Bourdieu
– the way he establishes categories and question sin order to describe a homology b/w class struggle and cultural hierarchy
- predictability or legibility – recognizable hierarchies
- the way about how these hierarchies settle – one of the ways in which social membership and social position can be defined
- you can denigrate, resist, combat other social position
- how do these categories change? From one generation to the next – they change but some sort of stability remains – the organization of the distribution of the power is reinforced
- accounting for dynamism eg. Art worlds
- cultural system very much based on the idea of the “new”
- how to build a stable system out of something that is always about the avant garge, the innovative, etc
- heteronomous – re-instantiation of what gets to count as legitimate art
- answers: how do you know someone is an artist or not or authorizing statements like “in the suburbs there is no culture” – who makes that observation? Whiteness as degree zero – what counts, what doesn’t count – the way in which the banal, the crass, etc becomes identified – not part of a treasured aesthetic

Paracinema – as Sconce describes it – loose and vague – you have an idea that it’s not so much a set of texts but rather a set of sensibilities
- low budget, bad movies – not considered within cinema proper
- however, there is an abundance of what is included in this category which creates an interesting problem – the abundance and its organization? What efforts are used to give this some sort of coherence? Catalogues and guides

- something weird video
- alpha video
- oldies.com
- othercinema (san fran)

Cutting Edge – Hawkins
- constructions of fan cultures and taste – entry point through video catalogues
- information gleaned from personal reading rather than on their usages
- euro art, euro trash – catalogue companies classify based on affect which is linked to bodies (Linda Williams) screaming in horror and arousal – link to bodily fluids
- affect – sensation of low vs. high’s removed from emotion (Bourdieu)
- Sconce – cultural space – paracatalogues as un-sacralize form
- catalogues celebrate hybrid categorizations – horror as an example
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Hawkins – video culture as very cool
- hot medium – filled with info (provided), cold medium – more gaps to fill (more effort)
- home viewing experience – tech – paracinema culture is indebted to it
- effect of bringing movies in the home
- comfort of privacy of home – allows for more experimentation
- desacralizes – the viewing experience itself – video culture bring video culture and high art into the home – mixed environment
- susan sontag – home viewing is low culture – importance of medium over content
- aesthetic merits of home viewing
- changing rle of the spectator – control over media, stop, replay, switch between tv, installments, more active in viewing experience
- French realist – encouraged participatory experience – burst into theatres, leave when bored
- 7 elements – countercinema
- glance theory (distracted) vs. gaze theory (engaged)
- disdain of home watching – Hawkins challenges this – home viewers are not necessarily distracted viewers, amount of money spent on entertainment systems, special room set aside for it
- crtiterion collection – authorist – work with directors, annotated, extras, commentary, etc. expensive, higher quality, etc.
- paracinema tapes – cheap, illegal, tape, (bad quality is celebrated as authenticity), American films and European released (censorship diffs)
- exclusivity – draw of authenticity and extra experience in criterion, in paracinema you get the satisfaction of owning something others don’t have
- element of rediscovery – the old and forgotten, underappreciated,

Contributions by J. Sconce
- confrontation against popular (Hollywood culture) and against the academy’s legit taste
- what is generally understood as the good or the ok – what is the terrible?
- does queer cinema straddle these categories
- Sconce is an academic but tries to address something about the moves in place
- you are always trapped within the ironic stance – overemphasis on reader’s position?
- organization of approaches to texts rather than just texts – Bourdieu’s claim about the field of culture, where people are understood as having the ability to tell the good from the bad – argument about “approach” or “sensibility” (Williams)
- irony – self-reflexivity built-in, knowing that you are knowing, which links back to the notion of the habitus
- developing a project about culture – what is the approach being summoned? This might help define or access the habitus
- extratextual –outside the work itself – arguments, writings, etc (Foucault)

M. Jancovich – Cult Fictions
- fan culture building its id through their diff from mainstream (imagined mainstream? B. Anderson’s imagined community); production of Others (specific to inclusion/exclusion of particular formations) which also reinstates on an authenticity
- uses cult and paracinema interchangeably when they should maybe signify diff things
- presents challenges in part to come around or move away from a position of valorization using subculture theory – presenting itself as a too easy understanding of Oppositionality, in a coherent fashion – Jancovich challenges this and extends this to the paracinema realm
- challenges Sconce’s claims that paracinema challenges the mainstream; Sconce reinstates the division b//w those who can read irony from those who cannot
- the role of resistance and ideas around historicity
- how is Bourdieu used? Always about distinction through aesthetics – and its limitations?
- Sconce: the class analysis – how class operates, reasserts itself, how does it get to announce itself and gain a certain amount of capital?
- Jancovich: mainstream and opposition to it – does he challenge the coherence of paracinema
- paracinema – reading strategy defined through their sense of difference – imagined as the normal, as a lose idea about corporate power, lower class conformity and higher class like academic elites, etc
- Bourdieu – for all his research and demonstrations, its neatness and organizations, blocks of categories that cover so much – all this is challenged by Jancovich, we have a degree of mobility which is a temporary strategy to understanding culture and imagined others – of both normal and highbrow
- what about queer cinema? Overlapping communities
- otherness – branding otherness, as special – what would the authors respond
- politics of ironic consciousness, making a spectacle of the working ideologies
- how to use “excess” to reveal, confront, be brash about things that would be otherwise hidden – shock value in art, make people uncomfortable,
- Bourdieu’s argument about cultural politics would not be about ideology but rather an analysis about how certain class formations get to reproduce themselves and keep going – beyond the economic and beyond power – org of cultural works beyond likes and dislikes, formations of communities, circulation of ideas, etc
- what are paracinema’s political implications? Representation? Reclaiming control over one’s culture?
- paracinema’s link to copyright – whoo gets to won and circulate works? Attempt to develop statements what public domain and open source are – sense of community at odds with control over materials
- ******othervideo – links to Prelinger cinema

Themes: abundance and consumption; identity and activities (activism); preconditions for the organization of communities; what are the appendages (theory of articulation, Laclau, Mouffe, Hall); connections between communities, mobilization of populations or cultural communities;