İnsan ve Toplum

Öz

Adorno and Bourdieu share the same interest in developing theoretical and methodological tools of a sociology of cultural forms. In this article, I argue that the main goal of both thinkers is to investigate ways to overcome internal and purely formal interpretations without falling into vulgar sociological explanations that reduce cultural forms to external social context. In line with the thesis of “priority of mediation” of his negative dialectics, Adorno develops a meta-critical style of interpretation based on establishing formal analogies between different fields which abolishes the illusion of absolute autonomy of cultural forms while acknowledging their truth contents. In his reflexive sociological critique, Bourdieu aims to reveal social and political implications of cultural forms without reducing them to external social context by building homologies between different fields. I try to reveal the common aspects of these critical methods through the Heidegger critiques of two thinkers. I also try to show that the dialectical critiques of rationality of them echo each other in aiming to reach an understanding of reason free from domination and symbolic violence by revealing the social mediations of reason that embodied in cultural fields.