The Rules of Misreading: Pierre Bourdieu and the Rhetoric of Antiaestheticism

While recent critics have made considerable efforts to “rethink the category of the aesthetic” (as Isobel Armstrong puts it), they have generally done so by trying to advance a positive case for the aesthetic and by seeking to demonstrate that such categories as aesthetic autonomy and disinterestedness need not be surrendered to reactionaries. In other words, they have sought to demonstrate that the aesthetic is compatible with progressive politics. The argument of this essay is, however, that the conversation about “rethinking the aesthetic” is incomplete as long as it doesn't attend to the ways in which the antiaesthetic discourse operates. How exactly have the category of the aesthetic and the discipline of aesthetics become so problematic? In order to address this question, the present essay turns to Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction, without a doubt the most ferocious and most influential polemical attack on the aesthetic: no other volume has done more to undermine both a broadly Kantian strand of aesthetics and the status of the category of the aesthetic among scholars in literary studies. The essay explores in detail how Bourdieu construes Kant's aesthetic theory and the aesthetic discourse in general as disingenuous and unselfconscious, an expression of bourgeois ideology masquerading as a theory of taste. Such a vision of aesthetics is, however, rooted in a series of deliberate conflations and misreadings: while he conflates Kant, aesthetics, and aestheticism, Bourdieu also offers a reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment that is not only tendentious but also extremely implausible. As detailed textual analysis demonstrates, Bourdieu's claims about Kant's disgust toward popular taste—in many ways the centerpiece of his attack on Kantian aesthetic theory—have no basis in the text of the third Critique. This essay's claim is that this failure to engage the actual arguments of aesthetic theory is in fact central to a certain version of antiaesthetic discourse.