The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa

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СКАЧАТЬ moment of origin for the modern feminist agenda for women’s rights, which does indeed require a process of democratization. She in effect shunts aside the unmodern in seventeenth-century French literary modernity. Scudéry and Lafayette were society women living in something like a caste, permeable to some degree but, in the self-image that sustained it, contemptuous of other ways of life as vulgar. The notion that they aimed to democratize taste and criticism is simply wrongheaded.

      Max Weber’s conceptual precision about social hierarchy is a good place to start in correcting DeJean’s work. To Weber there were two fundamental categories for understanding social hierarchy: classes and status groups (Stände). While one’s class position was a function of the objective power of disposal afforded by command of economic resources, one’s status position, or one’s position in a hierarchy of honor (Ehre), was a subjective phenomenon, a matter of social and cultural perception; it depended on the norms and values that informed “the privileging of social estimation” and especially the value attributed to an entire “way of life” (Lebensführung). Class and status were ideal types, indispensable as analytical distinctions but always bound together to one degree or another in social reality. Elements of class and status mingled in myriad ways in old-regime society, and the elite that gathered in the salons is a striking case in point. The salons mixed people from the upper and lower ends of the steep scale of rank and wealth in the nobility of the sword; families from this ancient nobility with families of the judicial, or “robe,” nobility with virtually hereditary rights to the expensive and lucrative offices of the royal parlements; robe and sword families with families in commerce and finance who had acquired titles as the Crown’s sale of offices and noble titles commodified honor; scholars and men of letters drawn from all these groups.²³ The venality of offices introduced anxiety-ridden instability into what was supposed to be a clear hierarchical order of inherited ranks and attached moral qualities. As one historian has aptly put it, it “monetized status,” converting “the attributes that determined one’s identity into qualities that could not only be acquired but also purchased in a marketplace.”²⁴ This confusing conflation of the calibrations of honor with economic (class) positions helps explain why salon society took such pains to demarcate itself as a status group, a circle whose members, however different in origins, wealth, and power, were united, and set apart from everyone else, by a unique social honor that could only be acquired with the personal mastery of worldly self-cultivation and selfpresentation.

      It was this honor that was performed in the social aesthetic of play. Its generic characteristics have been described in a remarkable essay published in 1910 by Georg Simmel, another German sociologist and a contemporary of Weber.²⁵ Titled “The Sociology of Sociability,” the essay focuses on the “pure sociability” to be found in, among other historical examples, the aristocratic mondanité of old-regime France. Simmel finds “a special sociological structure corresponding to those of art and play, which draw their form from these realities [of the constellation called society] but nevertheless leaves their reality behind them.” Pure sociability derives its substance from the actual social relations outside its space, but is “spared the frictional resistances of real life” (179). Its aspiration to “the pure, abstract play of form” cannot be reconciled with the values of modern rationalist utility, which sees in it only “empty idleness”(179). There is nothing specialized about this “play-form”; “all the specific contents of the one-sided and qualified societies” are “dissolved away.” The required traits of character are “amiability, cultivation (Bildung), cordiality, and powers of attraction of all kinds” (180). These require an intense self-discipline, an inner “self-regulation” essential to participation in the form of play, from which both the individual’s “interests” and his “most purely and deeply personal qualities” must be excluded (180–81). Discretion or “tact”—the suppression of the “purely subjective and inward parts of [the] personality”—is essential to the engagement in “nothing but the capacities, attractions, and interests of [one’s] pure humanity (reine Menschlichkeit)” (182). In that sense the “social ideal” might be called “the freedom of bondage” (Freiheit der Bindung) (190). But precisely because the social interaction in this world is “artificial,” it can be “a democracy of equals … without friction,” “free of any disturbing material accent” (182–85). What matters in conversation is not the content, but the stylized form that makes it play; there can be no “serious argument,” no attempt at an intersubjective “verification of a truth.”

      Though he does not use the term honnêteté, Simmel’s essay offers a penetrating analysis of its preoccupation with complaisance, bienséance, agrément, enjouement, and related qualities, including aisance. He constructed an ideal type, and he was aware that its actual social instantiations could ossify into “a conventionalism and inwardly lifeless exchange of formulas” (193). He suggests, in fact, that this may have happened in the French ancien regime. He is confident, though, that some social spaces have approximated the ideal purity; and in fact he tried to create such a space in the weekly salon he and his wife held in their Berlin home, which one of his friends recalled as having been designed to achieve “the cultivation of the highest individuals.”²⁶ We need to apply Simmel’s paradigm cautiously, keeping in mind how the logic of pure sociability functioned in a larger structure of class inequality that Simmel simply assumed. Simmel was well aware that “sociable equality” inside the group hinged on a strict exclusiveness, a sharp distinction between the rare few insiders and the great mass of outsiders. As the essay nears its end, however, it becomes apparent that he viewed the historical phenomenon of pure sociability through the lens of a late nineteenth-century variant on the German ideal of individual self-cultivation (Bildung) in “pure humanity.” Like many of his German contemporaries, he posed against the increasing specialization and commercial materialism of modernity a new aristocracy or, perhaps better, a new clerisy carrying the torch of aesthetic cultivation. As he tried to enact this ideal in his own salon, he looked for historical antecedents. He ends the essay on a swelling note: “the more thoughtful man” finds in sociability a “freeing and lightening,” a “simultaneous sublimation and dilution, in which the heavily freighted forces of reality are felt only as from a distance, their weight fleeting in a charm” (193).

      We need a skeptical antidote to Simmel’s idealism, and it is to be found in the work of the French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus is, to be sure, open to the charge of reducing the cultural to a function of social power. I use it here simply as a reminder of the need to place the internal symbolic structure of the discourse of honnêteté within the societal structure in which it positioned itself.²⁷ Le monde presents us with a habitus in Bourdieu’s sense: a cultural preconscious formed in the induction from childhood into a total way of life. What interests us here is the binary duality of Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus. It is, first, a “structuring structure,” the internalized symbolic organization of “practices and perceptions of practices.” This is not simply a matter of internalizing ideas, as in the commitment to a political ideology; it is the ground for the individual’s consciousness of himself and others as social beings. But Bourdieu is equally insistent that the habitus is, second, a “structured structure,” formed by the objective reality of hierarchy, its social perceptions being “the product of internalization of the division into social classes.”²⁸ The “distinction” attached to the aesthetic is “rooted in an ethic, or rather an ethos, of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world,” “the objective and subjective removal from practical urgencies, which is the basis of objective and subjective distance from groups subject to those determinisms.”²⁹

      We proceed with the understanding that the interaction Bourdieu posits between the subjective and objective, though it leads him to a reductionist concept of culture, is essential to the study of symbolic power.³⁰ But our focus here is on Bourdieu’s structuring structure. We want to understand how the social and cultural logic of mondanité shaped and informed social relations within its own space. “In a cultural system,” William H. Sewell, Jr., writes, “the meaning of a sign or symbol is a function of its network СКАЧАТЬ