Bourdieu and Literature by John R. W. Speller (review)

John Speller’s study of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is a lucid, timely attempt to rehabilitate his writings on literature, refuting the standard accusation by his Anglo–American critics that he was both too ‘French’ and too ‘essentialist’, primarily concerned with reducing the literature of his own country to its social conditions. In six tightly argued chapters Speller reveals in Bourdieu a far more nuanced theoretical commitment to the value and function of literature not only in France but at a ‘transnational’ level, from his diffident beginnings as a working–class, provincial ‘outsider’ to his international reputation as professor at the Collège de France who was regularly consulted on government cultural policy. This commitment is shown to have both personal and intellectual roots, which distinguish Bourdieu from contemporaries such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, whose chosen escape route from the overbearing shadow of Sartrean existentialism was the linguistic and philosophical turn of structuralism. Instead, he gravitated via Gaston Bachelard to the ‘relational’ scientific thinking of sociology, a discipline that spoke more to his sense of marginality than the literary studies traditionally favoured by the bourgeois Parisian elite. And yet, therein lies a fundamental contradiction in Bourdieu’s thought: his lifelong attempt to reconcile staunchly egalitarian values with a latent elitism. For all his professed desire to render literature and high art more ‘accessible’ and socially relevant by disassociating them from embedded social privilege and cultural tastes, there is a side to Bourdieu — encapsulated in his theory of literary autonomy — that insistently argues for the sacrosanct uniqueness of literature, its constant vulnerability to the corrupting influences of commercialization and excessive state and media intervention. To his credit, Speller intermittently concedes that Bourdieu often wants to have his cake and eat it: he calls for the exclusive protection of the avant–garde as the supposed guardian of ‘universal’ values, champions conceptual artist Hans Haacke for his mass appeal while tacitly endorsing the exclusionary notion of ‘art for art’, and passionately defending those priests of high culture Flaubert and Proust (the former for establishing a homology between social position and aesthetic tastes, the latter for his syntactically complex depiction of reality). However, to overstate these contradictions, not to mention some of Bourdieu’s more idealistic ambitions (such as his ill–fated attempt to create a self–financing international collectivity of writers), would undermine one of Speller’s central claims: that Bourdieu’s writings on literature remain highly relevant to our contemporary educational and cultural policy. And while it is hardly Bourdieu’s fault that he died in 2002, just before the explosion of the Internet, Twitter, and blogging, these social media have significantly redefined the ways in which we think about and disseminate culture. The nagging suspicion remains, then, that Bourdieu’s theories on literature, while certainly too sophisticated to be dismissed as ‘essentialist’, are nonetheless already beginning to lag behind the times. That said, perhaps fittingly for a work on Bourdieu, Speller’s study will appeal as much to the novice as to the specialist, since it complements its specific focus on literature with an admirably wide–ranging introduction to some of the sociologist’s key concepts and intellectual influences.