Page 98 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 89

Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

Bourdieu’s general sociology had posited that, without excep-
tion, all human practices can be treated as ‘economic practices
directed towards the maximizing of material or symbolic profit’
(Bourdieu, 1977, p. 183). Hence his inclination to view the
intelligentsia as self-interested traders in cultural capital. For
Bourdieu, it followed that professional intellectuals were best
considered as a subordinate fraction of the same social class as
the bourgeoisie. Defining the dominant class as that possessed
of a high overall volume of capital, whatever its source—whether
economic, social or cultural—he located the intellectuals in the
dominant class by virtue of their access to the latter. The dominant
class thus includes a dominant fraction, the bourgeoisie proper,
which disproportionately controls ‘economic capital’, and a domi-
nated fraction, the intelligentsia, which disproportionately
controls ‘cultural capital’. The most apparently disinterested of
cultural practices are therefore, for Bourdieu, essentially material
in character. Even when analysing the more ‘purely artistic’ forms
of literary activity, the ‘anti-economic economy’ of the field of
‘restricted’ as opposed to ‘large-scale’ cultural production, he
noted how ‘symbolic, long-term profits ...are ultimately recon-
vertible into economic profits’ (Bourdieu, 1993a, p. 54) and how
avant-garde cultural practice remained dependent on the ‘posses-
sion of substantial economic and social capital’ (p. 67).

The artistic and academic fields
In The Rules of Art, Bourdieu resumed many of the themes first
broached in Distinction, especially the role of cultural discernment
as a marker of class position. Here he explained how Flaubert,
Baudelaire and Manet had been crucial to the institution of an
‘autonomous artistic field’ of salons, publishing houses, pro-
ducers, commentators, critics, distributors, and so on; and to the
establishment of a notion of ‘art for art’s sake’, which measured
authenticity as ‘disinterestedness’. For Bourdieu, the latter
notion marked the genesis of the modern artist or writer as ‘a
fulltime professional, dedicated to one’s work in a total and
exclusive manner, indifferent to the exigencies of politics and to
the injunctions of morality’ (Bourdieu, 1996, pp. 76–7). This new

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