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Contemporary Cultural Theory

politics have yielded strikingly original interpretations, none
more so than in his film criticism. But like Adorno and Marcuse,
he tends both to exaggerate the social system’s capacity for
dominative integration and to underestimate the possibilities
for resistance and change. In The Ticklish Subject, for example, he
analyses two British films, Brassed Off and The Full Monty, as
‘stories about the traumatic disintegration of old-style working-
class male identity’ (p. 351). In the first film, Zizek’s interest is in
the brass band’s decision to continue playing despite the loss of
their jobs; in the second, in the striptease that marks its con-
clusion. These represent ‘two modes of coming to terms with the
catastrophic loss’, he writes, ‘heroically renouncing the last
vestiges of false narcissistic dignity and accomplishing the act for
which one is grotesquely inadequate’. The sad thing, he contin-
ues, is that this is precisely our situation today: ‘none of the critics
of capitalism, none of those who describe so convincingly the
deadly vortex into which the so-called process of globalization
is drawing us, has any well-defined notion of how we can get rid
of capitalism’ (p. 352). For all the exuberance with which Zizek
prosecutes his practical criticism, his work tends thus to repeat
that most fundamental of Frankfurt School tropes, its enduring
cultural pessimism.

BOURDIEU: FROM THE SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE TO CRITICAL THEORY

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), Professor of Sociology at the
Collège de France, might appear an unlikely candidate for inclu-
sion under the rubric of critical theory. An erstwhile structuralist,
whose work sometimes seemed to run parallel to that of Foucault,
an erstwhile anthropologist and former student of Lévi-Strauss,
he was in many respects a quintessentially ‘French’ theorist. But
he distanced himself from the ‘objectivism’ of structural anthro-
pology, while remaining stubbornly resistant to post-structuralist
deconstruction (Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu, 1984, p. 495).
Moreover, his work engaged very directly with both Marxist and
Weberian traditions in social theory. One commentator has even
observed that it ‘is best understood as the attempt to push class

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