STEPHEN THOMSON

 

THE INSTANCE OF THE VEIL: BOURDIEU'S FLAUBERT AND THE TEXTUALITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

PIERRE BOURDIEU'S LES RÈGLES DE L'ART, translated as The Rules of Art,1 announces itself as a theoretically sophisticated and ambitious bid for the primacy and necessity of sociology in framing critical approaches to art. In this essay, I examine how Bourdieu uses a reading of a literary text, Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale, to advance his theory and, in particular, how Bourdieu’s idea of literature as a "veiled unveiling" of social reality allows sociology to cast itself as the final unveiling pure and simple. In Bourdieu’s reading, all that prevents L’Education from appearing as a sociological system is the disavowal implicit in literary form. Consequently, revelation is the only thing that sociology claims to bring to its reading of the literary text. But in this way, Flaubert’s exemplary literary text is annexed as a sort of proxy unconscious for sociological enlightenment, and any question of the sociological text’s own veiling is sidestepped. The problem I want to raise here is not that Bourdieu does not respect sufficiently the sanctity of literature, although he does praise it in terms that ultimately deny it intellectual lucidity and make it categorically dependent on the patronage of "science." Rather, I wish to examine the role Bourdieu’s idea of literature plays in his claims to scientificity. The first half of this article details how this role works in Les règles, and questions to what extent Bourdieu’s own text can be free of "literary writing." The latter half of the article takes a passage from L’Education as a test case to explore how far Bourdieu’s oppositions of internal to external reading, and literary to scientific writing, can be sustained. I want to question, from as many angles as possible, scientific writing’s claim to autonomy from the literary, a claim that, it seems to me, is a curious end to an argument that sets out to denounce the pretended autonomy of art. 

First, however, I have to establish that this pretention to "science" is the end, in the sense of either an intention or a result, of Bourdieu’s text. The case is not self-evident. After all, Bourdieu explicitly disavows scientistic delusions of grandeur from the first page, and surely his longstanding commitment to reflexivity moves in the opposite direction. All this notwithstanding, his text is rather prone to making finalizing, totalizing claims in order to be able to say what steps must be taken "to fully understand" the rules of such and such a game. Nor is it entirely shy of claiming the word science itself. An insistence on the ultimate supremacy of sociology is, I would suggest, the most pernicious and unnecessary aspect of Bourdieu’s system-building. Furthermore, it cannot be discounted as an incidental stylistic mannerism, especially as it highlights a serious problem for Bourdieu’s ambitious claims to reflexivity. For The Rules seems at times more concerned to recommend reflexivity to others than to carry it out on itself. Literature as conceived by The Rules is ideal fodder for this paradoxically vicarious reflexivity, because it acts out the problems of textuality—the need for interpretation and the contingency of interpretations—in such an exemplary way as to free the scientific text of them. To show how this works, I will have to start by looking in more detail at how Bourdieu conceives of literature.