Commentary on the commentaries (Pierre Bourdieu)

Commentary on the Commentaries
Pierre Bourdieu
Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 21, No. 2. (Mar., 1992), pp. 158-161.
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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 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 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. 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.