foundations of social theory, reconstructing historical materialism to account for human as communicators and not just laborers, and social science metatheoretics can all nicely be pursued without a theory of aesthetics. moral theory seems largely capable of carrying on without it too, since, well, unless you're a metaphysician, most philosophers generally stick with moral theory OR aesthetic theory. the last person i read who dealt with the good, the true and the beautiful was Justus Buchler, a little known american pragmatist. last i heard, metaphysics was dead!
as for culture, well, yep, he's interested in other aspects of culture that have to do with citizenship, social movements.
> > 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).
the part you snipped out was the "latter" where i mention "socialization". but, bad para construction on my part. apologies.
bourdieu has undertheorized the micro-politics of learning involved in the acquisition of a habitus. he needs a social-psychology, iow. bourdieu could certainly be supplemented by various social-pscyhologies. this failure on his part is somewhat devasting to his theory since he wants to avoid structuralism, but doesn't quite do so because there is a "black box" _still_ between the selves and habitus. in my own work, for ex, i have to draw on social psych and the Birmingham school to deal with what Bourdieu inadequately addresses, particularly since without reverting to other theories, i cannot explain the resistance or failure of those who reject the values of their habitus. (see e.g., Jay MacLeod in _Ain't No Makin It_)
a failure to study consumerism is hardly devastating or, at least, i think you would have to actually go further and demonstrate that it is, rather than assert this.
kelley