chapter 20 Literature and Modernity: Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor W. Adorno – Interpreters of Kafka
Daglind E. Sonolet
One of the merits ascribed to Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural sociology is the at- tempt to free the theory and practice of determinism from the legacy of its Marxist past. Deeply interested in the subtle ways power relations are repro- duced, Bourdieu rejects the theories formulated by Georg Lukács or Lucien Goldmann that in his view explain literary works in terms of the world view or ideology of a social class, establishing a rather simplified one-to-one con- nection between author, class, and work (Bourdieu 1967, 1971). To overcome this perceived reductionism in the relation between a work of art, literature, and music and its author, Bourdieu introduced two concepts that became essential to the discipline: field and habitus (Bourdieu 1967, 1971). Field is the notion that the social production of cultural artifacts can be explained in terms of a many-faceted environment of interrelated conditions and actors’ dispositions weighing on the making of a work (Bourdieu 1967, 1971). Habitus defines the artist neither as a singular inexplicable genius nor as the typical representative of a class ideology but rather as a social actor in whom con- verge many traits, inclinations, and tastes, mostly acquired during childhood, that identify him or her as a member of a particular social stratum (Bourdieu 1967, 1971). Indeed, Bourdieu further defined the attitude of a group or class toward society as habitus that integrates structural and individual elements as a system of socially constituted dispositions that are at once “structuring and structured” and form “the generating and unifying principle of the totality of the practices and ideologies characterizing a group of agents” (Bourdieu 1967, 1971:15–16). Sustained by other concepts such as cultural and symbolic capital, Bourdieu used habitus to grasp more fully the nature of power-dominated cultural consumption in France, as is demonstrated in his extended study on taste (Bourdieu 1979). Taking into account a myriad of details, he broke down the French bourgeois class into various fractions that finely distinguish them- selves by aesthetic criteria, preferences in food and music, and all acquired
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1 This chapter was first published in 2010 as Daglind Sonolet, “Habitus et Modernité. Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt et Theodor W. Adorno: interprètes de Kafka,” 0PuS 15 Sociologie de l’Art (Paris: L’Harmattan), pp. 35–58. 2 Günther Anders, a pseudonym for Günther Stern, was Arendt’s first husband and, like her, a disciple of Heidegger’s. He returned to Europe in 1950 and subsequently became a well- known philosopher of technology with Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Obsolescence of Man), Munich, Beck, 1956. He also played an important part in the international antinuclear movement.