INTRODUCTION
Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical and empirical analyses of the art world constitute a substantial component of his published work spanning more than two decades (Bourdieu 1968, 1971, 1980, 1980a, 1983, 1984, 1985f, 1987d, 1988b). His central interest in the formation and reproduction of symbolic practices has drawn him inevitably towards the intellectual fields of art and literature, traditionally neglected areas for sociological study. As with other fields discussed in this book, Bourdieu has used the fields of art and literature to demonstrate that the cultural practices which constitute the production, distribution and consumption of symbolic goods are comprehensible within a theory of practice which admits neither transcendental/idealist categories of individual agency, nor deterministic explanations drawn from formal structuralism.1 By analysing the literary and artistic fields in relational terms, he has been able to understand and demonstrate further the homologies between symbolic and economic production. Moreover, by the constant application of his own powerful explanatory metaphors, he has revealed the extant relations between aesthetic dispositions of individual agents and the objective systems of social differentiations within which acts of artistic creation and appreciation necessarily take place. He has shown that the attitudes which individuals assume towards works of art are manifestations of more pervasive dispositions from which all other attitudes of taste are derived. These dispositions are engendered by a social logic which relates the aesthetic choices (distinctions) made by individuals to the more general strategies of struggle by which groups maintain their social positions — see Chapter 1 for a discussion of general strategies of struggle.
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NOTES
Although Bourdieu’s work marks a significant departure from the two dominant French aesthetic traditions of existentialism and structuralism, it can be seen also as a synthesis of these two traditions. By always grounding his analyses in the world of practice, he avoids the limitations of both idealist and materialist accounts of art. He recognizes the interdependence of the symbolic and the economic without resorting to the social determinism of traditional Marxist theories.
His project is sociological rather than philosophical and his discourse embodies this particular scientific interest. He does not collapse one discourse into another by reducing the problems of ‘beauty’ or ‘aesthetic value’ to the same ontological level as the social and political. Rather, he develops a discourse in which all the practices associated with the art world, including the discourses of philosophical aesthetics and art criticism, can be understood in social scientific terms as forms of cultural production.
In the Preface to the English language edition of Distinction, Bourdieu acknowledges that his empirical work inevitably reflects the specificity of the French intellectual field but his use of the comparative method, he believes, enables him ‘to enter into the singularity of an object without renouncing the ambition of drawing out universal propositions’ (Bourdieu 1984:xi).
Bourdieu is aware that such a position could be described as ‘barbarous’ because it ‘transgresses one of the fundamental taboos of the intellectual world, in relating intellectual products and producers to their social conditions of existence’ (1984:xiii).
Of course, earlier French books, as well as several articles are also crucial. See especially Un art moyen, essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie, with L. Boltanski, R. Castel and J. C. Chamboredon (Paris: Minuit, 1965); ‘Le Paysan et la photographie’, with M. C. Bourdieu, Revue Française de Sociologie, 2, 1965, 164–74; ‘La Musée et son public’, L’Information d’Histoire de l’Art, 3, 1965, 120–22; L’amour de l’art, les musées d’art européens et leur public, with A. Darbel and D. Schnapper (Paris: Minuit, 1966); ‘Eléments d’une théorie sociologique de la perception artistique’, Revue Internationale des Sciences Sociales, 20(4), 1968, 640–64 (for a translation of which see Bourdieu, 1968); ‘Sociologie de la perception esthétique’, in Les Sciences humaines et l’oeuvre d’art (Brussels: La Connaissance, 1969, 161–76 and 251–4; ‘Disposition esthétique et compétence artistique’, Les Temps Modernes, 295, 1345–78; ‘L’invention de la vie d‘artiste’, Actes, 2, 1975, 67–94; ‘Anatomie du goût’, with M. de St Martin, Actes, 5, 1976, 2–112; ‘Titres et quartiers de noblesse culturelle. Elements d’une critique sociale de jugement esthétique’, with M. de St Martin, Ethnologie Française, 8 (2/3), 1978, 107–44; ‘Des gouts artistiques et des classes sociales’, with D. Eribon, Libération, 3(4), 1979, 12–13; and ‘Pour une sociologie de la perception’, with Y. Delsaut, Actes, 40, 1981, 3–9; ‘Le marché des biens symboliques’, L’année sociologique, 22, 1971, 49–126; ‘La production de la croyance’, Actes, 13, 1977, 3–43.
Iconography refers to acts of making images (encoding), whereas iconology refers to acts of interpretation (decoding).
Structuralism, as a pervasive intellectual movement, was at its peak in Bourdieu’s formative years. The movement, led by Lévi-Strauss (1958), had rediscovered the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) and by the late 1960s had embraced most disciplines (cf. Ehrmann 1970; Robey 1973).
Cultural or symbolic capital is acquired, Bourdieu argues, through cumulative acts of distinction which are the products of internalised social structures. Thus: Distinctions, as symbolic transfigurations of de facto differences and, more generally, ranks, orders, grades, and all other symbolic hierarchies, are the product of the application of schemes of construction which, like (for example) the pairs of adjectives used to utter most social judgements, are the product of the internalization of the structures to which they are applied; and the most absolute recognition of legitimacy is nothing other than the apprehension of the everyday world as selfevident which results from the quasiperfect coincidence of objective structures and embodied structures. (Bourdieu 1985:204)
Bourdieu refuses to romanticise working-class culture by searching for its ‘heart’ or essence. In his terms, class is defined not by culture, but by position and habitus. Hence, working-class culture is constituted of practices which have a relational opposition to bourgeois practices.
There are strong parallels here with the work of Gombrich (1960), which Bourdieu himself has noted (1980).
It can be argued (Codd 1982) that the education of artistic appreciation involves an initiation into a particular logic and language of interpretation which makes the justification of aesthetic judgements possible. Bourdieu’s position, however, goes much further by claiming that such language always convevs a legitimation of social vower.
The theory that art appreciation is a form of cognitive appraisal has some obvious links with Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘seeing as’. (Casey, 1966; Scruton, 1974; Best, 1980; Codd, 1982).
The well-established tradition of idealist aesthetics includes such names as Santayana (1896), Croce (1922), DuCasse (1929), Collingwood (1938), Read (1943), Langer (1953, 1957) and Cassirer (1961).
Janet Wolff (1981:27) cites the historical evidence which shows that ‘the conception of the artist as unique and gifted individual is an historically specific one, and that it dates from the rise of the merchant classes in Italy and France, and from the rise of humanist ideas in philosophy and religious thought’.
This work, which is not yet published in full, promises to be Bourdieu’s most ambitious theoretical and empirical task to date — but see Bourdieu 1987d and 1988b.
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© 1990 Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar and Chris Wilkes
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Codd, J. (1990). Making Distinctions: The Eye of the Beholder. In: Harker, R., Mahar, C., Wilkes, C. (eds) An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21134-0_6
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