art and play, which draw their form from these realities [of the constellation called society] but nevertheless leaves their reality behind them.” Pure sociability derives its substance from the actual social relations outside its space, but is “spared the frictional resistances of real life” (179). Its aspiration to “the pure, abstract play of form” cannot be reconciled with the values of modern rationalist utility, which sees in it only “empty idleness”(179). There is nothing specialized about this “play-form”; “all the specific contents of the one-sided and qualified societies” are “dissolved away.” The required traits of character are “amiability, cultivation (Bildung), cordiality, and powers of attraction of all kinds” (180). These require an intense self-discipline, an inner “self-regulation” essential to participation in the form of play, from which both the individual’s “interests” and his “most purely and deeply personal qualities” must be excluded (180–81). Discretion or “tact”—the suppression of the “purely subjective and inward parts of [the] personality”—is essential to the engagement in “nothing but the capacities, attractions, and interests of [one’s] pure humanity (reine Menschlichkeit)” (182). In that sense the “social ideal” might be called “the freedom of bondage” (Freiheit der Bindung) (190). But precisely because the social interaction in this world is “artificial,” it can be “a democracy of equals … without friction,” “free of any disturbing material accent” (182–85). What matters in conversation is not the content, but the stylized form that makes it play; there can be no “serious argument,” no attempt at an intersubjective “verification of a truth.”
Though he does not use the term honnêteté, Simmel’s essay offers a penetrating analysis of its preoccupation with complaisance, bienséance, agrément, enjouement, and related qualities, including aisance. He constructed an ideal type, and he was aware that its actual social instantiations could ossify into “a conventionalism and inwardly lifeless exchange of formulas” (193). He suggests, in fact, that this may have happened in the French ancien regime. He is confident, though, that some social spaces have approximated the ideal purity; and in fact he tried to create such a space in the weekly salon he and his wife held in their Berlin home, which one of his friends recalled as having been designed to achieve “the cultivation of the highest individuals.”26 We need to apply Simmel’s paradigm cautiously, keeping in mind how the logic of pure sociability functioned in a larger structure of class inequality that Simmel simply assumed. Simmel was well aware that “sociable equality” inside the group hinged on a strict exclusiveness, a sharp distinction between the rare few insiders and the great mass of outsiders. As the essay nears its end, however, it becomes apparent that he viewed the historical phenomenon of pure sociability through the lens of a late nineteenth-century variant on the German ideal of individual self-cultivation (Bildung) in “pure humanity.” Like many of his German contemporaries, he posed against the increasing specialization and commercial materialism of modernity a new aristocracy or, perhaps better, a new clerisy carrying the torch of aesthetic cultivation. As he tried to enact this ideal in his own salon, he looked for historical antecedents. He ends the essay on a swelling note: “the more thoughtful man” finds in sociability a “freeing and lightening,” a “simultaneous sublimation and dilution, in which the heavily freighted forces of reality are felt only as from a distance, their weight fleeting in a charm” (193).
We need a skeptical antidote to Simmel’s idealism, and it is to be found in the work of the French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus is, to be sure, open to the charge of reducing the cultural to a function of social power. I use it here simply as a reminder of the need to place the internal symbolic structure of the discourse of honnêteté within the societal structure in which it positioned itself.27 Le monde presents us with a habitus in Bourdieu’s sense: a cultural preconscious formed in the induction from childhood into a total way of life. What interests us here is the binary duality of Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus. It is, first, a “structuring structure,” the internalized symbolic organization of “practices and perceptions of practices.” This is not simply a matter of internalizing ideas, as in the commitment to a political ideology; it is the ground for the individual’s consciousness of himself and others as social beings. But Bourdieu is equally insistent that the habitus is, second, a “structured structure,” formed by the objective reality of hierarchy, its social perceptions being “the product of internalization of the division into social classes.”28 The “distinction” attached to the aesthetic is “rooted in an ethic, or rather an ethos, of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world,” “the objective and subjective removal from practical urgencies, which is the basis of objective and subjective distance from groups subject to those determinisms.”29
We proceed with the understanding that the interaction Bourdieu posits between the subjective and objective, though it leads him to a reductionist concept of culture, is essential to the study of symbolic power.30 But our focus here is on Bourdieu’s structuring structure. We want to understand how the social and cultural logic of mondanité shaped and informed social relations within its own space. “In a cultural system,” William H. Sewell, Jr., writes, “the meaning of a sign or symbol is a function of its network of oppositions to or distinctions from other signs in the system.”31 Pervading the discourse of honnêteté is a central axiom of opposition, the deep logic of what Bourdieu calls an “elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world”: the polarity between labor (travail) and aisance, or effortlessness. In his Conversations, Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, an elder statesmen of the salons, observed that the surest sign of failure to master the art of conversation was “a constrained manner, where one senses much work (travail).”32 Méré’s essays remind us again and again that in the ideal of honnêteté “free” (libre) and “natural” were virtually synonymous qualities. We must be careful not to read back into this language the eighteenth-century critique of aristocratic society and culture, and more broadly of le monde, that would find its most impassioned articulation in Rousseau’s texts. In the discourse of honnêteté, appeals to the “natural” were not meant to censure the artificiality of polite sociability by invidious comparison with the more natural life of common people. Quite the contrary; the apparently natural aisance of the honnête femme and the honnête homme was precisely what marked their superiority over everyone outside their clearly delimited space. To be able to act naturally—to engage in the spontaneous play of the social aesthetic—meant to be free of the “determinisms” that labor to satisfy basic needs imposed on the great mass. Most obviously it marked the fact that one used one’s time as one wished, rather than as material needs demanded. Ultimately this conception of natural freedom drew a line between the choices open to a uniquely human nature and the imprisonment of the human animal in material necessities. It stigmatized labor as the mark of subjection to material need. The ideological irony lay in the fact that a universal ideal—the freedom of the human being as such—justified the exclusion of most human beings from its practice. This self-image obviously put the honnêtes at a vast social distance from people engaged in any kind of manual labor. More to the point, it made the life of the leisured mind—the pleasure of esprit—qualitatively different from the rule-governed intellectual labor of the “learned” or “liberal” professions. Their eloquentia—their distinctly male forms of verbal authority—was laborious. We miss the point, then, if we think of the discourse as perching honnêtes gens at the pinnacle of an occupational hierarchy; its imagined world hovered above the entire social organization of labor.33
If men who practiced professions and occupied offices—university professors, magistrates in the parlements, military officers, clergymen—did not want to be branded bores, they had to leave their professional concerns behind them when they entered the salons. Even when Méré and others wrote for publication, they took pains to seem to be merely recording the “caprice” of their thoughts, without any planned order of presentation, as in the free play of conversation.34 The social aesthetic would not allow any intrusion from the occupation world. At a deeper level, it would not allow conversational play to sully itself by taking on any appearance