Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Rancière on art/aesthetics and politics: the origins of disagreement, 1963-1985

摘要

Rancière published two substantial criticisms of the work of Bourdieu in the early 1980s. Itudis possible that these were provoked by his sense that he needed to oppose what heudconsidered to be the sociological reduction of aesthetic taste offered by Bourdieu inudDistinction (Bourdieu, 1986, [1979]) at precisely the moment when he (Rancière) wasudbeginning to articulate his commitment to the potential of aesthetic expression as a mode ofudpolitical resistance. Except in so far as it draws upon some of the retrospective reflectionsudoffered by Rancière in his introductions to the re-issues of his early texts, this paper examinesudthe parallel development of the thinking of the two men up to the mid-1980s – but notudbeyond. The discussion is situated socio-historically and, by definition, does not seek to offerudcomparatively any transhistorical assessment of the values of the positions adopted by theudtwo men. I argue that Rancière misrepresented the character of Bourdieu’s sociological workudby failing to recognize the underlying phenomenological orientation of his thinking. Bourdieuudsuppressed this orientation in the 1960s but, after the May events of 1968, it enabled him toudexpose the extent to which the practices of both science and art operate within constructedud‘fields’ in strategic distinction from popular primary experience. The challenge is toudintroduce an ongoing dialogue between primary and constructed cultures rather than toudsuppose that either social science or art possesses intrinsic autonomy.