Page 262 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes bringing structuralist theory to an impasse- structuralism is unable to go beyond a treatment of
knowledge confined to objective structure alone. Bourdieu also finds subjectivist modes of
knowledge, such as existentialism and aesthetics, to be focusing too much on personal accounts,
especially individual understanding, rather than the external conditions which shape or influence
public mentality. Having dealt with the problem of this objective/ subjective contradiction, Bourdieu
tries to break away from relying on either mode of knowledge. His sociology is a dialectically
interactive mode of knowledge production which does not confine itself to either the objective or
the subjective but rather integrates functions of both objective structure and experiential production
(See Bourdieu 1972, 1990a, 1990b, 1993a, 1993b, 1998). Bourdieu's break with exclusive subjectivism
or exclusive objectivism yields a new type of mediation which he calls practice-an act which links
social agents with social structures. David Swartz (1997: 58) suggests that Bourdieu's introduction
of a mediating device called for an epistemological break which resulted in Bourdieu's investigation
of two questions. The first is how practice and structure inform each other reciprocally; practices
by social agents constitute social structures and, in turn, are determined by them. Such a relationship
can be seen in the concept of habitus in which Bourdieu combines actions by social agents with
structural factors of their society. The second is in the way theoretical and practical knowledge
should be handled by social scientists. Bourdieu's sociology is a response to the notion of the
'disinterestedness' of scholars and their so-called 'object of study.' Bourdieu contends that the
academic tradition, especially in the social sciences, has become absorbed in a theoretical approach
to the point at which theory itself has become the sole narrative of a social event, no matter how
varied each single context appears to be. Bourdieu's concern is that MANUSYA: Journal of
Humanities, Special Issue No. 18, 2009 scholars lack reflexive vigilance towards practical knowledge
and are likely to subscribe to a type of academic disinterestedness that divides sociological research
from practical reality. Yet it is still important for researchers to have a conceptual paradigm which
is able to capture and theorise social patterns in a critical manner. From this direction, Bourdieu
developed an approach to sociological research which he terms "reflexive sociology," a theory that
aims to make scholars aware of the 'scholastic fallacy' of detaching academic tradition from the
social world. Structuralism, especially that of Lévi- Strauss and Althusser, is criticised by Bourdieu
as engaging in objectifying social events into reductionistic structures which dissociate the written
report from social reality. Sameh F. Hanna points out that such a gap is the result of the objective
implementation of clear-cut structuralist binary oppositions, which leads to the omission of agency-
the cause of the structuralist scholastic fallacy. This neat delineation of the social phenomenon
which underlies the concept of 'structure' purportedly provides a tool for describing and predicting
phenomena, but in fact it constrains social reality within deterministic patterns by means of which
all phenomena are projected as exact actualisations of the structuralist model. To further consolidate
the objectivist character of their model, structuralists confine themselves to describing the material
reality of the social world, excluding the social agents' representations of this reality.
While Foucault is generally associated with structuralism, we may hold that he 'narrowly' escaped
the objectivist approach that dominates structuralism in that he was aware of the genealogy of
discourse through the generative effect of agency as we can see in the works after The Archaeology
of Knowledge such as "Discourse on Language" (1971), Discipline and Punish (1975), The Will to
Knowledge (1976-the first volume of The History of Sexuality). However, while Foucault tried to
trace the genealogy of ideology, power, sexuality and explain the 'history of the present,' the
motivation of those agents or carriers of these values were 'left out' and this has subjected Foucault
to a great deal of criticism. Charles Taylor, one of his severest critics, attacked Foucault for an
'unintelligible' account of history which fails to recognise the 'purposeful actions' of agents whose
roles in shaping discourses cannot easily be dismissed (During 1992: 137). Said is aware of the
importance of the experiential mode of production and the problem of academic disinterestedness,
for, as he states in the introduction to Orientalism, his life as an Arab Palestinian living in the US
does make him a part of the whole project of Orientalism, as someone living with the impact of
Orientalist discourse.

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