Literary Theory

45: JOHN GUILLORY:   from “Literature after Theory”

Selections from "Literature after Theory" are reprinted from Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). quoted from Critical Theory Since Plato, 3rd ed., pp. 1500-1508.

... I have already alluded in Chapter 1 to the significance of the relative autonomy of pedagogic practice in the context of appropriating Bourdieu and Passeron's contention that "by ignoring all demands other than that of its own reproduction, the school most effectively contributes to the reproduction of the social order."' The question before us now is somewhat more complex. Bourdieu and Passeron insist in Reproduction on the theoretical distinctiveness of the "autonomy" specific to the educational system, and they are thus resistant to any reduction of pedagogic action to a species of the bureaucratic. They object in particular to the argument of Michel Crozier in The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (1964) that “we should find, in the French educational /1501/ system, the main characteristic patterns of the bureaucratic system of organization,” a thesis they regard as construing the formal features of the educational institution merely as reflections of the dominant mode of social organization:

    Thus, for example, Crozier is only able to grasp characteristic features of the school institution such as the ritualization of pedagogic action or the distance between master and pupil, insofar as he recognizes in them manifestations of the logic of bureaucracy, i.e. fails to recognize what is specifically scholastic about them, in that it expresses tendencies or requirements proper to all institutionalized educational systems even when scarcely or not at all bureaucratized toward "routinization" of pedagogic work, which is expressed in, among other things, the production of intellectual and material instruments devised by and for the School, manuals, corpuses topics, etc., appears,...