Abstract
This chapter reflects on Martins’ powerful critique of Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions. It also compares Martins with the work of Bourdieu on science and art, arguing that despite the invaluable recent publication of Bourdieu’s lectures on Manet’s ‘symbolic revolution’, there are certain difficulties with Bourdieu’s theory of the cultural field. In particular, for Bourdieu, photography could never become any other than a minor art. In part because of its reliance on technology, it offers less cultural distinction than other more ‘legitimate’ forms of art. Martins, on the other hand, is less pessimistic: he sees art as continually transformed by technological change and therefore does not see the camera as presenting any inherent barrier.
A different version of this chapter appeared in Portuguese in Razão, Tempo e Tecnologia: Estudos em Homenagem a Hermínio Martins, ed. Manuel Villaverde Cabral and José Luís Garcia. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2006.
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Notes
- 1.
Since Bourdieu and his team wrote, the inclusion of a camera on mobile phones makes the practice even more commonplace, of course.
- 2.
Chamboredon’s essay in Photography: A Middle-brow Art briefly indicates the aesthetic recognition (canonisation) of photographers by listing Cartier-Bresson and others; it thus designates photography’s potential legitimation (Bourdieu et al. 1990: 145, n38, 203). But recognition of these virtuosos is only weakly integrated with Bourdieu’s major claim in the book overall as to photography’s impossible consecration.
- 3.
However, there was also institutional resistance to this change: for example, the Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester) and the Tate (London) refused to exhibit photography even in the 1970s.
- 4.
- 5.
I am grateful to Alison Eldridge for illuminating comments on photographic consecration, which in contemporary terms is marked indelibly by rising prices. As she shows: ‘The auction market for fine art photography, which has been driven mostly by contemporary photographers, saw an increase of 22% in 2013 [from 2012]. Total photography sales were up over all by 36% with the collected auction sales of Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips coming in at $50.7 million’ (Eldridge 2015: 340); ‘Vintage prints’ by photographers such as Ansel Adams have reached as much as $518,500 each (2015: 341).
- 6.
Note: the quotations from Bourdieu’s Manet that follow are translated by me.
- 7.
- 8.
I would agree that the painting refuses to render heroic the death of the French puppet Emperor and that its coldness contrasts with the emotional evocation of the tragic chaos of war painted in Goya’s image of a firing squad (The Third of May 1808). But this is surely an appropriate portrayal of such quasi-colonial struggles. Politically dangerous too: by refusing a glorifying representation and a straightforward humanist appeal to indignation, Manet’s censored painting proved disastrous, both for him and his lithographer.
- 9.
Bourdieu suggests more tentatively that Manet’s temperament might also have been affected by a complex ‘family romance’ (to use Freud’s term)—his father’s paternity of a child born to Suzanne Leenhoff, Édouard’s piano-teacher, later to become Édouard’s wife (2013: 457).
- 10.
- 11.
Indeed, it is fascinating within this line of descent how much links Martins and Bourdieu: Durkheim’s The Evolution of Pedagogical Thought is a crucial text for both (see, for, e.g. Bourdieu 1996: 344), whilst Bachelard, Canguilhem and Piaget were mutually influential.
- 12.
I do not want to overplay their similarities: Martins was for a period (1960s) a ‘revisionist’ or dissident Parsonian (Martins 1974, Mennell and Sklair in this volume); Bourdieu always kept his distance from Parsons and the entire ‘Capitoline Triad’, Parsons, Merton and Lazarsfeld (Bourdieu 2004:18).
- 13.
For example, Sohn-Rethel argued plausibly that the Galilean and seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution should be linked not just to the development of mathematics but also to the interrelated changes leading to the disappearance of artisanal production and to the greater circulation of commodities (1978: 118–128).
- 14.
In this respect he differs from the Kuhnian critique mounted by Lakatos (1970), which is strictly internalist in character.
- 15.
It needs hardly be stressed here that Bourdieu’s own positions should never be projected onto his sociological exposition of the aristocracy of culture. My highly schematic view of Bourdieu’s argument (1990) omits his later, more heterodox interests in forms not yet fully appropriated by the spiritual aristocracy, for example, the conceptual art of Hans Haacke and the controversial photography of Mapplethorpe (Bourdieu and Haacke 1995: 6–13).
- 16.
Addressing the links between the transgressiveness of Manet and Bourdieu, Pascale Casanova cites Flaubert on Mme. Bovary (‘Mme. Bovary, c’est moi!’) imagining Bourdieu secretly reflecting: ‘Manet, c’est moi!’ (Bourdieu 2013: 741). Bourdieu himself argues, citing Kuhn, that his own dispositional analysis of practice represents a ‘paradigm’ change from the analysis of artists’ intentions within orthodox aesthetics (2013: 103).
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Fowler, B. (2018). Revolutions in Science and Art: Martins, Bourdieu and the Case of Photography. In: Castro, J., Fowler, B., Gomes, L. (eds) Time, Science and the Critique of Technological Reason. St Antony's Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71519-3_8
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