The politics of action in our society, as it is and not as the socius of the sociologists, eventually concerns the politics of the avant-garde: officially an outdated issue. This is demonstrable, if at all, practically.
Our society is hierarchical, and also capitalistic. At the most general level originality is simply absent. The refutation of originality is only deployed at a quite elevated level. It cannot, in fact, be deployed universally.
Since we exist in this particular society, at this particular time, we are obliged to take a view on postmodernism, undoubtedly a privileged part of capitalist culture, as that which has supplanted all previous, failed, avant-gardes. Postmodernism is obviously not without its cretins, liars, mystagogues, hypocrites and opportunists, but leaving this aside, we would still expect it to have been transformed, by the logic of the market economy, into an entropic system. This is what, in effect, has happened. The critique of originality has supplanted its object on the basis of its unaccountable, infallible and absolute originality. What used to be called post-structuralism represents, fundamentally, a structural avant-garde that disavows itself as such
We are therefore justified in persisting with the analysis of the works of this particular avant-garde, which have certainly had an influence on critical thinking in general, in ways that can be both beneficial and deleterious.
As an example of a certain critical methodology, its presuppositions and consequences, it is worth considering Bourdieu and Darbel’s “The Love of Art”, which concerns itself, albeit obliquely, with the politics of the avant-garde, and itself retains, after thirty-five years, an official avant-garde status.
Bourdieu and Darbel’s thesis is as follows: the enjoyment of art is an in itself arbitrary product of education, ultimately sanctioned by the state, and not subject to appropriation outside of this sanction. Bourdieu and Darbel assert the impossibility of “education that owes nothing to education”. We should not be misled by an impulse to accept these conclusions on the basis that art is against austerity, and by implication something fundamentally useless. The question being posed is whether the individual appropriation of ideas is at all possible in this society. Art, as the particular object of analysis, could just as easily be substituted for theory, for example. The conclusions authorised would be:
1. Theory cannot be appropriated outside of the state’s own sanction
2. Owing to the state’s economic self-regulation, theory can never be appropriated against the state
These conclusions are not universally valid, but rather presuppose the complete comprehension of society by its owners. For a number of reasons this cannot be applicable to the market economy. It is difficult to judge whether or not Bourdieu and Darbel are believers, since their equation of art and religion supposes religion to be simultaneously true and false, but their sociology is ultimately an assertion of the divine government of the world.
I would like to contend that society is in not governed competently, let alone divinely, and that this conclusion, in the case of Bourdieu and Darbel’s “The Love of Art” is derived not from reality, but from their own methodology, and ultimately their status as radical thinkers.
Radicalism, as the synthesis of originality and contestation, is only meaningful in the context of a certain economy of ideas. The phenomenology of pure radicalism would be as follows:
1. Reality is subsumed by an absent idea.
2. Reality is coherent to the extent that it excludes all original ideas, since they are already formally subsumed.
3. The original idea derealises this formal supersession, but does not in itself subsume reality; the original idea qua original idea, as an attempt to comprehend reality, is still only coherent as an apprehension, not yet as something intended.
4. The idea itself becomes coherent by remaining strictly an apprehension while disavowing this condition, by becoming the pure opposition to reality coherent as apprehension, such that it no longer needs to be, in itself, an apprehension.
5. Radicalism as such generates as its compliment an imaginary antithetical order that reciprocally supports it as a meaningful idea, and whose perfection is derived in its entirety from this antithetical orientation.
It is consequently easy to recognise in radicalism a style of exposition where all kinds of imaginary qualities are attributed to whatever is opposed, provided they are conceived negatively. From this we can adduce the reasons for theoretical illusion of a coherent bourgeois society in “The Love of Art”.
Pure radicalism necessarily diverges from the Marxist system of analysis, while routinely neglecting to stress this divergence, or its implications. So in “The Love of Art”, the Marx-ish conclusion that the bourgeoisie are the occluded managers of social reality is asserted, contra Marx’s key conclusion that the bourgeoisie’s possession of social reality is always inherently unstable, without any explanation being given as to how this incompatible conclusion had formerly been reached.
We must bear in mind, as Bourdieu and Darbel certainly do, that they participate in the management of the society they criticise. Their attack on the orientation of this society is simultaneously a defence its operational integrity:
“Only a pedagogic authority can break the circle of ‘cultural needs’ which allow a lasting and assiduous disposition to cultural practice to be formed only by regular and prolonged practice”, necessarily, “a practice which is both arbitrary and initially arbitrarily imposed”
“To grant the work of art the power to awaken the grace of aesthetic inspiration in all people, however culturally disadvantaged they may be, and to produce through itself the conditions of its own diffusion, is to sanction the attribution of all abilities to the unfathomable fates of grace or to the arbitrary of ‘talent’, whereas in reality they are always the products of unequal education”
All of which is a straightforward enough demonstration of the ethics of Kierkegaard’s counterfeiter: an ostensible opposition to a particular bureaucracy underwriting the imagined coherence of this bureaucracy, and consequently the practice that depends on it. “The Love of Art” should be understood accordingly:
A pedagogic authority: “only a pedagogic authority can break the circle of ‘cultural needs’ which allow a lasting and assiduous disposition to cultural practice to be formed only by regular and prolonged practice”.
