Pynchon & Bourdieu (thank you, Matthew Cissel!)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Matthew,

thanks for reporting about your research project on AtD!

Made me read again some Pierre 'sociology is a martial art' Bourdieu 
after many years.

Good sociology of art and literature (f.e. Adorno, Bourdieu, Hauser or 
Luhmann) can indeed
intensify the artistic and literary experience. Like, for that matter, 
psychoanalytic approaches
to art and literature (cf. Freud or Heinz Kohut's take on Thomas Mann) can.

There is, however, always (although Bourdieu tries to play this down; 
cf. Mais qui a créé les
'créateurs'?, pp. 207-221 in PB: Questions de Sociologie, Paris 1984) 
the danger of reductionism.
Shall say: Social structure is NOT a determinant. And Bourdieu's notion 
of 'habitus' perhaps
too deterministic. In my opinion, that is.

Don't get me wrong: Bourdieu was certainly one of the most important 
social scientists of the 20th
century. And he also knew, unlike Habermas and Luhmann, how to make 
fruitful use of statistics.

Not to forget: Bourdieu was a good photographer!

http://www.deichtorhallen.de/501.html

The following made me think of Pynchon's transformation from Gravity's 
Rainbow to Vineland:

"Through society's imagination [of the author's public persona], 
intransparent and like an undeniable
fact of blind necessity [---> Durkheim's 'faits sociaux'], interposing 
between author and work, society
intervenes even in the heart of the artistic project, dresses the artist 
with its demands or repulsions,
its expectations or its indifference", as Bourdieu already wrote in the 
1960s (own translation from pp. 86-7 of PB: Zur Soziologie der 
symbolischen Formen. Frankfurt a.M. 1970).

Though with GR Pynchon had already written the 'Great American Novel' 
(and thus, as one might think, fulfilled all expectations, be they 
personal or social or whatever), he - think of the Slow Learner
intro or the essays or the blurbs - started to readjust to society's 
expectations during the 1980s
and then came back with a more consumable novel in order to reach a 
wider US-American audience.
Therefore the downsizing: From the world to California, from rockets to 
a little pistol.


Kai