Notes on Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art

These notes are part of a series and I'd welcome response.

“As for the threat that science might post to the liberty and singularity of the literary experience, it suffices, to do justice to the matter, to observe that the ability, produced by science, to explain and understand that experience—and thus to give oneself to the possibility of a genuine freedom from one’s determinations—is offered to all those who want to and can appropriate it.” (Preface xvii)


I greatly appreciate the idea that explaining and understanding the literary experience can offer a “genuine freedom” from one’s determinations, and that this possibility should be offered to all those “who want to and can appropriate it.” But a distinction is being made here between the literary experience (all the things that go into the making of a work of literature) and the work of literature itself. And scientific analysis is certainly well-suited tell us a lot about the “literary experience.” But of course isn’t one of the promises of literature itself that it can explain and understand experience, and in so doing give us the possibility of a genuine freedom from our determinations? If it weren’t for the slippage between “literary experience” and the idea of the work of literature, there would be a real danger here of implying that the work of literature does not offer the possibility of genuine freedom from one’s determinations, that it is the job of the scientist to do so.

Literature, because it often shows rather than tells (some of it), has often been treated as needing to be explained by someone else. Yet it’s not at all clear that a scientist is better able to free us of the determinations of the world than a work of literature simply because the work of literature shows those determinations at work. And if the scientist is more capable of direct explanation, that would simply be because direct explanation is not usually the way literature goes about exploring the world. It embodies, rather than explaining from outside. And is literature or science more capable of dealing with those moments when explanation breaks down? Isn’t literature more capable than science of dealing with those things about the world that maybe cannot be explained, if there are any such things?

the usefulness of genre?

Thinking about the issues of how one defines a genre, and considering for the moment the case of experimental fiction, which might be called a genre, a point that could itself be questioned.

Derrida's essay “On Genre” presents his notion of the indefinite divisability of the trait. There's no defining shared characteristic of any genre that can't be broken down into further differences, and no characteristics of any piece of writing that can be absolutely the same as any other piece of writing. Thus our notions of genre as a form of sameness ultimately break down in any close examination of the traits of a given text. Any two texts are part of the same genre only as long as one is generalizing.

At the same time, absolute difference between any two texts is just as impossible as absolute sameness. Derrida gives as his example (one of many perhaps) the way in which most pieces of writing tend to literally identify their genre, for instance the cover of a novel might give the title and say underneath it, A Novel. The trait of identifying a text’s genre doesn’t belong exclusively to any genre.

Genre is therefore not a fact of texts, but a conceptual tool (usually a faulty one) that might be used to understand them (and that’s true even when the text in question accepts the concept of genre). The question would be, therefore, whether ths imperfect concept is still useful, or should be discarded entirely. The answer would be found in what the concept helps us understand in certain instances, and whether what it helps us understand in those instances is more important than what it obscures.

Given Derrida’s arguments, all novels (indeed all pieces of writing) are experiments, since whatever influence they take from other texts, they’ll never literally be those texts. And as Borges’ “Pierre Menard” points out, even if a text was literally the same as a prior text, a ground of difference would still exist, one regarding the context of their creation.

Still, there remains an important difference between fiction that highlights its inevitably experimental condition and fiction that denies/avoids/downplays that condition by trying to fit itself within a pre-existing genre. But if experimental fiction is fiction that highlights this inevitably experimental condition, on some level it's attempting to repeat the terms of its genre in a way not entirely dissimilar to the attempt found in more conventional fiction. In consciously violating conventional expectations for fiction, it's merely doing the expected for the genre of experimental fiction.

The key difference between so-called “experimental” and so-called “conventional” fiction would then be not how a given text situates itself relative to its defined genre. Instead, being true to an understanding of genre by violating the traits of genre rather than by attempting to replicate those traits seems more critically aware of the actual condition of genre.

Of course, the violation can never be absolute, since all texts replicate some features of earlier ones. So some texts successfully conscious of the problems of genre might remain within a genre by replicating a few of its fundamental traits while significantly altering others.

It seems therefore that “experimental fiction” is indeed a concept of genre that remains valuable, and it’s a concept that much of my writing is committed to exploring. A strange conclusion, in a way: to defend one’s belief in the value of a genre through recognizing the faultiness of the concept.

Are there any times when you believe in the usefulness of the concept of genre? When?