New Uses of Bourdieu in Film and Media Studies

Guy Austin

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781785338298
• eBook ISBN: 9781785331688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Through his influential work on cultural capital and social mobility, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has provided critical insights into the complex interactions of power, class, and culture in the modern era. Ubiquitous though Bourdieu's theories are, however, they have only intermittently been used to study some of the most important forms of cultural production today: cinema and new media. With topics ranging from film festivals and photography to constantly evolving mobile technologies, this collection demonstrates the enormous relevance that Bourdieu's key concepts hold for the field of media studies, deploying them as powerful tools of analysis and forging new avenues of inquiry in the process.

Chapter 1

Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production and Cinema

Illumination and Blind Spots

Bridget Fowler

This chapter discusses the logic of Bourdieu’s theory of practice, moving from his initial discussion of the minor art of photography to the later analysis of the fields of cultural production. In his early works he states that the minor arts fail to undergo a consecration process because the necessary symbolic interests in doing so are absent. His second phase includes analysis of the genesis of the restricted cultural field and the distinctive author’s point of view. This pivots on the accumulation of symbolic capital and the struggle for autonomy from the market and authoritarian state. I shall lay out some of the problems with this account, particularly those clustering around his views about popular art. Finally, I shall reflect positively on Bourdieu’s value for the sociological and political dissection of the cinema.

In 1978, in France, Bourdieu’s Distinction had the shock of the new:

It is barbarism to ask what culture is for; to allow the hypothesis that . . . interest in culture is not a natural property - unequally distributed, as if to separate the barbarians from the elect - but is a simple social artefact, a particular form of fetishism . . . (Bourdieu 1984: 250)

In other words, Bourdieu invites us to explore the fetishised sacralisation of secular culture within modern capitalist societies. His research reveals that amongst other uses, the arts contribute a symbolic armour to the dominant classes, testifying to their spiritual values and seemingly innate good taste. This demystifying analysis permeates Bourdieu’s first phase, offering an unrelenting disenchantment of the world. It reveals how much our taste is determined by habitus, formed by a family’s trajectory over several generations.

Habitus differentiates actors’ modes of perception, judgement and evaluation of the world and drives the embodied practices that are improvised in relation to these. Felt like a second nature, it is crucially shaped by positions of power or powerlessness, including exposure to immediate material urgencies. In advanced capitalist societies, this positioning in social space depends not just on the volume of economic capital but crucially on educational qualifications – cultural capital – which is in part pursued instrumentally as a labour market investment, entailing material rewards. Specifically, agents’ diverse capitals, classifications of the world and social practices need to be understood within different fields, or specialised occupational areas.

In particular Bourdieu focuses on the genesis within Europe of the restricted field of cultural production, including the Romantic invention of the cursed or Christ-like artist. Crucially, in France by the mid nineteenth century the artist had come to occupy a second bohemia, a space for autonomous cultural production, free not only from the control of the State and the Church but also from the ‘Hidden God’ of the cultural industry, who demands market success or high audience ratings (1998a: 25).

Bourdieu’s sociology possesses the greatest potential for discovering the underlying structures or ‘mechanisms’ governing contemporary social reality. The study of cinema throws up both fertile and problematic areas in his general logic of cultural practice. We will benefit from being neither too pious nor too iconoclastic towards him, but from developing his social theory.

THE MINOR ARTS – PHOTOGRAPHY AND CINEMA

Cinema appears fleetingly in an early text, Photography – A Middlebrow Art (Bourdieu with Boltanski et al. 1990). Published in France in 1965, this book claims that it is the technology of photography together with its everyday family use that have so far proved insuperable obstacles to classifying it as an art form. Hence the absence of any sanctified tradition of consecrated practitioners. Like photography, cinema (and jazz) are both potentially ‘legitimisable arts’ but are doomed never to become major arts.

Why should Bourdieu possess such a tragic view? In order to grasp this we need to see that he approaches photography as Durkheim did religion. Across classes, he contends, photography has become part of the sacred cult of the family. Taking wedding or honeymoon photographs testifies to the importance of the occasion; to use a phrase he had deployed earlier, these stereotyped images contribute to collective memory (Sorlin 1977: 98). Of course, those with the highest cultural and economic capital realise photography could be an aesthetic practice but, given the necessary economies of time, they choose to dedicate their energies to more ‘noble arts’ – opera, theatre or literature. Consequently, the more exploratory uses of the camera are restricted to the subordinate classes, notably the petty bourgeoisie and skilled workers. It is from these classes that people come together in camera clubs around a different practice. Yet even then experimentation is rare; either they take classical academic conventions of painting as their aesthetic model or their interests are mainly technical. Bourdieu himself adopts a critical subtext, emphasising the subtle perspectivism and juxtaposition of contrasts that the camera can allow, and citing Proust to claim that photography permits the destruction of the ‘“cocoon of habit”’ (Bourdieu with Boltanski et al. 1990: 75–76). Dependence on a mechanical process does not remove the potential for defamiliarisation, a destabilising gaze.

Photography could in principle deploy images to undermine the usual frames of perception, thus unsettling the habitus and with it the stable processes for the social reproduction of power. Bourdieu refers throughout his works to Bakhtin and the Russian avant-gardists: in other words, he possesses an overlooked constructivist aesthetic that he shares with photographers like Rodchenko (Gray 1986; Tupitsyn 2009).

Yet since the early ’60s, Bourdieu has been in part disproved by events. Photography has been recognised as one of the major arts. Further, an orthodox history of the art has been disseminated, to which his co-author Chamboredon alluded – Stieglitz, Brassai, Clergue, Moholy-Nagy and Cartier Bresson (Bourdieu with Boltanski et al. 1990: 146–47, 209). Has the same fate occurred in the case of Bourdieu’s other ‘legitimizeable arts’ – such as cinema? Indeed: the cinema is now preserved via multiple forms of canonisation including higher education curricula. Bourdieu implicitly acknowledges this consecration in Distinction where he identifies a surrogate high/low division between the educated who classify films via directors and the uneducated who classify them via actors (1984: 26–28, 564; cf. Orr 1993: 182). Further, just before his death, he alerts us to the renewed dangers that the cinema of the ‘auteur’ is collapsing, following neo-liberalism (Bourdieu 2002).

BOURDIEU’S SECOND PHASE (FROM THE 1980S ONWARDS): A MOVE FROM THE ETHIC OF SUSPICION TOWARDS THE ANALYSIS OF CRITICAL ‘HETERODOXIES’

Bourdieu’s early phase – including Photography – was underpinned by an ethic of suspicion, provoking the critical unmasking of privilege and power. It revealed how claims of a universalistic stance are offered that act as a front for class or other concealed interests. He never ceased to think this important, yet he also possesses a second, later phase. This represents a defence of what he called the ‘corporation of intellectuals’, in particular an appeal to universalistic ideas and an elucidation of the resources conducive to an end to domination, a reasoned utopia (1989, 1998b). This second phase was in part his response to certain misuses of social theory that he classified as ‘narcissistic relativism’ and ‘chic radicalism’; in part, to the rolling back of the welfare state with the financialisation of capitalism (1998c: 50, 94–105).

In these later works, he emphasises how within the fields of professional existence in modernity such as the law, specific universalistic rules are codified, rules that should be seen as necessary and ‘disinterested’ (Guibentif 2010: 277–78). These advance a wider ‘corporation of reason’ and autonomy, free from domination by market logic or political power (Bourdieu 1996: 343–48). The consecrated arts, although often given a final State imprimatur, form part of these activities (Bourdieu 2014: 157–58 and 188). Heretical visions and divisions of the world are associated intimately with the artistic or experimental subfield – cinema has its place here alongside the other arts.

CLOSE-UP: THE AUTONOMOUS OR RESTRICTED (SUB)FIELD

Bourdieu famously describes the restricted cultural field (or the Republic of Letters) in terms of the historical battle for the conquest of autonomy in post-1848 France. He elucidates this through the work of modernist writers (such as Baudelaire or Flaubert) and artists (Manet particularly, but also the later avant-gardes). His analysis breaks with the usual hagiography and the ‘biographical illusion’. Granted, ‘Bourdieu’s modernists’ act with an improvisational flair and a ‘feel for the game’, but also in accordance with their class and the concerns derived from their artistic habitus. Front stage, they may be valued for their ‘natural’ distinction but they may also exhibit – backstage – strategic interests in the field, interests of which they themselves are not always fully aware. But what are the key elements of the restricted subfield?

First, an ethical rupture is the fundamental dimension of all aesthetic ruptures (1996: 60–61), which is noteworthy since Bourdieu’s critics claim that none of his actors are capable of reflexive thought except the sociologist (Alexander 1995). For Bourdieu, cultural producers are capable of at least some critical reflexivity about the social world. In Flaubert’s case, for example, he paints a sociological image of Frederick in Sentimental Education engaging in ‘social flying’, interacting with all or ‘flying’ above every social circle and thus understanding the point of honour in each.

Second, new art has to make its own public, and at first is appreciated only by fellow producers working in the same field (Bourdieu 1996: 82). Here he writes of the contemporary arts having to create their own demand (cf. Marx 1973: 92–93) – indeed, an individual artist’s failure may be conveniently masked due to this. The heroic modernists of the first generation made an artistic rupture via ‘formalist realism’ with safe academic forms; they paid a heavy price – exile or impoverishment – after criminal prosecutions.

Third, by the early twentieth century, a period of permanent revolution had been instituted within the restricted avant-garde field via successive symbolic revolut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Introduction: Bourdieu on Media and Film
• 1. Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production and Cinema: Illumination and Blind Spots
• 2. Bourdieu and Film Studies: Beyond the Taste Agenda
• 3. Bourdieu and Images of Algerian Women’s Emotional Habitus
• 4. The Taste Database: Taste Distinctions in Online Film Reviewing
• 5. Millennials Protest: Hipsters, Privilege and Homological Obstruction
• 6. A Bourdieuian Approach to Internet Studies: Rethinking Digital Practice
• 7. Obtain and Deploy: Mobile Media Technologies as Tools for Distinction and Capital
• 8. Weak (Cultural) Field: A Bourdieuian Approach to Social Media
• Index