The Instance of the Veil: Bourdieu's Flaubert and the Textuality of Social Science

Abstract

P IERRE BOURDIEU'S LES REGLES DE L'ART, translated as The Rules of Art,1 announces itself as a theoretically sophisticated an mbitious bid or the primacy and necessity of sociology in framing critical approaches to art. In this essay, I examine how Bourdieu uses a reading of a text, Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale,2 to advance his theory and, in particular, how Bourdieu's idea of literature as a veiled of social reality allows sociology to cast itself as the final unveiling pure and simple. In Bourdieu's reading, all that prevents L'Education from appearing as a sociological system is the disavowal implicit in form. Consequently, revelation is the only thing that sociology claims to bring to its reading of the text. But in this way, Flaubert's exemplary text is annexed as a sort of proxy unconscious for sociological enlightenment, and any question of the sociological text's own veiling is sidestepped. The problem I want to raise here is not that Bourdieu does not respect sufficiently the sanctity of literature, although he does praise it in terms that ultimately deny it intellectual lucidity and make it categorically dependent on the patronage of science. Rather, I wish to examine the role Bourdieu's idea of literature plays in his claims to scientificity. The first half of this article details how this role works in Les regles, and questions to what extent Bourdieu's own text can be free of literary writing. The latter half of the article takes a passage from L'Education as a test case to explore how far Bourdieu's oppositions of internal to external reading, and to scientific writing, can be sustained. I want to question, from as many angles as possible, scientific writing's claim to autonomy from the