Commentary on the commentaries (Pierre Bourdieu)

Photographic artists who exhibit their work want to minimize the contradiction between the social uses of photography and its practice as art, yet the contradiction never seems entirely

Commentary on the Commentaries

Pierre Bourdieu

Contemporary Sociology, Vol 21, No 2 (Mar., 1992), pp 158-161.

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158 SYMPOSIUM

hierarchies of legitimation which organize

cultural systems of expression No wonder

then that photographers feel the need to

justify the existence of photography as true

art

The second part of the book offers case

studies of groups that actively oppose the

naive popular view of photography Camera

clubs fall into two categories When members

are middle-class, painting is the compelling

aesthetic reference, and the refusal to acknowl-

edge technical considerations is considered

indispensable On the other hand, working-

class youth clubs reject aesthetic preoccupa-

tions and express their love of technology by

making the darkroom the heart of the camera

club They promote their own relationship to

technology and to culture by proclaiming

what they see as the victory of instrument

over nature Faced with these opposing

perspectives, photography seems unable to

establish an autonomous aesthetic

Photographic artists who exhibit their work

want to minimize the contradiction between

the social uses of photography and its practice

as art, yet the contradiction never seems

entirely forgotten Discontinuity also presents

a problem While taking, developing, and

printing photographs are creative acts, the

process is a fragmented one and disruptive to

the continuity of inspiration The threats of

repetition and copying are constant One way

out of the dilemma is to deny the authority of

the process, as Man Ray did (p 140)

Insecurity leads to polemics, yet all artists

agree on the necessity to seek consecration by

establishing photographic museums

The final study examines professional

photographers in their diversity of training,

status, income, and specialization, the last of

which follows a hierarchical pattern For

example, prestigious specializations such as

Commentary on the

I should like first of all to thank

Contempo-rary Sociology (and Vera Zolberg) for having

offered me this opportunity to pursue the

dialogue with American colleagues that has

always been of great importance to me Why

fashion photography preferably employ mem- bers of the upper classes

The version of the book that we are given here differs from the French original in several ways The title of the French edition,

A Middle-Brow Art: An Essay on the Social Uses of Photography (my translation), is more modest and more accurate Two chap- ters on press and publicity photography are missing, as well as the original version's conclusion on the symbolic and imaginary aspects of photography, all written by collab- orators Missing also are the methodological appendices I could accept more easily this truncated version if the book had a postscript with Bourdieu's reflections on the changes likely to have occurred since the book was first published For example, has the creation

of photographic museums served to legitimate photographic practice as an art form with an autonomous aesthetic? Do the high prices paid for artistic photographs attest to an increasingly higher place in the hierarchies of cultural legitimation? The book contains many of the ideas that Bourdieu develops more fully in Distinction; it should therefore

be read more for the light it sheds on photography itself and for the aesthetic questions that it raises than for its class analysis Finally, as Bourdieu himself would agree, this is a very French book, and the reader may wish to use it in a comparative way

The English translation is timely American readers reflecting on the recent controversy and trial surrounding the exhibition of some

of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs may relate Bourdieu's perspective on the ambigu- ity of photography to the jury's call for testimonies whether the disputed pictures were artistic or obscene Perhaps photography has come of age-and Bourdieu helps us to see it

Collkge de France and

des hautes e'tudes en sciences sociales

not say publicly what I have often had occasion to say privately? I deeply respect the tradition of free, frank, and amicable discus- sion that has developed and persists in American universities, and I owe a great deal

to the questions, objections, and suggestions

addressed to me, either in the course of public

seminars or in private conversations This is

not the place to describe, much less

de-nounce, the university tradition of which I am

the product and to which I am attached by the

accident of birth But I often have occasion to

think that I feel very much less at ease in a

universe that willingly defers to the master

without truly recognizing the virtues of

mastery than in a world which, as in the

American university, respects the scholar's

work according to its merits, not his person

In order to avoid giving this exchange an

overly personal turn and falling into narcissis-

tic indulgence, rather than pick up each point

of difference one by one, I prefer to try to

single out what seems to me to be their

common core I believe that it is necessary to

call to mind, first, the logic of the interna-

tional circulation of ideas and the structural

misunderstandings that it may produce Texts,

as we know, circulate without their context,

that is, without everything they owe to the

social space within which they have been

produced and, more precisely, to the fields

(scientific, in this case) in relation to which

they have been constructed It follows from

this that the categories of perception and

interpretation that readers apply to them,

themselves linked to a field of production

subject to very different traditions, run a

strong risk of being relatively inadequate

When it comes to my own work, I believe

that rather than run the risk of being totally

mistaken, it is necessary to put oneself in the

epistemological tradition that orients the

scientific mode of production of which it is

the product: I mean the mode of production

which, making of the construction of the

object, contrary to the common-sense mean-

ing, the decisive moment of scientific

re-search, refuses to disassociate the theoretical

and the empirical, the analysis of a particular

case conceived as a "particular case of the

possible," to use Bachelard's expression, and

the search for the invariant For example,

reading the book entitled The Love of Art as a

description of the public of European muse-

ums at a certain moment, or even as an

attempt to propose a model of attendance at

these places that conserve and exhibit

art-works (actually, the book contains a mathe-

matical model that adequately accounts for, at

SYMPOSIUM

least to date, the growth of museum publics)

is to make use of the very categories that it aspires to abolish and reduces the real object

of research (which does not always immedi- ately appear at the level of a single study, and even less of a single book) to the apparent object such as is defined by a certain tradition that, to simplify, I will call positivist

It was necessary to break at the same time from the sort of theorizing that thinks it is posing the problems of art and artistic perception in all their generality, whereas it is merely going around a space of theoretical possibilities marked out long ago by various philosophies, and from the short-sighted empiricism that records "data" without exam- ining the social conditions that make them possible This had to be done in order to raise the question of the genesis and structure of aesthetic disposition and competence with regard to a particular, directly observable, but theoretically constructed, case Hence, the real purpose of my enquiry into the museum public was to create the basis of a "sociology

of artistic perception" (the title of an article that I had published several years earlier) To that end I made use of the empirical materials that sociological methods gave me the means

of producing, but that could just as well have been provided by historical study of the type carried out several years later by the art historian Michael Baxandall I had begun to sketch out a study like that during my stay in Princeton in the early seventies, and it is likely that the study I was planning, besides

seeming infinitely more "chic" than a rather

crude dissection of the capacities and prefer- ences of the museum public, would have made more evident the historicity of catego- ries of perception nai'vely taken to be universal and eternal that we apply to art work Put another way, it would have brought out more clearly the social conditions of this

historical transcendental we call "taste"

(i.e., the "unthought" foundation of "pure" theories of art, of which Kantian aesthetics offers us an exemplary realization) But it is probable as well- sometimes "crudeness" has its virtues-that, by virtue of the neutralization associated both with historical distance and cultural canonization, such a study would not have had the same power of

social (and political) rupture It might not

have highlighted the economic and social

160 S Y M P O S I U M

determinants of the distribution of artistic

dispositions and competence which the char-

ismatic ideology of "the eye" would like to

pass off as reducible to something like the

distribution of "natural" gifts The Love of

Art forces us to recognize that the disinter-

ested game of sensitivity, the pure exercise of

the faculty of feeling, in short, the sensitivity

which Kant claimed to be an a priori, has

definite historical and social preconditions

Aesthetic pleasure, that pure pleasure which

"may be experienced by any human being,"

as Kant says, is the privilege of those who

have access to the conditions (i.e., social

status) in which the "pure" and "disinterest-

ed" disposition can become durably consti-

tuted

But something else, more important and

less visible, w a s i t stake in this study as well,

all the less visible because at the time the

dominance of norms of scientistic positivism

obliged me to keep it hidden I adopted

wholeheartedly the Cartesian phrase larvatus

prodeo lest by admitting such a nearly

"philosophical" theoretical ambition, I might

spoil the scientific respectability that method-

ological rigor and the power of the proposed

mathematical model would give me In the

privileged case of artistic perception I wanted

to try to clarify the specific logic of "practical

knowledge" (the analysis of which I was

pursuing, at about the same time, with respect

to a distant empirical object-Kabyle ritual)

In short, to create an adequate theory of

artistic perception as a practical execution of

quasi-corporeal schemata that operate beneath

the level-of the concept, even though they

might be summarized into pairs of adjectives,

it was necessary to break with the intellectu-

alist approach which, even in the iconological

tradition established by Panofsky and espe-

cially in the semiological tradition, then at the

height of its popularity, tended to conceptual-

ize the perception of the artwork as an act of

decoding, a reading, by way of the typical

illusion of the lector spontaneously inclined

to what Austin called the scholastic bias [in

English in text] It was necessary to lay the

foundations for the science of aesthetic

knowledge, a particular privileged case of

practical knowledge, as a science of the

obscure and confused which is itself neither

obscure nor confused; to construct a theory of

practice as practice, that is, as an activity

based on cognitive operations involving a form of knowledge which is not that of theory, logic, and concept, yet without being, for all that, as those who sense its specificity might have it, a sort of mystical communion and ineffable participation

This is undoubtedly the aspect of my research program that is least achieved in The Love of Art That is easily understandable considering all the obstacles, especially so-cial, that prevented me from transferring to the domain of art and artistic perception (the form, par excellence, of cultivated practice) what I had established with respect to the logic of practice, thanks to meticulous analysis (it took me several years) of the ritual practices of the peasants of Kabyle I might say in passing that by ignoring altogether the chapter entitled "Irresistible Analogy" (The Logic of Practice), in which I demonstrate in painstaking detail the necessity of going beyond a structural analysis of the Kabyle mythico-ritual system to account fully for the specific logic of practice, my commentators miss out on the empirical foundation and the theoretical refinements of the analyses that I propose By doing so, they allow themselves the liberty of reducing them to a few simple

or simplistic propositions that are then available for "theoretical" comparison with other "theories "

Amicus Pluto, sed magis amica veritas: I disagree with practically everything that Scott Lash writes in his review of The Logic of Practice, and, without going into a systematic refutation of his analysis and comparisons, I must point out that it is altogether false to say that I have been "recently fascinated by ethnomethodology." I have explicitly op-posed it since my Esquisse d'une thkorie de la pratique (pp.' 163, 184, 189), published in French in 1972 (at a time when there was no talk of "structuration theory"), and I continue

to oppose it today just as resolutely, at a moment when-Scott Lash is right at least on this point-certain sociologists of the younger generation, and not the best ones in my view, import it to Paris or reinvent it, thanks to the misunderstandings fostered by the interna-tional circulation of ideas I can only refer readers to the analyses that I have developed since-the work that I have carried out on taxonomies used in scholarly judgment, critical discourse, or political thought-on the

functioning of practical knowledge, of which

aesthetic knowledge is but a particular case,

and on the social genesis of classificatory

schemata that constitute the basic principles

of our preferences in the most diverse

domains of social existence

I have done all I could to avoid playing the

very disagreeable role, objectively and subjec-

tively, of criticizing my critics, especially

since, for lack of space, I was unable to

develop my argument with all the indispens-

able nuances This was no doubt the only way

of applying to my commentators the "princi-

ple of charity" that they have not always

applied in their reading of my works But I do

not want to conclude my remarks without

recalling once more the factors that tend to

muddle communications among scholars from

different nations and educational backgrounds:

aside from the gaps in time linked to the

slowness of translations (with the result that

books like The Love of Art or, in other

domains, The Inheritors or Reproduction

seem to repeat works that they preceded or

may have inspired), there are also intellectual

gaps resulting from the divergences between

historical traditions that tend to establish

misunderstanding at the heart of the most

ordinary, the most kindly, the most welcom-

ing communication I think that all sociolo-

gists who are concerned with the progress of

S Y M P O S I U M 161

their discipline and the internationalism that it presupposes and could encourage, should demand of the sociology of science (and, especially, of the sociology of the interna- tional circulation of scientific products) that it provide instruments of defense against the social forces and mechanisms capable of introducing the most harmful distortions in the scholarly exchanges most concerned with scientific and ethical rigor

References

Baxandall, Michael 1972 Painting and Experience in Fifreenth Century Italy Oxford: Oxford University Press

Bourdieu, Pierre 1968 "Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception." International Social Science Journal 20:589-612

- 1972 Esquisse d'une theiorie de la pratique, pricedee de trois etudes d'ithnographie kabyle

Geneva: Editions Droz

1987 "The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

(special issue): 201-10

- 1989 La noblesse d'etat: grandes ecoles et esprit de corps Paris: Editions de Minuit

- 1989 "The Scholastic Point of View." Cultural Anthropology 5, no 4 (November): 380-91

- 1990 "Les Conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idees." Romanistische Zeitschriftfitr Literarurgeschichre 14: 1-10

Bourdieu, Pierre and Loi'c J D Wacquant 1992 An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology Chicago: University

of Chicago Press