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SOCIOLOGIES OF ARTISTIC EMANCIPATION
Institutional configurations of critique in Bourdieu and Boltanski
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MASTER’S THESIS Hannah Lindo 6081509 Cover image : Thomas Hirschhorn, Flamme Eternelle (Palais de Tokyo, 2014)
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Table of Contents 1. The historicity of the aesthetic disposition in Bourdieu; a few key concepts....................5Introduction....................................................................................................................................5TherootsofBourdieu’sframework.................................................................................................5HabitusandField.............................................................................................................................7Culturalcapital,symboliccapital,dominantanddominatedpoles..................................................8Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................9
2. The origins of art for art’s sake............................................................................................11Introduction..................................................................................................................................11Theanalysisoftheworkofart......................................................................................................11Thebirthoftheliteraryfieldasarealmofpracticeassertingitsownlogicin19thcenturyFrance12“Morphologicalchanges”andartsofliving...................................................................................14Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................19
3. BOLTANSKI’S CONCEPTION OF CRITIQUE: A RETURN TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF INSTITUTIONS......21Introduction..................................................................................................................................21OnCritique....................................................................................................................................23Criticalsociologyversuspragmaticsociology.................................................................................23Theinstitution...............................................................................................................................26Thefragilityofinstitutionsandtheoccurrenceofcritique.............................................................28Tests.............................................................................................................................................31Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................32
4. THE ROLE OF CRITIQUE IN THE EVOLUTION OF CAPITALISM AND THE APPROPRIATION OF ARTISTIC ATTITUDES......................................................................................................................34INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................................34Themultiplefacesofcapitalism....................................................................................................35Theincompatibilityoftheartisticandsocialcritique.....................................................................37Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................39
5. GENERAL CONCLUSION.............................................................................................................40
BIBLIOGRAPHY.............................................................................................................................44
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General introduction The crisis and crises of art, criticism and even art criticism have been discussed in artistic,
academic, and public circles so extensively that they have become a near cliché. It is often argued
that artistic criticism has run out of ways to meaningfully alter either itself or reality, whether this
is due to the protuberances of neoliberalism, the digital revolution, the fading away of mental and
social categories, or a combination of any of the above.
This is not a thesis about art; it merely seeks to explore art as a possible breeding ground for
critique and change. To be more precise, I will attempt to draw a comparison between Bourdieu’s
theory of the art field and Boltanski’s conception critique and institutions, in relation to his
diagnosis of the role of artistic critique in the evolution of capitalism over the last decades.
Not only have these authors worked very closely together – Boltanski eventually devoted a large
portion of his career to developing an alternative to elements of Bourdieu’s methods and theories
that he grew to reject. Most importantly, both of their texts are regarded amongst the most
important works of the relationship of artistic practice to economy. My aim is to arrive at an
understanding of which author offers the most useful account of the rudimentary conditions of
possibility of radical artistic practice, understood as critique.
This piece is divided in two rough parts; while the first two chapters focus on Bourdieu,
specifically The Rules of Art, the latter two chapters, mostly concern Boltanski. Through the
second two chapters, however, I will also include points of comparison between the two authors.
To make for a solid starting position, the first chapter will be dedicated to Bourdieu’s most
important theoretical concepts, namely habitus, field, and capital. I will then proceed to an
explanation of the significance of actualized and potential positions within fields.
Subsequently, in chapter two, I will follow Bourdieu in an application of the terms mentioned
above to the emergence of the artistic field in 19th century France by discussing Flaubert and
Rimbaud as revolutionaries. Thereafter, in the third chapter, Boltanski will enter the picture with
a concept of a new institutional configuration that takes into account more contemporary
developments; I will first discuss his criticism of the paradigm of critical sociology, of which
Bourdieu was a major figure. From there, I will assess the conception of critique that Boltanski
offers as a counterbid. Finally, Boltanski’s take on the current relation of critique to capitalism
and of art to economy will be discussed.
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1. The historicity of the aesthetic disposition in Bourdieu; a few key concepts
Introduction
“What the ahistorical analysis of the work of art and of aesthetic experience really describes is an institution
which, as such, enjoys a kind of twofold existence, in things and in minds. In things, it exists in the form of an
artistic field, a relatively autonomous social universe which is the result of a slow process of emergence. In minds, it
exists in the form of dispositions which invent themselves through the very movement of self-invention of the field to
which they are adjusted. When things and dispositions are directly in accord with each other, meaning when the eye
is the product of the field to which it relates, then everything appears to be immediately endowed with meaning and
value1.”
What do we talk about when we talk about aesthetics? In discourse about the value and function
of art, one is generally inclined to assume Kant’s proposition, derived from the first Moment of
the first book of his Critique of Judgment, that art is necessarily the object of disinterested
appreciation. This approach to the work of art as being devoid of interest against which Bourdieu
agitated, he thus writes in the presented quote’, ignores the conditions of possibility of art
perception that are far from timeless and disinterested. The reason I choose to discuss
Bourdieu’s approach to art, rather than other forms of knowledge or social practice, is that said
approach uncovers the origin of said “disinterestedness” as a once radical way of life that was the
product of very specific social conditions.
Implied as the organic counterpart of the artistic field in the quote above is the habitus. The first
section of this chapter will be dedicated to the socio-historical specificity of aesthetic appreciation
in relation to Bourdieu’s theoretical frame of reference. Subsequently, I will explain the concepts
of habitus and field, as well as their mutual relationship. Finally, I will devote a section to the
basic structures of Bourdieu’s art field. The possibility of a reciprocal relation between artistic and
social innovation will be discussed more elaborately in chapter 2.
The roots of Bourdieu’s framework While the works of Pierre Bourdieu have become a staple, and are often considered to be among
the most important books in sociology and cultural philosophy, his oeuvre remains quite difficult
to pin down. Although Marx, Weber and the structuralist strand in anthropology have influenced
him to a great degree, he departs from these sources in quite significant ways. To thoroughly
1 Bourdieu (1996)
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explain what sets him apart from these inspirators would be the material for an entire book, but
suffice it to say for now that Bourdieu’s main criticism of these dominant social theories is their
lack of recognition for the reciprocal relation of action and social reality2; the social realm is
neither a set of rigid structures in the creation of which individuals have no part, neither is it the
sum of individual experiences, thoughts and actions. This opposition, which Bourdieu reckons to
be “the most fundamental (…) of all the oppositions that artificially divide social science..3”, comes down to
the divide between subjectivist and objectivist approaches. Where the former unfairly places the
centre of gravity on the side of individual experience, the latter fails to recognize the relational
character of the social world by ignoring the reciprocity of said objective structures and the way
actors experience them, by which these structures are also shaped.
This reciprocal mechanism of objective structures and situated experiences and actions is, of
course, also applicable to the world of art and cultural goods. Bourdieu deems the analysis of the
cultural field so important because “few areas more clearly demonstrate the heuristic efficacy of relational
thinking than that of art and literature4”. His first systematic publication on the structures of culture
production and consumption, from which I extract this quote, is Outline of a sociological theory of art
perception, originally published in French in Revue internationale des sciences sociales in 19685. This essay,
like the entirety of Distinction, is an attack on the social prestige afforded by cultural knowledge
and taste in 1960’s France, poignantly summarized in the following quote:
“Thus, the sacralisation of culture and art fulfils a vital function by contributing to the consecration of the social
order: (…) to conceal the social conditions which render possible not only culture as a second nature in which society
recognizes human excellence (…) but also the the legitimized dominance of a particular difference of culture.6”
This fragment is exemplary of the culturally pessimistic outlook that Bourdieu is often associated
with; art, and all other cultural objects that the middle to higher classes hold so dear, are merely
vehicles of justification for the materially privileged position that lovers of culture commonly find
themselves in. Social inequality, after all, is difficult to reconcile with the so-called democratic
values of the modern West. The privileged classes, the early Bourdieu proffers, thus need a way
of making their social distance from the working classes seem legitimate that is not material. This
is where middle-class to higher culture and taste comes in; by making art proficiency seem like a
matter of excellence, hard work or natural inclination, the accompanying privileged social
2Bourdieu (1990), 253 Ibid. 4 Bourdieu (1993,) 29 6 Bourdieu (1993), 236
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position gains the appearance of being earned.
It is thus clear that Bourdieu, at least initially, imputes the world of art with a function of
domination. Far from culture simply being an ideology that is deliberately imposed upon the
unknowing masses from above, though, the creation of artistic values and the disposition –
ordinarily appearing as the result of taste, education or love - that is required for its effective
deciphering, mutually dependent and are born and modified in a dialogical manner. This brings
us to the two cornerstones of Bourdieu’s sociology: Habitus and field.
Habitus and Field
As discussed, Bourdieu sought to overcome the dichotomy of subjectivity and objectivity,
without overlooking either the objective nature of social relations or the direct role practice has
in forming these relations. The relationship between habitus and field is Bourdieu’s key in this
endeavour. Far from being two separate entities, habitus and field are intertwined at the base.
They are two aspects of the same reciprocal dynamic that is at the heart of Bourdieu’s social
theory. Regarding the first of these concepts, Bourdieu posits that it “(...) is acquired and it is also a
possession which may, in certain cases, function as a form of capital7”. Habitus, originally from Latin, has a
twofold meaning; as a noun, it denotes ‘habit’; as a perfect participle, it ought to be translated as
something that, in the past tense, was “had”, or “possessed”. In its application, it indeed denotes
those behaviours, tastes and opinions that we experience as habitual.
Particularly, though, its verb-like connotation is a sign of the generative accumulation it entails;
these dispositions are, for a large part, acquired through participation in as well as exposure to
social games and value-systems8. Furthermore, Bourdieu proffers that habitus is the expression of
“that desire to escape from the philosophy of consciousness without annulling the agent in its true role of practical
operator of constructions of the real9”, and that it underpins the renunciation of the “canonical opposition
between theory and practice10”. Individuals thus constitute reality through practice. Practice, moreover,
should not be conceived of as theory’s counterpart or opposite.
Tersely put, as a set of mental structures habitus is the subjective counterpart to the objective
reality of social relations in social space. The objective correlate of social life takes the shape of
one or more fields in which agents, all endowed with their respective habits, interact with one
another in accordance to a set of field-specific rules that police a struggle over universality. The
interplay between habitūs and fields – in field-specific games – ultimately constitute the index of 7 Bourdieu (1996), 179 8 Ibid., 214 9 Ibid., 180 10 Ibid, 179
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all meaning and value. Such games are reducible to neither pure mental subjectivity nor
objectified structures.
The field under investigation in this thesis is the literary field, though the results of the analysis of
the position of this field within the field of power, Bourdieu argues, are applicable to the realm of
cultural production in general11. The field of power, which encompasses the relations between
individuals and institutions that are the holders of positions in proportion to their possession of
the appropriate capital, contains the entire field of cultural production as a semi-autonomous
citadel. The interactions within the field of power – be it between individual agents, between
individual agents and institutions, or between institutions by way of individual agents – are
defined by the exchange of different forms of capital that are weapons in the struggle to gain
dominant positions within�social space. This exchange discerns between economic and�symbolic
capital, the latter of which cultural capital pertains to.
Whereas the exchange of economic capital and its social conditions of accumulation is apparent,
cultural capital – because it functions symbolically - takes the guise of distinction, literacy, or
competence. Although the field of cultural production, as a whole, depends�on the field of
power and the exchange of economic capital�governing the latter, it functions like the economic
order�upside-down; “those who enter it have an interest in disinterestedness12”. The extent to which this
statement holds true at any moment in history is the expression of the field of cultural
production’s degree of autonomy13.
Cultural capital, symbolic capital, dominant and dominated poles
In the figure below we can see how the field of cultural production,�here in a more or less
mature and advanced form, is embedded in the field of power and, as such, in the field of class
relations which is social space. Within the spatial distribution of this entire realm of social
relations, we can see two different centres of gravity, namely that of high concentrations of
economic capital (CE) and high concentrations of cultural capital (CC).�The first of these forms
of capital is concentrated more heavily on the right side of the diagram, whereas the latter is
aggregated on the left. Within the field of cultural production, then, we see two subfields: the
subfield of small-scale production and the field of large-scale production. In the first of these
subfields the production of cultural goods serves the accumulation of symbolic capital only. In
11 Ibid., 214: “Readers may, throughout this chapter, replace writer with painter, philosopher, scholar, etc...” 12 Ibid., 216 13 Ibid., 217
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the latter production is tuned to the eventual conversion of symbolic or cultural capital to
economic capital. In other words, whereas the subfield of small-scale production is dedicated to
the law of art for art’s sake, the subfield of large-scale production submits to economic demands
to a great degree. While small-scale production that favours production over distribution has a
high degree of autonomy that is payed for in a lack of economic assets, exactly the opposite is
true for the field of large-scale production, which
considers distribution of cultural goods as its basic
principle14. Every agent or institution of cultural
production is thus positioned somewhere between these
two extremes, though neither of the two poles are ever
completely met. On both sides one needs to answer to
symbolic as well as economic value to some degree.
Consequently, the field of cultural production is spread
out between a pole that is symbolically dominant but
economically dominated, and a pole that is symbolically
dominated though economically dominant. The first of
these is sanctioned by a commitment to an economic logic that is anti-economistic; it favours
production over distribution, and it does so while submitting to a demand that it has created
itself15.
Conclusion We have now seen how the “Charismatic ideology” of art and culture works in terms of
Bourdieu’s two fundamental theoretical concepts, habitus and field. Art fulfils a justificatory role
that somewhat defies the laws of economy, power and society. This means that it can indeed –
and still does – function as a vehicle of legitimation for those who find themselves in a position
of power, because it has the guise of being completely independent, and thus impartial, value
system. What it also means, however, is that this seemingly opposite logic of the cultural field can
be turned to one’s advantage in constituting a realm of relatively autonomous practice. To arrive
at an understanding of the origins of this mechanism, and how the field of cultural production as
shown above came into being, we will now return to an investigation into the origins of art for
art’s sake in 19th century France. After having thus applied Bourdieu’s theoretical framework to
one of his concrete case studies, we will follow the same order with Boltanski in chapters three
14 Ibid., 142 15 Ibid.
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and four, respectively.
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2. The origins of art for art’s sake
Introduction The previous chapter was dedicated to explaining the bare theoretical framework that is relevant
for our discussion. Where I have already hinted a bit at the possibilities of using the art field’s
inverted economic logic for revolutionary or innovative hands, this chapter will be devoted to
offering an example of how such a mechanism concretely works. The example at hand is an account of the role that a handful of writers had in the emergence of
the literary field in 19th century France. Our aim will be to distil from Bourdieu’s historical
analysis of the literary field the conditions of possibility for autonomous art, or intellectual
practice.
Key figures – ‘players’, if you will – in this account are Baudelaire and Flaubert. Their work has
had, for Bourdieu, great aesthetic as well as social consequences16. The aim of this section will be
to explain the anti-economistic origin and potential of art practice and arts of living.
The analysis of the work of art The statement that “art has as its function not to have a function17” is, like we have discussed, a
disposition that ought to be historicized rather than universalized. Moreover, the normative claim
that art ought to be disinterested, and favour form over function is merely a proposition about
the status of art perception. Art perception, however, cannot be discussed in isolation from art
production; the two ontologically ground each other18. The “science of the production of the work of
art19” consequently coincides with the theory of art perception, that is, the historical analysis of
the pure aesthetic. Bourdieu aims to debunk the myth of the creator and the pure gaze by
defining artistic acts as necessary position-takings or lacunae to be fulfilled, and at once to show
how such an endeavour is not relativistic.
Hence, the notion of the work of art as essentially and transhistorically disinterested is, in fact,
the specific product of very specific socio-historical developments and struggles. This
“phylogenesis” (production) of the aesthetic disposition and its subsequent ontogenesis
(reproduction), are two necessary aspects of the effective analysis of the nature of any mode of 16He argues in a similar vein in Manet: A Symbolic revolution - the way of representation that Manet, with the other impressionists, introduced still influences our categories of cultural perception today. This work, however, will not be further discussed17 Bourdieu (1996), 285 18 Ibid., 288 19 Ibid.
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aesthetic experience; only by taking into account these conditions of production and
reproduction can the “illusion of universality20” that underlies any “analyses of essence21” be evaded.
Moreover, the analysis of the work of art should not be attempted as a twofold endeavor; the
opposition of production and reception is a false one. The state of art production as well as
reception have the same history of social relations and mutually ground each other; the birth of
art for art’s sake was, at the same time, the birth of the pure gaze of the ‘art lover’22. When
considered in terms of phylogenesis, then, “the pure gaze capable of apprehending the work of art as it
demands to be apprehended (in itself and for itself, as form and not as function) is inseparable from the appearance
of producers motivated by a pure artistic intention23”.
The birth of the literary field as a realm of practice asserting its own logic in 19th
century France
The modern aesthetic disposition and aura of the artist are, like I said, the product of specific
developments and struggles. So specific, in fact, that Bourdieu chooses to explain these
developments in relation to merely a handful of key figures. Of these key characters, Gustave
Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire are the most important, of whom Flaubert is most elaborately
discussed. Let us consider the following quote:
“To reconstruct Flaubert’s point of view, that is, the point in the social space from which his vision of the world
was formulated, and that social space itself, is to have a real chance of placing ourselves at the origins of a world
whose functioning has become so familiar to us that the regularities and the rules it obeys escape our grasp24”.�
Why is this important? What is at stake in being able to grasps these rules and regularities? And
why is Flaubert such an exceptional figure in that his work is one of the few examples of works
that are truly insightful in this respect? To get a clear picture of those ‘regularities and rules’ of
the world in which Flaubert lived, a brief examination on some socio-economic developments in
19th century France is in order. Along with the steep industrialization driven on by the regime of
Napoleon III, a generation of super-wealthy “self-made men” was born that had little ties to the
higher classes of yore. As a result, many of these businessmen came from a background that one
would have called “uncultered”, proudly rejecting all things intellectual. Instead, they committed
themselves to a lifestyle of luxury; money became the sole token of social prestige, in an
20 Bourdieu (1996), 286
21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 28823 Ibid,, 288 24 Ibid., 48
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unbridled manner. In addition, a lot of these wealthy businessmen now utilized the novel chance
to occupy political positions. It goes without saying that political power once again seemed to
become an extension of economic wealth. This all coincided with the granting of material
benefits for members of the press, artists and publishers to produce expressions that were
accommodating or praiseful towards the status quo. The new disdain for intellectual and artistic
depth amongst the powerful meant a sudden devaluation of cultural capital; the world of power
and the world of money now exercised very direct control over artistic practice, due to a market
that has direct influence courtesy of “the absence of true specific apparatuses of consecration25.” This
meant that men of wealth and those in political power – two categories gaining ever greater
affinity – directly steered the nature of the artistic climate through their choices and tastes. One
can guess that these tastes did not lean in the favour of poetry, still associated with the sentiment,
bohemia, and intellectualism that the industrialists disdained. Poetry thus became severely
disadvantaged, while the simple novel – called “feuilleton” – became the most encouraged form
of literary expression. Experimentation in literature thus had little terrain. �
The only body actually mediating between the field of power and the field of literature, was the
salon. The salon, on the one hand, granted continuity between the different axes of the field of
power by offering networking opportunities amongst artists and between artists and the
powerful. On the other hand, it functioned as a stock market for different forms of capital. For
those in power, it was an arena to exercise influence over artists and writers to thereby gain
cultural prestige and “the power of legitimation26”; artists, in their turn, used the gatherings of the
salons to gain the benevolence of the powerful to get a piece of the financial pie, or to indirectly
influence the distribution key of funds rewarded by the government.
The Salon, in other words, was a site of mutual interest; both the powerful and the cultured
needed its symbolic or material benefits. It is where the interflow of the field of power and the
art field became the most visible. At this intersection of political and cultural capital, there were a
few that were caught in the moral or strategic dilemma of falling in between the two poles; they
were not quite powerful enough to dabble with politicians, but nevertheless respected by the
culturally dominant.
One peculiar feature of the art field in the second half of the nineteenth century, like I have said,
is “the absence of true specific apparatuses of consecration27”. As a consequence, political bodies and
25 Ibid., 4926 Ibid., 51 27 Bourdieu (1996), 49
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figures of nobility had a great deal of direct influence in the field.
The generative structures of the early literary field answer to great fundamental oppositions;
there’s three ‘camps’, if you will. On the one hand there’s the salons, where writers and other
agents assemble that are deemed to be fashionable. Secondly, there are the groups of “great elitist
writers28” like the one surrounding Princess Mathilde and the Magny’s, at some point also
including Flaubert. 29Lastly, there’s the group of agents characterized by bohemia. The structural
domination that took place within this set of opposed sites was, for a large part, an effect of the
exclusory power of the salons.
Moreover, the press of the Second Empire was subject to censorship and the imposition of a
self-important tone. What were once serious journals became depoliticized, light serials that were
“read by everybody, from the common people to the bourgeoisie, from ministerial offices to the
court30”. The directors of these papers and serials were regulars at the literary salons31, a
circumstance that leaves no doubt about the way in which literature was colonized by industrial
interests through the press32. Writer- journalists increasingly write according to public taste. Since
they also served the role of literary critic, the value systems these journalists adhered became the
straitjacket that any literary initiative seeking institutional recognition had to fit into33.
“Morphological changes” and arts of living
The increasing overlap between the industrial realm and the literary field through the
development of the press, Bourdieu argues, is one of the factors that gave rise to an
“unprecedented expansion of the market of cultural goods.” This expansion was both cause and
effect of a substantial influx of a certain demographic into the margins of the field; a rapidly
increasing number of young people with literary aspirations, though without economic capital,
were drawn to Paris from the provinces to test their chances at artistic careers. Literary
professions attracted young people because of the prestige surrounding these kind of careers and
the fact that there simply were not enough dominant posts in industry or politics to
accommodate the growing number of young people endowed with secondary education. An
island within society thus took shape; a significant number of young people could not be
accommodated by the existing economic structures. Among these young people were many who
28 Ibid., 53
29See also Brooks (2017) 30 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 54
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aimed to make a living as an artist, writer or otherwise34.
These “morphological changes35” at the root of the emergence of a relatively autonomous artistic
field went hand in hand with the invention of a new lifestyle, an “art of living36”, that had the
chance to arise because its bearers did not unproblematically fit into any established levels of
social stratification. These characters often fit into the category discussed above; not quite
powerful enough to be one of the powerful, yet eccentric and culturally dominant enough to gain
regard among other artists.
This nascent art of living, meaning the artistic lifestyle of bohemia, is what separated its
champions from ordinary workers, though the two groups were akin in terms of lack of material
wealth. At the same time, this bohemian art of living was fiercely opposed to the ethos of the
bourgeoisie that controlled literary production and reception37. These young artists could thus be
said to bear the mark of a split habitus, which gave their possible social trajectory a measure of
indeterminacy, alienated both from the commercially preoccupied bourgeois and the people,
constrained by daily labour38. Their existence is influenced by the laws and expectations of
coexisting but contradictory social universes, which loosens the grip of social determination on
some of their life choices. The artistic lifestyle, marked by a keenness on transgression in both
literary work and daily habits, signalled the apparition of the inverted world that we discussed in
chapter I. As mentioned above, bourgeois values permeated the realms of cultural production to
an exceptional degree. The institution of the art world as “an empire within an empire39” was fuelled
by an aversion to this omnipresence of bourgeois – and therefore material – interests to a great
degree. Apart from being a space to create a new art of living, the newfound realm of social
relations that was the birth of the art field comprised of the assertion of a market that resisted, to
some degree, the economic force field.
The positing of the opposition of art to money meant the end of the reproduction of the until
then prevailing mechanisms of the market of cultural goods. This rupture took place through the
repulsion of bourgeois clientele. Opposed to the idealist literature preferred by bourgeois
audiences was socialist realism, “just as moral and moralizing40”.
34 Ibid., 55 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 50 38 Ibid., 58 39 Ibid., 5940 Bourdieu (1996), 72
16
Flaubert managed, in Sentimental Education, to produce a work that, as a novel, had a truth to it
in two ways; first it produced, by way of its structure, an objective effect in the field of literature
through its reception; second, it permitted itself in a sociological manner, without literally stating
that which a sociological analysis of the text would produce. Consequently, it embodies a
structural, scientific wisdom about the context in which it was produced, but through its
structural effects rather than literally stating it41; “ If Sentimental Education – necessarily a story of a
group whose elements, united by an almost systematic set of combinations, are subjected to an ensemble of forces of
attraction or repulsion exercised over them by the field of power – may be read as a history, 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”. The similarity between the structure of the
social interactions in Sentimental Education, in other words, does not lie in substantial properties
of characters, objects, or places, but in the fact that the structures of these literary social relations
mimic the structures of a certain social space as an analogy. Additionally, like a true literary work,
it “speaks of the most serious things without insisting, unlike science according to Searle, on being taken completely
seriously.”. Likewise, Bourdieu writes in Science of science and reflexivity, that artists do not “tacitly accept
the arbitration of the real42”. In other words, Flaubert – and in Sentimental Education, Frédéric – did
not find himself willing or capable to participate in the games that constituted the political,
artistic and economic field of the time, and thus resorted to invoking his own Illusio. The Illusio, or value system, of the field of literary production before authors like Flaubert and
Baudelaire transformed it, took shape as the struggle between two dominant poles; that of
bourgeois literature propagating a bourgeois morality, and that of realist, supposedly socially
aware literature.
Bourgeois idealism and social realism were but two positions within the same logical axis, namely
that art ought to step into a direct relation with ethics. Whereas the former, in a more or less
romanticist style, embodied literary propaganda for the morals and lifestyle of the bourgeois
class, the latter prescribed that art should be a faithful representation of the life of the masses,
often decorating the latter with moral superiority. The crux of this realist tendency of social art is
that its adherents do not discriminate between the artistic field and the political field43, thereby
making their literary praxis an extension of prevailing praxes in the political field. It is, in other
words, arbitrated by the same notion of reality that shapes the field of power. The same can be
said about bourgeois art. This representation of the status quo, both literal and structural, is
41 Ibid., 32 42 Bourdieu (2004), 6943 Bourdieu (1996), 91
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precisely that authors like Flaubert and Baudelaire sought to subvert.
The resistance of Flaubert and Baudelaire bore the mark of an indignation to moralistic
pretences. The rupture within the bourgeois order – that is, the dominant sphere of the field of
power – was thus effected by a rejection of this order as well as its direct opposite. Flaubert and
Baudelaire did not simply oppose one social disposition by assimilating to another; they lay bare
the common structure of the value systems of both bourgeois and social literature, which was the
imperative to “Moralize, Moralize!44”. In producing this double negation, they instituted a
position in the literary field that had no direct precedent in the field of power; they did not situate
themselves on the axis of either existing position, but rejected both extremes equally. They
acknowledged that bourgeois idealism as well as social realism were merely two different
positions in the same hierarchy of values that they rejected altogether. The new nomos of art for
art’s sake was, in short, not an already available or logically necessary position waiting to be
occupied, but was invented by the unclassifiable social being of agents like the aforementioned
writers. Their transgression did not spring from adherence to a concrete ideological cause, but
resulted from a longing for transgression itself. They demanded unconditional ethical freedom
and instead committed themselves to unconditional dutifulness with regards to their self-
legislated laws, the refusal to surrender their art to material or symbolic seduction being the
cornerstone. They boldly chose to follow only the rule of their own art in the face of financial
and social repercussions to instigate an aesthetic revolution, “with no explicitly planned scheme or
expressly designated leader45” – and not only through literary experimentation, but also through
symbolic gestures. An example of this is Baudelaire’s application to the Académie Française, the
supreme bulwark of the classic literature that he so utterly and openly despised. This move
shocked his fellow bohémiens just as much as the bigwigs at the Académie, testifying to a
symbolic fearlessness on Baudelaire’s part. His application was an anticipation of the outlook that
he would not be admitted due to his public animosity towards the Académie and his reputation,
and by the same stroke a provocation; Baudelaire, after all, was already quite revered in Avant-
Garde circles, whereby the Académie’s imminent rejection would expose their standards of
consecration and appreciation as innate, partial and uncritical as they were. Far from being a
purely performative gesture, Baudelaire was known to have a preoccupation with his social
position; while he looked down upon the Bourgeois tastes that the Académie represented, his
application was also an appeal to his presumed right to be taken up into the order of
consecration. This ambiguous position, in between the establishment and bohemia, makes 44 Ibid., 65 45 Ibid., 62
18
Baudelaire the example par excellence of the double-binded character of Salon culture that
Bourdieu discusses.46
Positions,dispositionsandposition-takings
Throughout the book Bourdieu uses three similar-sounding terms that nonetheless have distinct,
specific definitions: position(s), disposition(s) and position-taking(s). We will have a look at their
respective meaning and their mutual relationships.�We have seen that the field is an assemblage
of power relations. The positions in a field are the nodes of these relations. These positions are
specific, and are “objectively defined by [their] objective relationship with other positions47”. One should
think of categories and genres, or of institutions of reception. They are points of orientation for
agents that either enter the field or are already participating in the field. Position-takings, on the
other hand, correspond to acts, works, and discourses. They are manifestations or contestations
of existing positions. Position-takings are attempts of agents to acquire or displace the capital that
is concentrated in objective positions. In a stable field, these position-takings tacitly reproduce
the positions that govern them. The struggles of a field are to be defined on the basis of two
structures, the first being the relation between positions, the second being the relation between
position-takings. The space of possibles, “which acts as a discloser of dispositions”, is wedged
between these two structures.�So-called aesthetic revolutions are an overturning of the relations
within the space of position-takings48. Such transformations happen when acts are committed –
that is, when positions are taken – that already exist negatively in the space of possibles as
“structural lacunae49”.
The position that Flaubert thus took up in the emerging literary field was one that he himself
created out of a refusal of all pre-existing social roles. This commitment to indifference
engendered a double refusal, of which Bourdieu constructed the following formula: “I detest X
(...), but I detest just as much the opposite of X50”. By placing his work at the intersection of realist and
idealist or romanticist literature – by, in other words, embodying through his writing the
confrontation of the two most prevalent existing positions in the field - he exacerbates the
struggle over values and forms within the field. He grasps the contrast between the two positions,
and, by making them collide, asserts this new point of view of his as above and beyond the fields
46 The Rules of Art, 51 47 Ibid., 231 48 Ibid., 234 49 Ibid., 234 50 Ibid., 239
19
restrictions and limitations. By refusing the patronage of the bourgeoisie on the one hand, and
realism’s convergence of the political and artistic field on the other, he postulates art for art’s
sake; the given that art is irreducible to any interest, and thus free from the forces of both poles
of the field of power. Flaubert thus didn’t take up an already existing position, but made the
position of art for art’s sake that was hitherto “a position to be made, devoid of any equivalent in the field
of power and which might not or wasn’t necessarily supposed to exist.51” Such a position-taking is the
resistance of the dominant as well as the dominated pole of the field of power which govern the
main modes of thought, thereby asserting at the intersection of both poles an independent point
of view that is the beginning of a new, autonomous field. The intrinsic disinterestedness, then,
that is often ascribed to art, is a side effect of morphological changes in the structure of society in
post-feudal France.
Conclusion We have seen how radical transformation of artistic praxes, that is, a structural change in the
struggle over forms, is rooted in the realization of already potentially existing positions. In the
established literary field, all realized positions are located somewhere between to extremes. These
two extremes are, on the one hand, small-scale production, and on the other large-scale
production. In the field of small-scale production, which is symbolically dominant – I.e. with a
high concentration of positions endowed with symbolic capital – but temporally dominated – i.e.
corresponding to a dominated position in the field of power – production takes place in
accordance with internal demand; that is to say, artists produce for each other.
Though aesthetics as it is commonly understood is but a historically produced, contingent point
of view, Bourdieu’s text shows how aesthetics can be the product of subversive, truly innovative
practice. That artistic practice can be truly subversive is shown, for example, that Poulet-Malassis,
the small publisher Baudelaire sought out in preference to the financially thriving, larger
publishing houses of the time, was sentenced to go into exile for publishing Les Fleurs du Mal. It
is not exaggerated, then, to think of the literary avant-garde of the time and the tribulations of the
smaller publishers that associated with this avant-garde as a “ligne de combat52”.
This account of the quest for artistic autonomy in the 19th century offers, I hope, a case for the
fact that the historical analysis of the art work is far from relativistic but that it can, instead, lay
bare the revolutionary roots of certain artistic dispositions and practices. Furthermore, the
51 Ibid., 79 52 Bourdieu (1996), 67
20
sociological analysis of fields of practice, and the art field in particular, can offer leads “to draw up
a realistic programme for the collective action of intellectuals53”, and offers a case file of how the birth of
new realms of action can mean to “institute [an] anomie54”; in the case of Flaubert and Baudelaire,
the refusal of two opposites on the same axis meant the subversion of a whole system of reality,
because when accepted thought is distributed by two virtual opposites, these two opposites tend
to contain the structures of the accepted social and cognitive world between them.
53 Ibid., 339 54 Ibid., 51
21
3. BOLTANSKI’S CONCEPTION OF CRITIQUE: A RETURN TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF INSTITUTIONS
Introduction
After having explained the application of Bourdieu’s core theoretical concepts to the emergence
of the artistic field, we will evaluate Boltanski’s theoretical divergence from Bourdieu. This
chapter will focus on the abstract framework linking everyday social practice, critique and
domination. Our primary source will be Boltanski’s On Critique. In chapter four we will recount
the diagnosis of the state of critique, as well as the role that critique has played in strengthening
capitalism, as proffered by Boltanski and Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism.
To get a clear picture of the structural differences between these authors, we will discuss
Boltanski’s reasons to propose a new sociological paradigm – that is, the “pragmatic sociology of
critique55”- as well as his definition of the institution.
Although Bourdieu was Boltanski’s theoretical predecessor and teacher, he was also his most
frequently cited opponent; a significant portion of his work has been devoted to, at least partially,
cast off the sociology of domination that flourished at the time of his early academic years. Still at
work today at EHESS, Paris, one of his lifelong projects has been to form a theory of critique
and justification56 that takes into account the immense economic, social and ideological changes
that characterize the onset of what one usually calls neoliberalism57 - a word that he never uses
himself, but rather denotes as a change in the justification regime of capitalism, which we will
discuss in further detail in chapter four. Suffice it to say for now that these remarks serve to
clarify Boltanski’s role in the present debate. Bourdieu’s most well-known findings are based,
after all, on empirical sociological research that dates from a time and place before the structural
changes mentioned above. Does Boltanski’s approach to critique offer a better fit to a society in
which class and capital aren’t as clearly distributed as in Bourdieu’s times?
The previous chapter was dedicated to Bourdieu’s account of the emergence of the art field as a
relatively autonomous category of meaning as a result of the invention of new arts of living.
55 Boltanski (2011), 33 56 Biographical information on Boltanski is obtained from Simon Susen’s entry on the author in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Susen, Luc Boltanski, 2015) 57 I have to mention here that Boltanski himself never uses the term “neoliberalism”
22
The Rules of Art, after all, even being one of Bourdieu’s later works, was published in the early
nineties; the playing field on which artistic and economic means compete for terrain, to use a
Bourdieusian expression, has structurally changed since then. I will approach this change not by
immediately diving into contemporary analyses of the current state of the art world, but first by
using Boltanski’s view of the place of critique in society to, later on, arrive at an explanation for
the difficulty of artistic critique in today’s socio-economic situation. To get a clear picture of the
structural differences between these authors, we will discuss Boltanski’s reasons to propose a new
sociological paradigm – that is, the “pragmatic sociology of critique58”- as well as his definition of the
institution.
Bourdieu, Boltanski argues, underestimates the ability or potential to develop truly critical
practice, which therefore seems limited to a lucky few. This stance seems more compatible with a
class society in the original sense; Bourdieu’s more or less straightforwardly Marxist approach to
culture, after all, is based on a society that’s stratified in a clear, structural, and “vertical” manner.
Similarly, Hardt and Negri developed the notion of the shift from national class inequality into a
virtually nondescript “multitude”, dominated by the decentralized set of globalized networks
called “Empire”. Because Boltanski employs a more flexible account of social reality and critique,
while still stressing the weight of institutions, his pragmatic sociology of critique might be more
fit to offer an analysis of the place of art in a world of work and value that might try to have a
semblance of being more free, flexible and stimulating, but in fact complicates and neutralizes
actual difference and critique. The ideals of flexibility and independence, it is argued59, have since
evolved into an ideological discourse that propagate the idea of life and work as an
entrepreneurial project. The conditions of labour and organization – or lack therof –
accompanying this jargon, though, are those of precarity. Moreover, the diffusion of the art field
calls for a new approach to the philosophy of institutions, the urgency of which has been
underscored by, amongst others, Andrea Fraser: “Today, the argument goes, there no longer is an outside (…)
But assessments of the institutionalization of institutional critique and charges of its obsolescence in an era of mega -museums
and global markets founder on a basic misconception of what institutional critique is, at least in light of the practices that
have come to define it.60”
58 Boltanski (2011), 23
59 Apart from Boltanski and Chiapello, see Lazzarato - The Misfortunes of the “Artistic
Critique” and of Cultural Employment 60 Fraser (2005), 101
23
Boltanski’s partial rejection of his former teacher’s heritage comes forward in his distinction
between critical sociology and the pragmatic sociology of critique. This will, therefore, be the starting point
of this chapter. Subsequently, as Boltanski deems neither of the sociological programmes cited
above satisfactory, we will give an account of his alternative, in which critique and the institution are
two mutually founding social phenomena. Furthermore, this construction will be explained as the
mechanism that allows us to navigate the so-called contradiction between reality, world, and
specific points of view. The notions of contradiction and points of view will re-enter the picture
several times in this chapter. Thereafter, we will focus on Boltanski’s distinction of different
kinds of tests as means of either confirmation or contestation.
On Critique
On Critique is the publication, in six chapters, of the three Adorno Lectures that Boltanski
delivered at the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt in 2008. The book, Boltanski suggests,
still shows the thematic division in three parts. The first part, consisting of the first two chapters,
considers different approaches to the relation between sociological theory and critique; it
contrasts Bourdieu’s approach, denoted by Boltanski as Critical Sociology, with the programme
of the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique. The third and fourth chapter, which make up the second
thematic section of the book, are an attempt on Boltanski’s part to formulate a more or less
structural theory of how critique emanates from everyday situations. Within this context, he
offers a definition of the institution as well as a case for the indispensability of institutions for the
navigation of reality. Finally, chapter five and six contain some suggestions on a contemporary
critical programme for sociologists vis-à-vis current modes of domination and emancipation. The
middle section of the book, consisting of chapters three and four (The power of institutions and The
necessity of critique) will be our point of focus. The contents of the first two chapters will also be of
interest for Boltanski’s own grievances with Bourdieu’s critical sociology, although these matters
are also the point of departure in chapter three. I will thus begin this consideration of Boltanski’s
conception of critique with a discussion of the opposition between Critical sociology and
Pragmatic sociology as summarized in the beginning of The Power of Institutions, with some
diversions to chapters one and two.
Critical sociology versus pragmatic sociology
In On Critique, Boltanski thus denotes the schism of modern sociology as the division in two
approaches to the phenomenon of critique. The first, critical sociology, takes on an exterior
approach to domination and the actors subjected to it, and seeks to arm these actors, from
without, by academically mined resources to understand and partially subvert their own
24
domination. Boltanski files the works of Bourdieu under this programme61.
Boltanski has abandoned Critical sociology for three reasons. First, its definition of domination is
“at once too powerful and too vague in character62”: by understanding social reality in terms of hierarchies
and power relations, Boltanski seems to say, is to subject the definition of true domination to
inflation. By making situations that Bourdieu deems instances of symbolic violence the extension
of physical violence, one ignores the experience of the actors in question, who, Boltanski argues,
do not see themselves as oppressed or victimized in the former case. In other words, critical
sociology of dominations projects a too all-encompassing definition of domination on the
majority of social relations, thereby shifting focus away from forms of violence, physical or social,
that are actually experienced by the actors involved as such63. Second, the critical capacities of
ordinary actors are supposedly met with too little faith; actors are allegedly believed by the critical
sociologists to be nitwits that blindly believe any ideology that is fed to them. Structures and
dispositions are thereby endowed with too much importance, while specific situations and the
actors that shape them are ignored. Finally, through this gap between ordinary actors and
sociologists, the scientific power of sociology becomes overestimated; they are fully trusted by
affiliates of the critical programme to effectively and truthfully analyse the very social structures
from which they were born. This leads to “the intensification of the difference between sociological science
and ordinary knowledge64”. The Critical Sociology of Bourdieu, Boltanski seems to argue, assumes
that societal mechanisms and ideological configurations are external phenomena that can only be
comprehended by a lucky few, as if they were god-like, monolithic beings that were here before
we were. It is this asymmetry65 - between the intellectual and the actor – and supposedly reified
notion of social relations that Boltanski sought to do away with.
The sociological programme that was developed in response is that of pragmatism. It signalled,
Boltanski said, a move towards descriptive rather than normative aspirations66 by focussing on
the interpretations of everyday situations by actors themselves. Rather than endowing the
researcher with the privilege of an exterior standpoint from which ordinary actors are to be
enlightened about their own social situation, the ‘pragmatic sociology of critique’ assumes that
61Boltanski (2011), 18 62Ibid., 20 63 Ibid. 64Ibid., 21 65 Duvoux (2012)66 Boltanski (20011), 23
25
actors already have their own critical capacities, and starts out from there by making these
capacities explicit67.
The project of critique, therefore, was not to be abandoned by the pragmatic programme; the
goal was simply to reverse the hierarchy of the argument, by giving a new, perhaps more
democratic impulse to critique by “returning to things themselves” of social reality. The structuralist
premise was put aside in favour of an attitude akin to phenomenology. In a study of the
phenomenon of critique, this meant to choose as object of analysis the form of critique in its
most elementary, everyday appearance; in disputes between ordinary actors. These ordinary
critical capacities, Boltanski admits, should not be overestimated. This is not due to some lack of
awareness or know-how of the actors, or to the fact that they are immersed in a situation that
outside experts could allegedly more adequately analyse. The issue with fervently pragmatic
approaches68 to disputes and critique is that too much of the question of the resolution of
disputes is left to the black box of “common sense”. Where pragmatists, Boltanski argues,
rightfully underscore the uncertainty rather than the determination of social reality, they fail to
draw the apt conclusions from this “radical uncertainty”, and are instead satisfied with the cure-all
of the common sense of actors69, paired with the presumed omnipresent desire to cooperate; the
latter notion is present in sociological texts as early as those of Goffman70 and Mauss71 This
emphasis on the absolving powers of the common sense have been, in Boltanski’s words, “an
obstacle to the sociology of critical operations72”, because it stops where the investigation should carry on
and works as a neutralizer of critical impulses.
So, Boltanski argues, although pragmatism is right to emphasize the critical capacities of actors
in everyday situations, instead of suggesting that situations tend to resolve themselves naturally,
we should give due attention to “the significance of the disagreement, dispute and, with it, uncertainty which
constantly threaten the course of social life73”. In other words, the “primitive phenomenon” to be
studied in sociological approaches to the emergence of critique shouldn’t be agreement, but
uncertainty.
67Ibid., 50 68 Boltanski here has in mind the notion of cooperation in works as early as Erving Goffman and Marcel Mauss 69 Ibid., 54 70 e.g. The Presentation of Self in Everyday life 71 e.g. The Gift, 1925 72 Boltanski (2011), 55 73 Boltanski (2011), 56
26
We have seen that critical sociology deems domination a too all-encompassing phenomenon,
leading to a lack of concise definition. However, some pragmatic sociologists, while right in
underlining the uncertainty and fragility of social reality, mistakenly count on the alleged ability
and willingness of people to abridge this uncertainty for the sake of social bonds. Consequently,
Boltanski deems neither of the sociological programmes apt in their approach of social reality and
actors’ relation to it; while the first – critical sociology – features domination too prominently and
renders ordinary individuals too helpless, the second – pragmatic sociology – is too nonchalant in
this aspect by deeming individuals and small communities capable of overcoming the residue of
uncertainty that haunts reality.
Boltanski, above all, emphasizes the threat that this “possibility of a radical uncertainty” poses to the
structures of social life. He considers the metacritical approach that he champions to be an
improvement of the Bourdieusian critical sociology for underlining the specificity and fragility of
empirical and social positions, instead of their embeddedness. Whereas Bourdieu allegedly
regards social reality, fixed by an interplay of habitūs and fields, as a rigid sediment, Boltanski
argues for a more ephemeral conception of the social in which the notion of uncertainty should
be the starting point of any investigation into critique and emancipation. Radical uncertainty is a
necessary problem of all communication, deliberation and action because every human being, in
the end, can only really convey an account of the specific point of view that they are confined to.
Because agreement and collective action, two elements without which society could not exist,
need an overarching set of common principles, individuals need external semantic bodies to refer
to that are not confined to specific points of view like human beings. These bodies, in other
words, need to be bodiless; these bodiless beings are what we call, Boltanski argues, institutions.
This is obviously not a novel premise; the institution serves as one of the most fundamental
concepts of sociological concepts, although it is rarely adequately defined. I will first recount
Boltanski’s definition of the institution. Subsequently, I will go over the different registers of
action that Boltanski distinguishes, in each of which the relationship between order and critique
attains different degrees of stability or fragility.
Theinstitution
We have seen that Boltanski is satisfied with neither of the sociological programmes cited in On
Critique. This is because neither of the cited sociological programmes offer a satisfactory
framework to conduct the required ‘sociology of institutions”. According to Boltanski, the critical
programme recognizes the pervasiveness of institutions in social life, while mainly attributing to
27
them the function of domination; “The conjunction between, on the one hand, recognizing the ubiquity of
institutions and the central role they play in the unfolding of social life in the spirit of Durkheim and, on the other
– contrary to Durkheim – regarding them predominantly as instruments of domination, contributes to an indefinite
extension of the diagnosis of domination.74” In other words, Boltanski argues, to equate the instituted
with the social, while only properly taking the trouble to describe it with regards to its effects of
domination, gives the institution a too infinite and all-encompassing power since “it is because there
are institutions everywhere that there is domination everywhere75”. Boltanski has, in his turn, attracted criticism from some of his peers; his emphasis on the critical
capacities of all actors seems a bit voluntaristic, at least in principle76. Though this is something I
wholeheartedly concur with; while I follow his analysis of uncertainty as an elementary
phenomenon from a descriptive point of view, as a starting point this view seems to be lacking
programmatic political potential. In On Critique, however, Boltanski develops a theory of the
institution that is essential to critical operations because, while not relying on outdated objectivist
or structuralist views, provides a convincing explanation for collaboration, order and critique
other than ‘common sense’ or the “horror of a social vacuum77”.
While the original pragmatic programme barely gives the institution any attention at all, Boltanski
argues, it provides us with useful tools because it emphasizes the uncertainty and fragility of
social reality rather than its impermeability and structural rigidity. Since the pragmatic programme
largely ignores institutions, however, the task of overcoming and managing this uncertainty is put
upon individuals. This is where the pragmatic programme fails in Boltanski’s eyes; it fails to see
the power of uncertainty, and the impossibility to overcome it by purely individual efforts. In
other words, while critical sociology deems ordinary individuals too helpless, pragmatic sociology
underestimates the constraints of the institution. In this sense, where critical sociology is too
fatalistic with regards to critical potential of individuals, pragmatic sociology endows actors with
the tools to overcome uncertainty too easily. This is largely due to the fact that pragmatic
sociology does not dwell on the definition of the institution. To truly grasp the power of
institutions, then, Boltanski attempts to formulate his own definition.
74 Boltanski (2011) 52 75 Ibid. 76 E.g. Wuggenig (2008) and Honneth (2010) 77 Boltanski (2011), 54
28
Boltanski’s theory of the institution is, in part, motivated by the lack of emphasis that the notion
of uncertainty is granted by either critical sociology or pragmatic sociology. To wit, the institution
is what he considers to be society’s coping mechanism regarding this uncertainty. The institution
is what enables the semantic background of social arrangements and utterances to be coherent; it
mediates order. As a consequence, the institution is also a key phenomenon to investigate while
studying order’s opposite, critique78: “To pose the question of the very possibility of critique”, he writes,
“assumes recognizing that social activity is not and doubtless cannot be constantly critical79”. In other words,
to research the conditions of X contains the implication that X can be isolated from an
environment that it emerges from, and that X is not always the case. To understand the
environment in which critique appears, Boltanski argues, “we must return to the sociology of
institutions80”, because the institution seems to be the entity that enables this environment, or
“background81”, to seem as solid as it does.
Thefragilityofinstitutionsandtheoccurrenceofcritique
To arrive at a more convincing explanation for the suppression of radical uncertainty than
“common sense82”, then, we should investigate the things that have the authority to surmount
the strictly specific points of view that individual humans are confined to. Agreements between
individuals are made possible, Boltanski argues, by transferring the authority of establishing the
“whatness of what is” – that is, universal definitions that make deliberation and the convergence of
different points of view possible – to beings that are not confined to a corporeal existence83.
These bodiless beings are Boltanski’s understanding of the institution84. The institution,
understood in this way, bears the power of conferring value and meaning upon “non-existent85”
or abstract beings with no material presence, but also of giving material objects a universally
respected abstract meaning or value86.
To account for the significance of this power, we will take a step back to explain Boltanski’s
distinction between reality and world. As I said in the introduction to this chapter, in Boltanski’s
account (social) reality is a lot more fragile than in that of his predecessor. This is not to say that
he trivializes reality – as in, “socially constructed” – in the way that his more formally pragmatic 78 Boltanski (2011), 57 79 Ibid., 51 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., 54 83 Ibid., 74 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 75 86 Ibid., 79
29
peers do. Reality, he proffers, is what is coherent, meaningful, and – to a certain degree –
controllable. The uncertainty that we seek to suppress comes forth from the background it stands
out against. This background, which Boltanski calls the world, simultaneously contains all
possible contents and outcomes of reality, and contains everything that this reality has either left
out or cannot master. In Wittgensteinian terms, Boltanski proffers, ‘the world is everything that is the
case87’. Consequently, “while we can construct the project of knowing and representing reality, the design of
describing the world, in what would be its entirety, is not within anyone’s grasp88”. It follows that, in
moments when “something of the world precisely manifests itself”, the legitimacy of reality is at
stake. The task of institutions - as bodiless beings that make a claim to an overarching point of
view regarding the ontological and normative status of states of affairs - is to virtually maintain a
connection between reality and world to wane off the uncertainty that lingers over reality because
of its essential specificity and contingency. When an institutional task fails – in other words, when
it reveals a contradiction between reality and world - critical moments emerge.
Boltanski puts critical moments in a specific place within a hierarchy of moments in social life;
objects gain different meanings, roles and affordances in different regimes of justification89. On
the first level, he distinguishes between a pragmatic and a metapragmatic register. The first of these is
characterized by a low level of reflexivity – that is to say, “..it enables actors not to linger unduly over not
only their contradictions, but also the contradictions between reality and the world90.” Actors immersed in this
regime are concerned merely with the completion of tasks; no participants in these situations
usually have any reason, they feel, to question or confirm the validity of what is happening. The
whatness of what is, in other words, is taken for granted; there are no blowholes from the world
into reality.
In the metapragmatic register, on the other hand, actors transcend the merely practical realm.
The level of reflexivity is increased, and attention is focussed on “the question of how it is appropriate
to characterize what is happening91”. Within the metapragmatic register, then, there is another
distinction between moments of confirmation and moments of critique. Moments of confirmation – that,
for the purpose of effectivity, tend to have a public character 92 - consist of establishing that what
is the case, in fact is. In short, moments of confirmation exist as attempts to connect reality and
87 Boltanski (2011), 57 88 Ibid., 58 89 See also T. Benatouïl (1999) 90 Boltanski (2011), 6591 Boltanski (2011), 67 92 Ibid., 73
30
world, to smoothen their relation. Critical moments are precisely the opposite; they occur when
the contradiction or divergence of reality and world can no longer be suppressed and attract
everyone’s attention.
In “the power of institutions”, Boltanski justifies the presence of institutions as those beings
endowed with the task of securing a necessary minimum of agreement on the meaning and being
of things. In the next chapter, “the necessity of critique”, the potential symbolic violence
manifested by institutions is used to justify critique as a necessary counterpart to the order
represented and maintained by these institutions. There are two main instances where the fragility
of institutions manifests itself. First, the institution needs a spokesperson to make itself known
through. Since such a spokesperson has a physical body, they need certain signs to indicate the
fact that in this instance they are not speaking “from their own point of view”, but are mere
vessels for the allegedly universal rules ascribed by the institution93. Generally, people believe in
institutions and their spokespeople. However, suspicion sometimes manifests itself when the
fictitious character of institutions and the alleged objectivity of their spokespeople is iterated.
This suspicion, notwithstanding, only stands out against the semantically secure background of
institutions. This tension – formulated here as the question that “if no one took the trouble to say what
is, what would there be to criticize?94” – Boltanski calls hermeneutic contradiction. The second type of
faltering institutional reality, one that is more relevant to the issue at hand, is the one between
semantics and pragmatics. This contradiction means that semantics can contain nor satisfy all the
different contexts that occur in practice. An operation that, in essence, tries to suppress this given
is ritual. By orchestrating a set of acts and utterings that always follow the same step-by-step
rules, and doing this in one context only, ritual can be said to be an attempt to proof to oneself
and to bystanders that reality and world coincide. In other words, that the world is accurately
represented and grasped by instituted reality, and that the workings of these institutions are not
arbitrary or manifestations of a specific point of view. Thus, when ritual fails, “the world has ended
up imposing its untimely presence95.” In other words, the aim of ritual is to prove that this reality is the
only possible reality, and is not merely a contingent, specific construction made up of arbitrary
elements of the world. When this aim fails, a wedge is driven between reality and the world,
possibly drawing attention to the fact that other realities are possible. The space that thus arises is
the space of critique.
93 Ibid., 85 94 Ibid., 86 95 Boltanski (2011),, 88
31
Tests
Ritual is but an example of a test, a category of which Boltanski distinguishes three forms in On
Critique. Tests are operations in which reality and world are either demonstrated to coincide, or to
differentiate. The sort of test that seeks to consolidate something in the institutional realm and to
fix a pre-existing semantic notion is what Boltanski calls a truth test96. These tests serve the aim of
confirmation, or, in other words, to seal the divide between reality and world. Truth test aren’t
tests in the sense that they compare results with a pre-established set of rules to enquire if the
results adhere to the prescriptions, but function as statements to demonstrate that something is,
in fact, the way it is. Reality tests are also geared towards confirmation or reaffirmation of reality,
but do so in an argumentative manner, unlike truth tests, which merely seek to display the validity
of instituted reality through ritualistic acts. Reality tests are comparative in nature; they ask
whether what is happening, should be happening in this way. What should be happening, in this
sense, is what is prescribed by reality. Reality tests are critical operations towards pragmatics in
the name of semantics: “[their] performance is placed at the service of a critique that can, to be brief, called
reformist97”. Boltanski deems this type of critiques “reformist” because, in the end, it bases itself
on the premise of “the reality of reality98”. When the inadequacy or cruelty of reality is argued, we
speak of existential tests. Unlike reality tests, these types of test draw from what are often called
“subjective” experiences to show a fragment of the flux of life that is not accounted for by the
claims of reality. They attack the usual form the point of view of the deviant, and thus focus on
the fringes of reality. In this way, existential tests “open up a path to the world99”. Critiques that take
subjectivity as a starting point are what Boltanski deems radical rather than reformist critiques. It
is, then, in this line of argumentation that Boltanski cites artistic creation as a primary source of
radical critique100. In this constellation, he argues, the philosophical work of offering
interpretations of literature is the same type of operation as the sociological work of analysing
lived experiences of “ordinary people”, in the sense that both of these projects give meaning and
understanding to singular points of view. Truth tests, as we have seen, seek to smooth out
irregularities as to deny their existence. They distract attention away from the contingency of
reality by ritualistically showing instances of its convergence with the world, so as to prove its
totality. Reality tests, on the other hand, call to order deviations from reality, but still confirm said
reality. While reality tests can be critical, they can only be so in favour of reality; they aim to
confirm norms or rules that are internal to reality, albeit while making an actual argument, unlike
96 Ibid., 103 97 Ibid., 98 Ibid.,107 99 Ibid.,108 100Boltanski (2011), 108
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in truth tests. Critical operations that aim to uncover profound and deep-rooted patterns of
injustice always do so by exploiting contradictions. These contradictions are often embodied in
the most fundamental form by institutions; while institutions, in this sense, serve to normalize
and mask these contradictions, they also offer clear targets for critical operations. By embodying
societal injustice, institutions might thus, sometimes, come as a blessing in disguise.
The inevitability of hermeneutic contradiction, taken as it is, posits the institution and critique as
logically necessary counterparts that cannot exist in their own merit. Does this mean that critique
is doomed to essentially reproduce the very conditions it sought to attack, because these
conditions were also its breeding ground? Critical sociologists, Boltanski seems to imply, would
affirm; after all, this is what renders domination all-encompassing in the logic of critical
sociology101. Ordinary, everyday critique merely applies to the application of reality tests. Radical
critique, on the other hand, “opens up the possibility … of a critique of reality itself.102” . It seems that
what Boltanski calls radical critique might be of most interest in investigating routes of
emancipation, while the everyday forms of critique that he references are mainly tools necessary
to navigate social reality.
Conclusion
We have seen how contradictions within reality, and instances in which the world manifests itself
in a way that contradicts reality, open up a space for for critique. The work of critique, now, is
not to solve or reconcile these contradictions, but to exploit them. These operations “are based on
existential tests in the sense that they must be based on lived experiences103”. As we have seen, this is where
Boltanski connects critique, stemming from existential tests, to artistic expression. While
Boltanski does not further explicitly discuss art in On Critique as a realm of possible
emancipation, the aforementioned connection is important to our discussion because this gives
us a clue to sketch a comparison between Boltanski and Bourdieu with regards to the role that
arts of living have in the birth of realms of artistic critique. While Boltanski does not give much
attention to concrete artistic practices that he would deem emancipatory himself, his emphasis on
pluralistic experience and his methodological focus on micro-level phenomena like personal
disputes and collaborations, one quickly thinks of relational aesthetics and other forms of
participatory art. Fervent opposition to the theoretical conceptions of ordinary actors as
incapacitated bystanders that have no influence on or access to certain institutional arrangements (Bourriaud, 2002) 102Ibid., 33 103 Bourdieu (2011), 110
33
is usually a motivation of these practices104. While these remarks on the artistic analogue of the
pragmatic sociology of critique are speculative on my part, I concur with Claire Bishop that the
simulation of democracy in art has no intrinsic value, nor does it lead to actual democracy105.On
the other hand, Boltanski’s notion of institutions as mediators between reality and world points
us towards a possible conception of art practice as a regime of practice in which examples can be
drawn from the world in relation to hypothetical configurations of reality in a free and
experimental manner, without the fear of social disintegration or isolation that tend to preclude
the manifestation of critique in daily life. This offers – at least theoretically - the potential of
autonomous art practice to re-evaluate or negate meaning.
Bourdieu’s notion of art is useful because he convincingly sketches art as a possible means to
translate potentially-existing social positions into real ones, making way for new institutional
configurations – in other words, new configurations of reality. Boltanski, on the other hand,
provides us with an interesting view of the relationship between specific points of view – that is,
(potentially existing) positions – and institutions. Moreover, his focus on institutions rather than
fields makes his theoretical apparatus more contemporarily applicable. However, the historicity
and acknowledgement of the specific internal logic of cultural objects as a social motor is
lacking. Above all, his analysis of the institution - as a body that is at once signifying and limiting,
fragile yet hard to penetrate – might prove useful to conceive of arrangements in which
institutions offer handles for emancipation and change. I do not fully agree, however, that
Bourdieu can be accused of equating the institution with oppression; I concur that in The Rules
of Art, he has offered a clear and well-argued example in which institutional ramifications can be
used to instigate change. In a word; Boltanski might imply that “good” art is art that exploits the
contradictions inherent in political regimes, but we might still need Bourdieu’s historical analysis
of cultural positions and attitudes to find out how to exploit these contradictions. However,
Boltanski rightfully points out that if there were no institutions, “…what would be there to
criticize?106”- a reminder that without (artistic) institutions, transforming discontent into fruitful
critique would be impossible.
104 Bourriaud (1998) 105 See for example “Participation and Spectacle: where are we now?” - a Lecture given by Bishop on the occasion of Living as Form, an exhibition on the question of engaged art (New York, 2011) ; also, Artificial Hells106 Boltanski (2011), 86
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4. THE ROLE OF CRITIQUE IN THE EVOLUTION OF CAPITALISM AND THE APPROPRIATION OF ARTISTIC ATTITUDES
Introduction
The scope of this fourth and final chapter is a further development of Boltanski’s notion of
critique with regards to new ideological configurations as emerged in the eighties and nineties of
the last century. I will link the contents of On Critique that I discussed in the previous chapter to
Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism. I chose to deal with Boltanski’s work in this
order – it might seem strange to discuss his newer work first – because with Bourdieu, too, I
covered his theoretical framework before delving into an investigation of a concrete example,
namely the 19th century literary field. Likewise, whereas “On critique” covers Boltanski’s theory
of critique and institutions, “The New Spirit of Capitalism” can be seen as the field work that
contributed to this framework.
On Critique retains a rather high level of abstraction. Although Boltanski mentions concrete
examples of the mechanisms of critique in passing, these remain largely in the background. The
New Sprit of Capitalism on the other hand, which he wrote with Eve Chiapello a decade earlier,
deals with critique and its relation to capitalism through the analysis of managerial discourse and
literature of the eighties and nineties. In the previous section we have seen that the tension
between reality and world is mediated through tests. We have distinguished truth tests, reality
tests and existential tests, of which the latter two can form instruments of critique. Each of these
tests have different relations to reality and world; reality tests, while possibly aiming to change or
fix a certain course of events or state of affairs, always essentially employ criteria that are internal
to reality. In other words, they refer to a certain totality in their interventions. Existential tests, on
the other hand, aim to give legitimacy to singular experiences and concrete, specific events. They
do not acknowledge the totality of prevailing reality as the ultimate and necessary frame of all that
is and all that could be. Tersely put, they aim to prove the contingency – and thus, in the same
stroke, the illegitimacy – of reality. In this way, the contradictory and problematic nature of reality
is shown by drawing examples from the world. This focus on uniqueness of experience and the
legitimation of subjectivity seems compatible with the artistic critique of May ’68, while the social
critique that led to the transition from the first to the second spirit of capitalism focused on a call
to solidarity and collectivity, rather than individual potential and freedom. To enrich the outline
35
of the new relation of artistic values to money that Boltanski examines in New Spirit, I will also
discuss some other contemporary critiques on the state of criticism and creativity.
The multiple faces of capitalism
We will now turn to this work for a problematization and contextualization of the structures
discussed above. The opposition of art to economy that I referenced in the introduction to the
previous chapter will be explored through the two types of critique that Boltanski and Chiapello
distinguish: Artistic critique and social critique. I will define these two types of critique in detail
after explaining the several shapes that capitalism has had over the course of the late 19th through
the 20th century according to Boltanski and Chiapello.
The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello write at the beginning of the General
Introduction, is “the ideological changes that have accompanied recent transformations in capitalism.107” While
Bourdieu gives a convincing account of the role of artistic critique as a means to gain ground
against economic power in specific circumstances regarding the economic, social and cultural
field that could be considered as outdated. Bourdieu’s fields do not seem to apply anymore.
Capitalism seems adaptable to such a degree that criticism and theory cannot keep up.
But critique is not merely an unfit opponent; worse yet, it is like a feeding ground for the
transformations that capitalism makes in order to escape its grip. Boltanski and Chiapello define
three such transformations in the history of capitalism and the critiques directed towards it.
The first “spirit of capitalism” emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. The promise that
emanated from capitalist endeavours in this era consisted of security, rationality and
emancipation from inherited dependence108. All this was fuelled by an admiration for the new
industrial accumulation process and new forms of employment springing from this development.
The critique that this first spirit of capitalism was met with, firstly saw the new economic
situation as disenchanting and inauthentic. These grievances concerned the existential
dimensions that the new industrialized society and working life brought about and can be seen as
alienation in the traditionally Marxist sense. Furthermore, from an intellectual and artistic angle,
critique was fuelled by a desire for autonomy and creativity. Generally, Boltanski and Chiapello
distinguish four categories of indignation against capitalism, of which the critiques mentioned
above respectively belong to the first kind ((a), ‘disenchantment and inauthenticity’) and the second
107 Boltanski & Chiapello (2007), 3 108 Ibid., 3
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kind ((b), ‘oppression’)109. These first two forms of indignation, B&C elaborate, are forms of the
first type of critique that I mentioned above, namely artistic critique. Artistic critique stands out
from social critique; these forms tend to be in tension with one another. I will elaborate on this
later. The two categories of indignation that social critique reacts to, and to both of which the
first spirit of capitalism was subject, are (c) “capitalism as a source of poverty” and (d) “capitalism as a
source of opportunism and egoism”110. The changes that capitalism adapted to enter into its second
spirit resulted mostly from these two forms of social critique111. The second spirit of capitalism
was characterized by a focus on organized collectives rather than the individual entrepreneur. In
addition to the security that was the promise of bourgeois capitalism as seen in the nineteenth
century, this second spirit celebrated the merits of long-term planning, growth potential in career
prospects, and favourable working conditions as well as non-monetary benefits for employees.
We can see it answered to a call for supervision of accumulation that emanated from the
egoistical capitalism of the nineteenth century bourgeois class. Furthermore, an attempt to
compensate for the exploitative character of the first spirit of capitalism can be seen in the
protection that workers enjoyed under the second spirit of capitalism.In turn, the welfare state
that originated in this second capitalist spirit was met with its own critique. Whereas the second
spirit of capitalism was the result of the demands of the two forms of social critique mentioned
above, its downfall was set in motion by a critique of artistic nature, stemming from an
indignation with the mechanization, massification and monitoring that were the other side of the
coin of the welfare state. The dissatisfaction with these developments, calling for more creativity,
autonomy and the freedom to undertake specifically human endeavours, led to what we know as
may ’68. Whereas the transition from the first spirit of capitalism into the second was triggered
by the demands of social critique, the demands of May ’68 – which, Boltanski and Chiapello
argue, led us into the new and current spirit of capitalism – were artistic in nature. Paolo Virno,
for one, has argued in a similar vein; one of the ideas he developed in A Grammar of the
Multitude was that the mode of production of the culture industry – namely, “virtuosic” –
anticipated post-fordist production in general112.113
109 Boltanski & Chiapello (2007) 37 110 Ibid., 111 Ibid., 199 112 Virno (2004), 56 113 Also, see Hardt and Negri’s Notion of immaterial labour becoming the new hegemonic order of all labour in Empire, p.30 among others
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The incompatibility of the artistic and social critique
Artistic critique is indignation with the disenchantment and homogenization that capitalism
brings about. The bohemian artistic resistance of Flaubert and Baudelaire as discussed in the
second chapter offers a fine – and the earliest – example of this type of critique; a “paradigmatic
formulation”, even114. Rather than calling out the capitalist order for its egoist incentives and the
material inequality it causes, the artistic critique points out the hypocrisy of the moralistic
attitudes of those in power. Of the four sources of indignation I discussed above, the artistic
critique is aimed against the first to sorts, respectively “capitalism as a source of disenchantment and
inauthenticity” and “capitalism as a source of oppression”115. The social critique, on the other hand,
pertains to issues of egoism and unbridled accumulation and, as a result, the growing inequality
between social classes. These accord to the second two sources of indignation as identified by
Boltanski116. In contrast to artistic critique, social critique appeals to the morals that the former
eschews. This fact is an indication of the fact that these two forms of critique, insofar as they
indeed pertain to their common set of grievances, have structures that are not very well
compatible. The first two sources of indignation, after all, spring from a desire for individual
expression and freedom, whilst the latter two demand solidarity and unity. It is easy to see that
the flipside of these demands are precisely that which stirs dissatisfaction from the other side;
calls for solidarity and fraternity have served as a pretext for totalitarianism at more than one
occasion. The demands of the artistic critique, on the other hand, can spiral into a culture of
egoism and opportunism. All in all, the protuberance of the demands of one type of critique
forms the other critique’s object.
Boltanski thus paints a picture in which the two sides of capitalism cannot be targeted in the
same stroke. Social critique targets capitalisms egoism, opportunism and poverty, while artistic
critique attacks its disenchantment and alleged opposition to creativity and authenticity. The
satisfaction of the demands of one of these critiques can lead to abandonment of demands of the
other. More precisely, following May ’68, artistic critique has had an unforeseen role in “the revival
of capitalism”:
“Autonomy was exchanged for security, opening the way for a new spirit of capitalism extolling the virtues of
mobility and adaptability, whereas the previous spirit was unquestionably more concerned with security than with
liberty117”
114 Bolanski & Chiapello (2007), 38 115 Ibid., 37 116 Ibid.117 Boltanski & Chiapello, 199
38
Boltanski and Chiapello here explicitly tie the birth of a new, more tenacious form of capitalism
with the birth of the ideology of creativity and fulfilment of the self. The attack on
disenchantment and inauthenticity, paired with a quest for autonomy, proved then to be
politically and practically compatible with an “even libertarian way of making profit”, advocating
the alleged egalitarian and boundless opportunities of the market. By staging the empty and
unguided nature of pure accumulation as an arena of “self-realization” and mental emancipation,
the new spirit of capitalism quickly flourished by satisfying the most vocal demands of may ’68,
albeit cynically. By doing so, the New Spirit appeared to “transcend anti-capitalism as well [as
capitalism]118”.
Boltanski proffers that “the destructive effects of an unconstrained capitalism by themselves create favourable
terrain for the revival of critique119.” However, he also underscores the importance of the revival of a
social critique, which would once again inscribe constraints to capitalist and exploitative practices
into the law. He therefore believes in the restriction of capitalist modes of domination through
existing legislative institutions, rather than subverting a current value system through innovative
praxis that once sprung from the art field120. Autonomy is not the only possible artistic attitude.
Furthermore, autonomy as an art of living was not invented in may ’68. That a yearning for
autonomy has been enlisted and reified by managers and capitalists, in other words, does not
mean that all potentiality of artistic critique has been neutralized. The propaganda of creativity,
autonomy and flexibility does not have to be insurmountable, but only if it keeps being exposed,
analysed and made visible as the historically specific value system it is.
Immanent critique of the art world can and has to extend into a social critique because to
recognize the socio-historical, structural and economic conditions of artistic practice is to
acknowledge the fact that artists do not act in a vacuum, but enlist – unwittingly or not -
symbolic power either to the service of emancipation or domination, and therefore always set in
motion or react to mechanisms in “the real world”121. A higher degree of artistic autonomy thus
is not favourable because of the adage of art for art’s sake, isolation and eccentricity itself, but
because a relatively autonomous art practice could indicate the possibility of overcoming the
most tenacious value systems and mental structures.
118 Ibid., 201 119 Ibid.,, 516 120 Ibid., 399121 Bourdieu & Haacke, 2
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Conclusion We have seen that Boltanski points to the artistic lifestyle and attitude, first strongly manifested in
19th century France, ended up aiding justifications for the new forms of capitalism and
accumulation that emerged in the 80’s by annexing the beforehand artistic values of autonomy,
elusiveness and individuality to organizational and ideological strategies. He indicates the alleged
insurmountable opposition of social and artistic critique, the former of which aims to assure
equality, solidarity and material quality of life, as a cause. However, he also assures the reader that
“the advantage thus secured [of capitalism’s emancipation from critique] consists in gaining time, not in a definitive
victory.122”. It thus seems that the current alleged crisis of critique might be specific to this
moment in history, just like all major crises and revolutions, artistic or otherwise. The associated
artistic values of the art of living that accompanied the emergence of the art field have, a century
later, contributed to a new justificatory regime in capitalism that seems immune to radical
criticism. This picture is perpendicular to the configuration of fields that were the object of
Bourdieu’s analyses, and points us to evolved mechanisms regarding the complete assimilation of
cultural capital by economic power structures. Furthermore, a conclusion we most pull from New
Spirit is that ‘autonomy’ does not have intrinsic value as an attitude or statement. However, I
disagree with the supposed radical opposition between artistic and social critique; political and
social change has to be preceded by a shift in mental structures, for which art practice eminently
serves as a laboratory.
122 Boltanski & Chiapello, 516
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5. GENERAL CONCLUSION “The return to the sociology of institutions” that Boltanski calls for to form a middle ground between a
too all-encompassing notion of domination and a social theory that stops at “common sense”. As
the beings that mediate and facilitate meaning, they are the necessary counterpart of critique and
form the concrete context in or against which revolutions are to happen, artistic or social.
However, Bourdieu’s theory of the artistic field does not seem to preclude this when we conceive
of institution as the mechanisms within and between fields and subfields instead of concrete and
physical beings like publishers, museums and foundations.
Boltanski’s conception of reality, world and their contradictions has great merit in understanding
which situations cause social unrest, and where or when critical potential is to be mobilized. In
art practice, these dynamics can serve as a clue which conceptual antinomies to exacerbate. In On
Critique, contradictions between reality and world appear through tests. Boltanski mentions, in
passing, that existential tests123 - which form the basis for radically critical operations – are related
to artistic practice in the sense that they “undo the generally accepted relations between symbolic forms and
states of affairs124”. This brings us to an important issue; In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski
sketches a schism between “social critique” – that is, critique of poor material living conditions,
exploitation and individualism – and “artistic critique”- that is, critique of disenchantment and
lack of autonomy. These two forms of critique, he argues, emanate from interests that are
fundamentally incompatible, because artistic critique always ends up strengthening the
justification regime of capitalism or the exploiting “class”, if there even is such a thing as social
class anymore. While his account of the appropriation of artistic values and attitudes that were
once emancipatory by management culture are quite compelling, his arguments for the
irreconcilable opposition between artistic and social critiques are philosophically quite weak; the
claim that artistic stakes necessarily preclude appeals to security and solidarity seems to imply that
the scope of artistic practice is limited to an art of living that was revolutionary in the 19th
century. Moreover, it is precisely the moralistic impulse to choose between two parts of a false
dichotomy that radical art practice has the potential to resist125. Like we have said, two opposites
can contain entire value systems; these systems can be challenged by refusing to submit the
associated contradiction, or by challenging its validity by making it all the more explicit.
123 Boltanski (2011) ,108-110 124 Ibid., 109
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Crucial to the quasi-creative management discourse so apparent in neoliberalism is a jargon of
individual willpower and ingenuity that should, supposedly, be enough reason that people ought
to save themselves to keep afloat in life. This view is problematic for reasons explained by
Boltanski himself, as we discussed in the previous chapter; it leads to precarisation and
incapability of individuals to make sense of their socio-economic situation and thus to effectively
organise politically. It inhibits collective action, because this requires more or less clear
institutional frames of reference and power structures to use as a point of reference or dispute. It
is for this reason that I find Boltanski’s emphasis on the critical capacities of individuals all the
less convincing; while he rejects the notion of the so-called common sense as a driving force for
all fruitful dispute and agreement, I do not see what explanation for the critical capacities within
individuals he proposes instead. For critique to be effective, one still needs to acknowledge the
fact that societal structures are the result of specific historical constellations.
Regarding the phenomenon of critique and its rudimentary, philosophical relation to art, I thus
argue that Bourdieu’s analysis of the 19th century art field in France and its associated conclusions
remain relevant. In a word, major socio-political events are always the result of an intersection of
specific coordinates in a social field.
I suggest, however, that a more pragmatic approach to critique is not altogether incompatible
with the notion of the possibility of critique – understood by me as the birth of relatively
autonomous realms of practice and meaning that is ushered by the taking of potentially-existing
positions by a double negation – that is implied in The Rules of Art. Critical practice in Bourdieu
should understood not only as the activity of intellectuals and sociologists that he describes, but
also the gestures of not-belonging of the split habitus, like Bourdieu and Flaubert. The “programme
for the collective action of intellectuals” merely lies in deciphering these types of critical acts in order to
postulate their conditions of possibility126. In other words, while Boltanski is right to stress “the
disseminated nature of power127”, he does, I think, not offer a satisfactory and concise account of how
the relationship of domination and critique today is structured. He seems to prefer confidence in
so-called “critical collectives” and “horizontal relations128” over a focus on vertical power-structures;
however, I argue with Bourdieu that “temporary zones of autonomy129” can arise by being conscious
of those very vertical power-structures and their historicity. Moreover, though Boltanski admits
126 Bourdieu (2011), 339 127 Bourdieu (2011), 47 128 Bourdieu (2011), 46 129 Ibid.
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that “ordinary people rarely call into question, at least in the normal course of social life, the general framework in
which the situations that provoke their indignation and protest are inscribed130”, his solutions to this problem
are not entirely satisfactory because he seems more concerned with stressing the latent critical
potential in individuals than with developing a programme that would offer the type of
overarching position that even he deems necessary to criticize the underlying framework of
domination.
All in all, Boltanski seems to deem critique a necessary anthropological phenomenon131. For
Bourdieu, the critique is a structural occurrence in the historically materialist sense. While I agree
that it would indeed be very unproductive to “just have critical intellectuals on the one side and the rest of
the people who just believe things, on the other132”, I disagree that this is a stance that Bourdieu can justly
be accused of. Boltanski, on the other hand, even seems to agree that the critic needs to be a
person that somehow adopts the type of overarching view that ordinary actors usually don’t have
due to the specific position in space, time and society they occupy133. Perhaps these bodiless
beings incarnate can be found in Bourdieu’s double-bound figure, at home in none of the
prevailing value systems; artists may be suitable for this job, since their work and gestures are not
necessarily the expression of their own point of view. These figures are the actors that have the
opportunity of exploiting the structural lacunae that are inherent to the space of possibles; this space
is not merely, like Simon Susen’s reading, a set of “structural constraints134”. I do concur, however,
with Boltanski in his emphasis on the importance of critique as a collective endeavour; while I
think Bourdieu’s analysis of the phenomenon of artistic revolution as a seizing of the structural
lacunae of the space of possibles, he seems to assign this task to heroic, eccentric individuals. I
would suggest that such an endeavour might just as well be carried out by a collective of
economically or socially uncategorizable individuals.
Furthermore, I argue that the Habitus-Field model remains convincing because Boltanski does
not offer a parallel for Bourdieu’s habitus. By this, I mean that he leaves the explanation for the
variety of dispositions in actors rather blank. His notion of the different ways in which actors
experience reality, world, and their cohesions and contradictions seems limited to elusive “critical
capacities”. The manifestation of these capacities then largely seem to occur when provoked by
circumstances that are either of purely anthropological nature, or ascribed to the aforementioned
130 Boltanski (2011), 32 131 Boltanski, Celikates, Lijster (2015), 115 132 Ibid., 121 133 Ibid., 123134 Boltanski & Chiapello, 319
43
relationship of reality and world; in any case, his explanations for the relationship between actor’s
motives to act in a certain way retain a high degree of exteriority and descriptiveness. As Andrea
Fraser concurs with Hans Haacke135 - “..the fact that we are trapped in our field does not mean that we have
no effect on, and are not effected by, what takes place beyond its boundaries”; it does not follow from the
(alleged or actual) opposition of artistic logic to economic logic, or of art practice to social
practice, that one is completely out of the force field of the other, or that their interplay is
doomed to keep on reproducing or strengthening the powers that be.
The everyday critical capacities that Boltanski stresses seem to occur mainly in situations where
problems need to be solved, rather than caused. Boltanski’s analysis of critique - insofar as it
mostly occurs in the form of “reality tests” - and deliberation mainly applies to problem-solving
rather than problem-causing. To challenge the reality of reality in the way that Boltanski’s
framework prescribes still, to some extent, relies on established value oppositions. Social change
usually follows after a crisis of values following problematization; “a task that was until recently
recently reserved for the artist or dabbler”, thus writes Pascal Gielen136. To guarantee a more
autonomous intellectual and artistic practice, the task of art should remain to highlight the
contingency of oppositions within value systems. For this task to succeed, we need institutions to
navigate meaning in the first place. To apprehend the genesis, and thus the validity of these
institutions, they have to be apprehended in their specific historical context. Let me conclude that
a more pragmatic approach to institutions can – and should – remain aware that individual actors
are not simply nondescript individual actors, and that reflexive methods need a strong normative
orientation. Critical practice has to be grounded in specific configurations; if critique is
everywhere, it is nowhere.
135 Fraser (2005) 136 Gielen (2013)
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