Bourdieu’s Genetic Structuralism

Abstract

Since the centenary of Edouard Manet’s death, there has been a restless interest in the artist’s work within the Anglophone institutional context. Essays, books, and a steady stream of large-scale retrospectives in renowned art museums have all contributed to a seemingly endless process of intellectual production – a ‘Manet Industry’ of sorts. Faced with the superabundance of Manet scholarship, one could be forgiven for asking whether we have had our fill of the painter, of whether anything new can be said about his work. Pierre Bourdieu’s recently translated Manet: A Symbolic Revolution shows that we are not only far from sating our hunger to learn more about Manet’s artistic practice, but that we have barely begun to properly ingest (let alone digest) its historical genesis and import. Divided into two parts – a lecture course at the Collège de France across the academic years of 1989–1999 and 1999–2000 and an unfinished book manuscript composed with Marie-Claire Bourdieu and titled Manet Heresiarch: Genesis of the Artistic and Critical Fields – Bourdieu’s book offers a remarkable contribution to Manet scholarship that will no doubt be a central point of reference for scholars interested in the painter and his legacy. While the unfinished manuscript offers useful crystallisations, it is on the lecture courses at the Collège that this review focuses.