole part” (1992: 458). Reality has to be measured, quantified, and objectified. Ultimately, only the sociologist is able to perform this task and „say the things as they are, without euphemisms, without demand to be taken seriously” (1992: 458).

Bourdieu wants to render ‘the things as they are’ and ‘without demand to be taken seriously’ since a scientific representation of Reality must not take recourse to the ‘games of society,’ to ‘fundamental beliefs’ ( croyance fondamentale ), or to the ‘common sense’. Scientific representations do without Durkheim’s ‘logical conformism’ because the latter is nothing more than a fundamental version of the common sense. But if Durkheim’s ‘logical conformism’ is not necessary, what would the ‘things as they are’ mean? How would Reality make sense then? If meaning is constituted by the shared expectations of the ‘players’, how would Bourdieu be able to give an account of Reality that would not go back to a fundamental ‘belief’? How would the author -- no matter whether scientific or literary -- sidestep the shared structures of common perception and immediately grasp Reality as such?

It may be true that Bourdieu cannot claim a personal rendezvous with Reality but at least he is confidently waiting for a date to be fixed. The high priest of Reality -- the sociologist -- must protect the holy Truth from entering the play of the written. Ironically, this orthodoxy has been called into question by a Jesuit, Michel de Certeau, who considers Bourdieu’s theory -- in stark contrast to his actual empirical research -- „mystical”, ”aggressive” and a „fetish” because of its ”totalizing” tendency (de Certeau 1990: 94, 96). The contradiction between subtle analysis and ‘theory’ seems equally at work in the discussion of Flaubert, where Bourdieu says that the meaning of the ‘real’ is produced by the application of a certain writing, a style, on the basis of common schemes of perception (Durkheim’s ‘logical conformism’). Yet Bourdieu’s theory claims that Reality, unlike ‘the effect of the real,’ comes without the trace of the written: ‘things as they are.’ It seems that Culler’s remark on the problems of philosophy should equally hold true for Bourdieu‘s theory: ”Philosophers write, but they do not think that philosophy ought to be writing” (1982: 89). A reading ‘taking seriously’ Bourdieu’s actual writing reveals the paradox that Reality has to renounce the ‘demand to be taken seriously’ by his readers in order to be scientific. He cannot but not take seriously the results of his own analysis! Indeed, Bourdieu rejects to take the notorious games for recognition by Parisian philosophers too seriously and thus unveils the socially constructed character of their legitimacy. When it comes to his own project, however, Bourdieu tries to prevent his theory from turning back on itself, sc. that meaning, the ‘real’, is always -- be it in fictional realism, be it in sociological realism -- produced by a differential form (‘writing’, ‘style’), the structure of which always has to be accepted by both reader and writer to generate the desired meaning. For what would Reality mean if it were in contradiction to common interpretive bases for lack of ‘seriousness’? ‘Nonsense-Reality’? This paradox is the unacknowledged irony of Bourdieu’s admirable analysis of late 19 ^th century French literature. What Bourdieu’s theory manifestly means is countered by what he is nevertheless forced to say: that there is no referential content without a textual form. Reality cannot but be represented through writing: a meaningful reality is never just there, but always produced as an ever differential form, as writing.

[2] Cf. Culler’s distinction of two strands of deconstruction, which is very close to mine: ”a structuralism like Barthes’s, Todorov’s, or Genette’s, that remains preeminently literary in its references” and ”psychoanalytical, Marxist, philosophical, or anthropological theory” (1982: 20). The first brand of structuralism is sometimes accused of formalism but at least in the case of Barthes this seems doubtful. Formalism, however, sometimes seems to hold true in the case of largely philosophical approaches, like Beardsworth’s (1996).

[6] Following the publication of L’esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1972) and La distinction (1979) Bourdieu’s theory had been the object of intense scholarly discussion in the 70s and 80s. However, the postmodern turn in American anthropology from the early 80s on and the general hostility towards theory among American mainstream (i.e. positivist) sociologists were strong obstacles for Bourdieu’s theory to become a major paradigm in the intellectual discourse in the US. Only through his reception by literary critics in the mid 1990s (cf. Bourdieu 1992, transl. in 1996) did it find entrance into the broader intellectual debate. It is its status as a literary approach, not as a sociological one, that currently underlies the success of Bourdieu’s theory in the US.

Derrida vs. Bourdieu: Sociologizing Deconstruction, Deconstructing the Social