Bourdieu
Consumption – stage in communication process; act of deciphering/decoding presupposes mastery of code
Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class – conspicuous consumption/leisure
Popular taste – devalued by popularization; works devoid of artistic ambition or pretension
Aesthetics (moral agnosticism) vs. ethics (subordinates art to values)
Positions in social space – distance from/detachment to realities and fiction – systems of dispositions (habitus=the physical and constitutional characteristics of an individual, especially as related to the tendency to develop a certain disease) characteristic of classes
Habitus – the demands social structures make on individuals become embedded patterns of behavior and perception that people unreflectingly apply in everyday life.
Social subjects distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make
Aesthetic consumption integrates with ordinary consumption abolishes high aesthetics and difference b/w ‘taste of sense’ and ‘taste of refleciton’ & b/w facile pleasure and pure pleasure.
Art and culture fulfill social function of legitimating social difference
2 facts established from survey:
• close relationship b/w cultural practices to educational capital and secondly to social origin
• weight of social origin increases as move away from legitimate areas of culture
3 zones of taste which correspond to educational levels and social classes:
• legitimate taste – dominant class richest in educational capital
• ‘middle-brow’ taste – middle class & ‘intellectuals’ of dominant class
• ‘popular’ taste – working class; varies in inverse ratio to educational capital
music most ‘spiritual’ of the arts; represents most radical absolute form of negation of the world, esp. social world
The Entitlement Effect – noblesse oblige
Academic capital – product of cultural transmission by family and cultural transmission by school
Cultural capital – directly inherited from family
The Aesthetic Disposition – socially accepted ‘right’ way of approaching objects which have been socially designated as works of art; presupposes distance from the world which is basis of bourgeois experience
Conspicuous consumption vs. pure gaze
Ideology of charisma
The popular aesthetic – refusal to invest oneself and take things seriously
Cultural pedigree – bourgeois culture is acquired pre-verbally by early immersion in cultivated world; immediate adherence to tastes and distastes forge unconscious unity of class
Questions:
In the introduction, Bourdieu suggests a transgression in his comparison of the science of taste and cultural consumption, subjecting culture to scientific analysis and abolishing the sanctity of legitimate culture. Do you agree with this assessment as a 21st century reader? Do you believe it was transgressive when it was written in 1984?
Bourdieu argues that discourses around formal theories of culture, language, and aesthetics create and maintain hierarchies of power and domination – how can this be applied to reception theory?
Why and how has the concept of cultural capital been adopted by media scholars?
How can Bourdieu’s notion of the “bourgeois aesthetic,” emotionally distancing oneself from the work, be used when looking at certain genres of film or tv, such as trash/cult cinema, horror, experimental/avant-garde film?
Why is this a canonical text?
Compare Bourdieu’s theory of culture to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School pertaining to class and culture. To neo-Marxist theory.
Criticisms of theory?
habitus
- a form by which relationship between objective and subjective is mediated
- the inscription of the social game in individuals
- possibilities and constraints of social action
- an instinctive sense of what might be achieved - pattern of bahaviour, dispositions, ie. habitus is passed on through generation reinforced by education and culture
- in Bourdieu's own words, 'an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted'
- doxa: a way of understanding the apparently spontaneous beliefs, opinions; and the body and its demeanour
- Bourdieu sought to show how 'the body is in the social world but the social world is also in the body'
- how this was manifested in ways of 'standing, speaking, and thereby of feeling and thinking'.
- The body becomes a memory and acts as a repository for the principles 'embodied' within it which, since they are placed 'beyond the grasp of consciousness...cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit'
- The habitus, as an instrument of mediation, endlessly engenders 'thoughts, perceptions, expressions, actions' within the limits imposed by 'the historically and socially situated conditions of its production'
- it offers a means of conceptualising 'conditioned and conditional freedom' other than as a product of chance or as an immediate reflection of objective structures.
- Bourdieu discussed how aesthetic concepts such as "taste" are defined by those in power
- The habitus of the dominant class can be discerned in the notion that 'taste' is a gift from nature. Taste functions to make social "distinctions".
- He observes that even when the subordinate classes may seem to have their own particular idea of 'good taste', "...[i]t must never be forgotten that the working-class 'aesthetic' is a dominated 'aesthetic' which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics..."
- Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes
- Distinction is the social force which gives different individuals different value.
- This is a disappointing conclusion, one that argues that somehow the working class (or women or other disadvantaged groups) are untainted by ideology because they are compelled by real necessity, by a functional relation to things, or because they know things through direct labour. It is suggested that lower orders and women are morally and cognitively purer than the ‘cultured’ classes.
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