Back to the Body: Bourdieu and Eagleton

Our texts for this week, Eagleton and Bourdieu, both seem to take up an interest in aesthetics alongside a renewed focus on the body. While the interest in the body is perhaps much more explicit in Eagleton, it is taken up centrally (albeit often implicitly for our reading today) in Bourdieu through his discussion of acquiring competencies and educational, symbolic and cultural capital--and to go beyond our reading some, what he fleshes out as the notion of the habitus in the later chapters of the book. While aesthetics for Eagleton have some radical potentials, Bourdieu's take on the social role of aesthetics and on how aesthetics are embodied seems to imply a more deterministic view. That is, Bourdieu seems to see less opportunity to use taste/art in ways that break down or challenge the system; rather, he suggests that while individuals attempt to move within this system they often ultimately end up unconsciously reifying the system all together through, for example, conspicuous consumption.

I'm interested, then, in talking about how Eagleton's view of the role of the body (and also subjectivity), when juxtaposed with Bourdieu's sense of the embodiment of taste and aesthetics, might suggest as we move forward in the course. In his introduction, Eagleton describes the aesthetic in the following way:

The aesthetic is at once, as I try to show, the very secret prototype of human subjectivity in early capitalist society, and a vision of human energies as radical ends in themselves which is the implacable enemy of all dominative or instrumentalist thought. It signifies a creative turn to the sensuous body, as well as an inscribing of that body with subtly oppressive law; it represents on the one hand a liberatory concern with concrete particularity, and on the other hand a specious form of universalism. If it offers a generous utopian image of reconciliation between men and women at the present divided from one another, it also blocks and mystifies the real political movement towards such historical community. Any account of this amphibious concept which either uncritically celebrates it or unequivocally denounces it is thus likely to overlook its real historical complexity (9).

Given Eagleton's passage here, how might we talk about bodies, subjectivity and the aesthetic as Eagleton sees these in relation to how Bourdieu might see these? What room for change and shift does Eagleton afford? Where are these affordances located (if at all) in Bourdieu's text?

I'm also interested in Eagleton's description of the Bourgeois social order--particularly in terms of how it seems to correspond with Bourdieu's focus on social practice and other minutiae such as taste. Eagleton states:

The ultimate binding of bourgeois social order, in contrast to the coercive apparatus of absolutism, will be habits, pieties, sentiments and affections. And this is equivalent to saying that power in such an order has become aestheticized. It is at one with the body's spontaneous impulses, entwined with sensibility and the affections, lived out in unreflective custom. Power is now inscribed in the minutiae of subjective experience, and the fissure between abstract duty and pleasurable inclination is accordingly healed (20).

What does this passage suggest about the ideology of aesthetics and, as Bourdieu would point to, taste?