> aesthetic theory isn't what he is up to. he's interested in the foundations
> of social theory, in reconstructing historical materialism, in social
> science metatheoretics, in moral theory and in culture in terms of of
> socialization.
And how do you theorize this without a theory of aesthetics? Consumerism, in its broadest sense -- shopping, marketing, TV, sports, media, broadcasting, the logo on the coffee cup -- is the biggest, baddest, boldest industry of them all in late capitalism. This is like trying to explain the computer industry while leaving out the history of CPUs.
> he's after the ways in which selves are related to others,
> to institutions and practices and the social. bourdieu's theory does not
> account for the latter as far as i know.
Nonsense. Bourdieu is intensely concerned with institutions, institutional power and the violence done to subjects by those institutions; "Distinction" is a magisterial analysis of the 1970s French consumer culture, which shows how class identity is defined through this complex web of cultural readings, tastes, and distinctions; his later works broaden this out into a theory of art-production ("Rules of Art", and the notion of aesthetic and cultural capital) and state formation ("The Nobility of the State", and the notion of political and symbolic capital).
-- Dennis