Commentary on the Commentaries Pierre Bourdieu Contemporary Sociology, Vol 21, No (Mar., 1992), pp 158-161 Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0094-3061%28199203%2921%3A2%3C158%3ACOTC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5 Contemporary Sociology is currently published by American Sociological Association Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/asa.html Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org http://www.jstor.org Sun Jan 27 05:44:58 2008 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 acknowledge technical considerations is considered indispensable On the other hand, workingclass youth clubs reject aesthetic preoccupations 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 Commentaries fashion photography preferably employ members 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 chapters 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 collaborators 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 ambiguity 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 Ecole I should like first of all to thank Contemporary 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 not say publicly what I have often had occasion to say privately? I deeply respect the tradition of free, frank, and amicable discussion that has developed and persists in American universities, and I owe a great deal SYMPOSIUM 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 denounce, 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 narcissistic 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 international 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 meaning, the decisive moment of scientific research, 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 museums at a certain moment, or even as an attempt to propose a model of attendance at these places that conserve and exhibit artworks (actually, the book contains a mathematical model that adequately accounts for, at 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 immediately 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 examining 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 preferences of the museum public, would have made more evident the historicity of categories 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 SYMPOSIUM determinants of the distribution of artistic dispositions and competence which the charismatic 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 disinterested 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 "disinterested" disposition can become durably constituted 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 methodological 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 intellectualist approach which, even in the iconological tradition established by Panofsky and especially in the semiological tradition, then at the height of its popularity, tended to conceptualize 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 social, 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 opposed 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 international 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 SYMPOSIUM 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 subjectively, of criticizing my critics, especially since, for lack of space, I was unable to develop my argument with all the indispensable nuances This was no doubt the only way of applying to my commentators the "principle of charity" that they have not always applied in their reading of my works But I 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 welcoming communication I think that all sociologists who are concerned with the progress of 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 international 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 (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 ... 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. .. specializations such as Commentary on the Commentaries fashion photography preferably employ members of the upper classes The version of the book that we are given here differs from the French... technical considerations is considered indispensable On the other hand, workingclass youth clubs reject aesthetic preoccupations and express their love of technology by making the darkroom the heart