Bodily hexis is "a basic dimension of the sense of social orientation", a sense
of how to present one's own body in social space. Bourdieu seeks
to establish that the pursuit of distinction and its parent disciplines
of discretio and diacrisis, include the body in the hybrid zone
of Plato, as did Plato himself. Ever since Leibniz, the possibility
for recognizing that we are automatons in "three quarters of what
we do" has been counteracted by the insistence on discursive acts
as best functioning as acts of symbolic domination.
In his bourgeois wisdom and strenuous research into the current culture of decadence
and symbolism, Nordau overlooks the importance of speculative fiction
and the birth of alternative histories rooted in futuristic fiction.
He cannot allow the question of "What if?", and offers a critique
of J. H. Rosny's novel set in the Stone Age. This inhibition is
part of a larger polemic against Zola and his disciples in which
Nordau claims that Zola's popularity is waning. He attempts to
establish the decadent mind as a mind and a producer of a text
of in-circumstantial value’Ä́ an ephemeral phenomenon.
wrote the first decadent novel, that which Oscar Wilde studied for The Picture
of Dorian Grey, he, unlike Wilde, but similar to Henry Adams autobiography
in the third person, distanced himself from himself, giving an
espousal of Decadence while subtly developing its critique. Coming
from a background of Kantian dignitas Huysman wrote about the vulgar
viscerally, recalling in disgust yet giving a picture of the thoughts
of his protagonist, Des Essientes: "Once these preliminaries were
over, he made every effort to avoid, in his study at any rate,
the use of Oriental rugs and fabrics, which had become so commonplace
and vulgar now that upstart tradesmen could buy them in the bargain
basement of any department-store." The vulgar in Huysman is like
an instantiation of sensation by the anti-heroics of des Essientes
which ultimately critique the outspokenness against the vulgar
and the elevation of cultivation as a end. Shifting cultivation
to a means Huysman positioned himself in opposition to other manifestations
of fin de siecle taste, notably the inputting of emotions into
realist works of art, which utilize a curious emotion in the processing
of solely memory-images, rather than utilize healthy emotion as
the outcome of perceptual investigation. The curious form of emotion
is that of complete focus with striking disinterest, not unbelievably,
for the lack of perceptual proximity, proximity that is conversely,
knowing, not through seeing, but rather, reading, within the space
of ideas, it is a lack of these conditions, and the distance between
object and objectifier that identifies the only mode as one of
realism. The disinterested is fraught with emotion which he funnels
into works of art which are lacking in their artistry and are well
endowed with the play of associations that reconciles the historical
surface of realism with its potential for catharsis--the purging
of emotions and the distinguishing of separate parts for pleasure
and artistic appreciation.
The realism of Zola therefore, overlooks healthy cognition and a hierarchy of taste showing parities of likes and dislikes across the stratified space of class. In order to posit the realist method, Zola must also posit the notion of memory as the stuff of distancing subjectivity from the object-- which it must render with blighted hopes of a grand transparency through language, language related to thought. This relationship, exactly, is the sign for an artwork produced solely on the basis of memory. Perception is employed, but it is not perceptual reading and analysis of the appropriate form, vulgar or disinterested, for the task--and if disinterested, not in light of the dispositions of likes and dislikes that articulate taste as something very much ruled by the dominant aesthetic which is equivalent to more than one position in the space of positions. The hierarchy of positions, petite bourgeoisie, working class, bourgeoisie, aristocracy, gives a picture of healthy, stratified cognition ...
The realism of Zola therefore, overlooks healthy cognition and a hierarchy of taste showing parities of likes and dislikes across the stratified space of class. In order to posit the realist method, Zola must also posit the notion of memory as the stuff of distancing subjectivity from the object-- which it must render with blighted hopes of a grand transparency through language, language related to thought. This relationship, exactly, is the sign for an artwork produced solely on the basis of memory. Perception is employed, but it is not perceptual reading and analysis of the appropriate form, vulgar or disinterested, for the task--and if disinterested, not in light of the dispositions of likes and dislikes that articulate taste as something very much ruled by the dominant aesthetic which is equivalent to more than one position in the space of positions. The hierarchy of positions, petite bourgeoisie, working class, bourgeoisie, aristocracy, gives a picture of healthy, stratified cognition ...
