The main concern of the paper considers how social class is produced, reproduced, and challenged in educational environments and career-making contexts. In the analysis, I will concentrate in particular on artists’ experiences of not having the necessary resources to succeed in the profession of their choosing. I will discuss the sense of inadequacy or of not being good enough to which non-possession of recognized resources often gives rise, which sense then influences one’s attitude and orientation in everyday life along with the subsequent choices one makes in life. My discussion of this sense of inability is couched in terms of what Pierre Bourdieu has termed symbolic violence. The main question guiding my examination addresses the possibility of freeing oneself from that violence and change the repressive rules and norms that govern the artistic space, while investigating what kind of means might be called for this kind of transformation to become possible. The empirical materials used in advancing my argument are derived from the area of Swedish arts education. In particular, I will focus on the stories told by a female art student without easy access to the legitimate tools needed to criticize the norms of her school environment who nonetheless succeeds in parodying these norms through means of artistic performance. In light of my analysis of the case, I will then consider whether, and in which ways, Bourdieu’s perspective might lend itself to explaining and understanding this and similar or comparable attempts by individual actors to offer resistance. The question will be posed as to how a sense of possibility can emerge that indeed reaches beyond the horizon of the existing reality.