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1. Bourdieu's work helps us address questions like 'why do people make strange and experimental films?' The issue of taste is important in these discussions: experimental pieces cannot often be grasped from a 'popular' structure of tastes, and, for that matter, our usual analyses of popular media products are not much help either. Popular media can often be grasped in terms of narratives and representations designed to smoothly involve the viewer -- but experimental pieces often refuse to represent anything, deliberately break conventional narratives, and set out to shock or alienate viewers. 2. If you're not a sociologist, the
idea that taste has a sociology might seem strange. Taste seems so personal
a matter, so subjective, and so tied up with our image of ourselves as
mature people. Bourdieu sets out to demonstrate that there are social patterns
in matters of taste, though,that tastes are connected to major
social divisions like class and gender, divisions between provincials and
cosmopolitans, and between the highly and poorly educated. Indeed, tastes
are used in whole structures of judgement and whole processes of social
distinction that produce substantial barriers between such social groups.
Bourdieu's work should be read as a description of tastes and NOT an evaluation
of them: he is not condemning the popular taste, and, if anything, his
sympathies lie in exposing the falsely universal nature of elite tastes.
3. It is important to see immediately
that Bourdieu's work is controversial. Much of it is based on rather old
data (despite the misleadingly recent dates of some of the English editions
of his work), and it is very French. Some 'postmodernist' commentators
believe the whole social structure has
changed so dramatically that it is now pointless to refer to 'social classes'
in the old sense, for example. Further, there were always exceptions to
broad sociological generalisations even twenty years ago: the whole cultural
scene these days certainly features much more mixing between
'high' and 'low' cultures than it did. The debates with the postmodernists
are not all one-sided, though, and Bourdieu has often been cited as helping
us grasp postmodernism in social class terms, as we shall see.
4. As a quick example of the work,
Bourdieu (1986) features some empirical work on cultural tastes involving
a questionnaire issued to respondents from different social backgrounds
(what a dissertation this would make!). For example, respondents were asked
about their views on what topics would make a 'beautiful, interesting,
meaningless or ugly' photograph -- ' a car crash, a landscape...the bark
of a tree'. The proportion saying that the bark of a tree could make a
'beautiful' photograph varied
from 16% of those with no educational qualifications to 61% of those with
elite h.e. qualifications. Similar patterns arose with musical tastes:
54% of manual workers, 16% of professionals, and 0% of higher education
teachers expressed a preference for The Blue Danube, for
example (I'd love to try this in Britain for, say, My Way).
5. Cinema-going similarly offers
a pattern -- attendance is lower among the less well educated, provincials
and the old. The way people think about cinema varies: only 5% of those
who left school at the 'elementary' level could name up to four directors,
while 22% of those with higher education could. Further, 'where some only
see "a western starring Burt Lancaster", others discover an "early John
Sturges" and "the latest Sam Peckinpah"'. These differences are not 'natural'
or purely personal, but are linked to social class and education. The sort
of analytic framework used to describe and classify films (and other texts)
arises from 'a disposition acquired through the domestic or scholastic
inculcation of legitimate culture'. Certain patterns of upbringing
or schooling provide people with the terms, concepts, knowledge and experience
to make these more abstract and technical judgements about films -- this
is 'cultural capital'. Those with large amounts of it 'perceive, memorise
and classify [art] differently'.
6. Different amounts of cultural
capital produce different structures of taste. Let's consider two main
ones: popular and high aesthetics (in the book, different combinations
of inherited and acquired cultural capital, and different types of cultural
capital, produce a more complicated schema). The 'popular aesthetic' is
'based on a continuity between art and life', a similarity between 'ordinary
dispositions' and aesthetic ones. It favours functions over form, it dislikes
experimentation, it likes, for example, logical and ordered plots in plays
or films, as in life. It features a deep-rooted demand for participation,
a strong desire to be able to enter the fictional world and identify with
the characters. Any denial of that demand is likely to lead to 'strong
feelings of hostility', 'panic mixed with revolt', because experimental
art is seen as an affront to common sense and to all sensible people.
7. Persons with that aesthetic stance
are quite right to feel excluded, Bourdieu insists, since the 'high aesthetic'
is deliberately defined 'against the popular', as an inversion of it, as
a definite way to exclude the popular and to mark off an elite grouping.
It stresses cool distancing and a refusal of involvement, instead of direct
emotional engagement, form rather than function, disinterest in content,
an admiration for artistic effects, a taste for formal complexity and 'objectless
representations'. These stresses and preferences are only possible with
considerable dollops of cultural capital: when this is passed on in families,
people acquire the necessary concepts and techniques effortlessly, 'naturally',
'unconsciously', as part of their taken-for granted 'habitus' (a kind of
local social world). To put it bluntly, you can afford to be cool, distanced
and calmly indifferent to almost any content if you have been raised in
one of those families that has several languages, perhaps; that visits
famous European museums and art galleries; that exposes its children to
European and Asian film, poetry, painting and novels; that has experience
of living in different cities or countries; that holidays in exotic locations
and is widely travelled; owns lots of books, knows lots of academics and
writers; that sees university as a place to develop culturally and make
even more contacts; that has the financial security needed to avoid any
worry about getting a job or having to move around or being socially mobile,
a 'world freed from urgency'.
8. Let's remember that this is not
an analysis which simply approves of high bourgeois aesthetics. Bourdieu
goes
on to analyse the ways these structures of taste are used to maintain boundaries
and reinforce social distinctions. The education system is an interesting
site for such processes, of course. It can help to pass on cultural capital
to those not born into it -- but academic life itself is based on the same
unconscious structures of taste and judgement, at least among its elite
sectors. Bourdieu (1988) offers a splendid analysis of the French system
(some years ago)
9. I know education is not your main
interest, and you can skip this bit if you're not particularly gripped,
but here is a bit from one of my own recent papers (on distance education
-- in Evans and Murphy 1994) which develops a bit of Bourdieu on education:
A detailed study of French universities,
using both basic statistical techniques and close textual analysis of internal
documents, reveals the persistence of the effects of social location on
academic success (Bourdieu, 1988). For academic staff, Bourdieu offers
a sophisticated analysis of inter-faculty politics involving claims to
status, and manoeuvres to maintain a solid front and a coherent discipline
(roughly, the less coherent the intellectual framework, the more necessary
a social coherence based on common and largely unconscious perceptions
of the world, an habitus). In general 'The structure of the university
field reflects the [complex] structure of the field of power, while its
own activity of selection and indoctrination contributes to the reproduction
of that structure' (ibid, p.41)
Turning to the processes of academic
classification of students, Bourdieu collects evidence of social locations
of students (eg girls from different social classes in a Paris selective
school), grades awarded, and comments entered about them in files and references.
To be very succinct, his analysis shows that particularly frank and negative
judgements are reserved for those from the 'lowest' social origins, and
rarely applied to 'those with the richest cultural capital', while those
in between receive a curious mixture of euphemism, coded comment, and faint
praise. Actual grades awarded are more evenly distributed, but those judgements
remain on file. The judgements themselves are based on a 'whole collection
of disparate criteria, never clarified, hierarchized or systematized' (1988,
p. 200) which are listed as 'handwriting', 'appearance', 'style', 'general
culture', '"external" criteria' such as accent, elocution and diction',
and 'finally and above all the bodily "hexis"' which includes 'manners
and behaviour, which are often designated, very directly, in the remarks'.
(1988, p. 200)(original emphasis).
It is clear that, in France at least,
these judgements are 'naturalised' and socially shared 'transmitted in
and through practice, beyond any specifically pedagogical intention', and
they originate in experience gained from life in social locations before
becoming an academic: '..they are the product of the transformation imposed
by the specific logic of the university field on the forms which organize
the dominant thought and expression'. A strong implication, then, is that,
if they extend beyond French universities, these forms of classification
are 'deeper' than mere teaching style, 'behind' rational assessment policies
(a wonderful site for future research would be the final examination board
as one site where judgements are delivered as opposed to mere marks), rooted
deeply in the very professional activity of university academics, and largely
beyond reform.
[turning to the more general work
in Bourdieu 1986]
To be very brief about a massive
work, it is clear that different social groups develop quite different
'readings' of cultural activities across the spectrum, that they acquire
the ability to perform these readings from the cultural capital they inherit,
and that these readings are used to make further distinctions between groups.
Dominant groups claim a natural legitimacy for their readings, of course.
These legitimate readings are based on certain concepts and codes which
act as 'programmes for perception'. Those without these codes stop at '...the
sensible properties [ of a cultural experience]... or at the emotional
resonances aroused by these properties...[They] cannot move from the "primary
stratum of the meaning we can grasp on the basis of our ordinary experience"
to the "stratum of secondary meanings" ie the "level of meaning of what
is signified" (Bourdieu, 1986, p.2). Naturally, this is not how those with
the necessary codes see it - they have acquired concepts and codes 'by
insensible familiarization within the family circle...which implies forgetting
the acquisition' (ibid, p.3).
Bourdieu goes on to explain how this
basic insight can be used to explain the social patterns which he uncovers
in a wide range of cultural preferences, but we also have here an explicit
link with 'deep' and 'surface' approaches in education [much discussed
in distance education and strongly recommended in 'normal' higher education].
The implication is that the [much admired] 'deep' approach is not merely
a cognitive (or metacognitive) technique but an aesthetic, connected to
much wider cultural predispositions, a source of pleasure and power, a
matter of social distinction, social solidarity, and social reproduction.
Bourdieu, incidentally, has never
denied that cultural capital can be acquired during schooling, but likens
the process to the painful 'primitive accumulation' of economic capital,
where 'like the Puritans [self made persons]...can count only on their
asceticism...and get the chance to realise [their ambitions] by paying
in sacrifices, renunciations, goodwill, recognition...' (1986, p.333).
And even after success, there remains the crucial status differences between
'autodidacts' and those born into the dominant habitus: the former are
'too [serious and anxious]...to escape the permanent fear of ignorance
or blunders, or to side-step tests by responding with the indifference
of those who are not competing or the serene detachment of those who feel
entitled to confess or even to flaunt their
lacunae' (1986, p.330).
10. Work on the university suggests
that the 'high aesthetic' is confined to a rather powerful minority. Perhaps
we never routinely meet such people socially -- but we are likely to encounter
them in crucial 'gatekeeping' roles, on admission to university, on examination
boards, at job interviews.
11. Finally, Bourdieu's work can
look very old-fashioned, and it can be criticised for using out of date
categories, discredited methods, and 'serious' old politics of emancipation.
I have over-emphasised the material on social class, to be fair: Bourdieu
is well aware of the interactions between
social class, gender and educational qualifications (as well as regional
differences), so he is far from being an old-fashioned marxist! Nevertheless,
the old patterns of culture and distinction are breaking down for postmodernists,
and so the analysis must be abandoned. As Wacquant (1993) makes clear,
though, Bourdieu is quite capable of a critical response: postmodernism
itself reflects the tastes of the 'petit bourgeoisie', especially of that
fraction which has more educational cultural
capital than inherited cultural capital. In their struggles to draw boundaries
around themselves and gain advantages, that group talks up a picture of
constant cultural change, and smites its 'serious' rivals with philosophical
underminings of the old certainties (including the old barriers between
cultural specialisms), and ironic detachment verging on cynicism -- all
the central features of 'postmodernism' in fact! In classic terms, these
rather particular values are alleged to be universal cultural trends which
'must' be happening. This sort of work has given much comfort to (usually
marxist) critics of 'postmodernism' and is found in work in cultural studies
like Hewison (1987) or Urry (1990), for example.
12. Not all experimental work
faithfully reflects the values of the 'high aesthetic' or the politics
of the high bourgeoisie: some sets out to disturb, rattle and confound
those groups, and challenge them to stay calm and detached in the face
of provocation. Surrealism fits nicely here as we'll see, and so might
Godard's political cinema. Strange alliances are possible between non-bourgeois
groups and these provocateurs, and there are also cycles of shock and re-adjustment
as the bourgeoisie learn to love
being challenged. Finally, postmodernism offers other odd possibilities,
as proletarians, bourgeois and capitalists in the culture industry all
promote artistic experiment, as long as it threatens no radical politics.
Bibliography
Bourdieu, P (1986) Distinction
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