Chapter Two: The Emergence of a Dualist Structure

The Invention of the Intellectual (pp. 129-131)

In this section Bourdieu argues that Zola successfully avoided the standard discredit and associations with vulgarity implied by commercial success through the production of the intellectual.  This intellectual was "inseparably intellectual and political" and applied the norms and values of independence in the literary field to the political field.  In other words, the autonomy of the intellectual field enabled Zola's intervention in the political field which, consequently, produced him as an intellectual.

Zola's "J'accuse" and intellectual production resulted from "a collective process of emancipation that is progressively carried out in the field of cultural production."  Unlike a politician, the intellectual acts independently of powers and is constituted through the act of political intervention "in the name of autonomy" and the values of cultural production.  Bourdieu contrasts this intellectual with the eighteenth-century writer, who he sees as divorced of politics and theology; the legislator; and the intellectual who switches to the political field and betrays the values of his original intellectual field.  Instead, this intellectual "asserts himself against the specific laws of politics . . . as defender of universal principles that are in fact the result of the universalization of the specific principles of his own universe."

This invention of the intellectual by Zola resulted not only from the "autonomization of the intellectual field" but also from the opposition to the reintroduction of the political field in the intellectual field.  Bourdieu argues that "it is by relying on the specific authority conquered in opposition to politics by pure writers and artists that Zola and the scholars produced by the development of higher education and research will be able to break with the political indifference of their predecessors in order to intervene, during the Dreyfus Affair, in the political field itself, but with weapons that are not those of politics."

Bourdieu concludes by presenting Zola's defense of Manet.  He claims that the same principles, "the sake of honour and truth," which led Zola to compose a written defense of Manet also compelled him to intervene in the political field.

Questions:
1.  Was there a similar distancing and development of autonomy that enabled an independent intervention in the political field by a Turkish author?  Are their any Turkish authors analogous to Zola?
2.  Could this process be applied to modern American politics and interventions made by Stewart and Colbert?