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You
said it, my good knight!
There ought to be laws to protect the body of acquired knowledge.
Take one of our good pupils, for example: modest and diligent, from
his earliest grammar classes he's kept a little notebook full of phrases.
After hanging on the lips of his teachers for twenty years, he's managed
to build up an intellectual stock in trade; doesn't it belong to him
as if it were a house, or money?
Paul
Claudel, Le soulier de satin, Day 111, Scene ii
 here is an economy of cultural goods, but it has
a specific logic. Sociology endeavours to establish the conditions
in which the consumers of cultural goods, and their taste for them,
are produced, and at the same time to describe the different ways
of appropriating such of these objects as are regarded at a particular
moment as works of art, and the social conditions of the constitution
of the mode of appropriation that is considered legitimate. But one
cannot fully understand cultural practices unless 'culture', in the
restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage, is brought back into
'culture'' in the anthropological sense, and the elaborated taste
for the most refined objects is reconnected with the elementary taste
for the flavours of food.
Whereas the ideology of charisma regards taste in legitimate
culture as a gift of nature, scientific observation shows that cultural
needs are the product of upbringing and education: surveys establish
that all cultural practices (museum visits, concert-going, reading
etc.), and preferences in literature, painting or music, are closely
linked to educational level (measured by qualifications or length
of schooling) and secondarily to social origin.' The relative weight
of home background and of formal education (the effectiveness and
duration of which are closely dependent on social origin) varies according
to the extent to which the different cultural practices are recognized
and taught by the educational system, and the influence of social
origin is strongest-other things being equal-in 'extra-curricular'
and avant-garde culture. To the socially recognized hierarchy of the
arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds
a social hierarchy of the consumers. This predisposes tastes to function
as markers of 'crass'. The manner in which culture has been acquired
lives on in the manner of using it: the importance attached to manners
can be understood once it is seen that it is these imponderables of
practice which distinguish the different-and ranked-modes of culture
acquisition, early or late, domestic or scholastic, and the classes
of individuals which they characterize (such as 'pedants' and mondains).
Culture also has its titles of nobility-awarded by the educational
system-and its pedigrees, measured by seniority in admission to the
nobility.
The definition of cultural nobility is the stake in
a struggle which has gone on unceasingly, from the seventeenth century
to the present day between groups differing in their ideas of culture
and of the legitimate relation to culture and to works of art, and
therefore differing in the conditions of acquisition of which these
dispositions are the product. Even in the classroom, the dominant
definition of the legitimate way of appropriating culture and works
of art favours those who have had early access to legitimate culture,
in a cultured household, outside of scholastic disciplines, since
even within the educational system it devalues scholarly knowledge
and interpretation as 'scholastic' or even 'pedantic' in favour of
direct experience and simple delight.
The logic of what is sometimes called, in typically 'pedantic' language,
the 'reading' of a work of art, offers an objective basis for this
opposition. Consumption is, in this case, a stage in a process of
communication, that is an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes
practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code. In a sense, one
can say that the capacity to see (voir) is a function of the knowledge
(savoir ), or concepts, that is, the words, that are available to
name visible things, and which are, as it were, programmes for perception.
A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses
the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded.
The conscious or unconscious implementation of explicit or implicit
schemes of perception and appreciation which constitutes pictorial
or musical culture is the hidden condition for recognizing the styles
characteristic of a period, a school or an author, and, more generally,
for the familiarity with the internal logic of works that aesthetic
enjoyment presupposes. A beholder who lacks the specific code feels
lost in a chaos of sounds and rhythms, colours and lines, without
rhyme or reason. Not having learnt to adopt the adequate disposition,
he stops short at what Erwin Panofsky calls the 'sensible properties',
perceiving a skin as downy or lace-work as delicate, or at the emotional
resonances aroused by these properties, referring to 'austere' colours
or a 'joyful' melody. He cannot move from the 'primary stratum of
the meaning we can grasp on the basis of our ordinary experience'
to the 'stratum of secondary meanings', i.e., the 'level of the meaning
of what is signified' unless he possesses the concepts which go beyond
the sensible properties and which identify the specifically stylistic
properties of the work. Thus the encounter with a work of art is not
'love at first sight' as is generally supposed, and the act of empathy,
Einfuhlung, which is the art-lover's pleasure, presupposes an act
of cognition, a decoding operation, which implies the implementation
of a cognitive acquirement, a cultural code.
This typically intellectualist theory of artistic perception directly
contradicts the experience of the art-lovers closest to the legitimate
definition; acquisition of legitimate culture by insensible familiarization
within the family circle tends to favour an enchanted experience of
culture which implies forgetting the acquisition. The 'eye' is a product
of history reproduced by education. This is true of the mode of artistic
perception now accepted as legitimate, that is, the aesthetic disposition,
the capacity to consider in and for themselves, as form rather than
function, not only the works designated for such apprehension, i.e.,
legitimate works of art, but everything in the world, including cultural
objects which are not yet consecrated-such as, at one time, primitive
arts, or, nowadays, popular photography or kitsch-and natural objects.
The 'pure' gaze is a historical invention linked to the emergence
of an autonomous field of artistic production, that is, a field capable
of imposing its own norms on both the production and the consumption
of its products. An art which, like all Post-Impressionist painting,
is the product of an artistic intention which asserts the primacy
of the mode of representation over the object of representation demands
categorically an attention to form which previous art only demanded
conditionally.
The pure intention of the artist is that of a producer who aims to
be autonomous, that is, entirely the master of his product, who tends
to reject not only the 'programmes' imposed a priori by scholars and
scribes, but also-following the old hierarchy of doing and saying-the
interpretations superimposed a posterior) on his work. The production
of an 'open work', intrinsically and deliberately polysemic, can thus
be understood as the final stage in the conquest of artistic autonomy
by poets and, following in their footsteps, by painters, who had long
been reliant on writers and their work of 'showing' and 'illustrating'.
To assert the autonomy of production is to give primacy to that of
which the artist is master, i.e., form, manner, style, rather than
the 'subject', the external referent, which involves subordination
to functions-even if only the most elementary one, that of representing,
signifying, saying something. It also means a refusal to recognize
any necessity other than that inscribed in the specific tradition
of the artistic discipline in question: the shift from an art which
imitates nature to an art which imitates art, deriving from its own
history the exclusive source of its experiments and even of its breaks
with tradition. An art which ever increasingly contains reference
to its own history demands to be perceived historically; it asks to
be referred not to an external referent, the represented or designated
'reality', but to the universe of past and present works of art. Like
artistic production, in that it is generated in a field, aesthetic
perception is necessarily historical inasmuch as it is differential,
relational, attentive to the deviations (ecarts) which make styles.
Like the so-called naive painter who, operating outside the field
and its specific traditions remains external to the history of art,
the 'naive' spectator cannot attain a specific grasp of works of art
which only have meaning or value-in relation to the specific history
of an artistic tradition. The aesthetic disposition demanded by the
products of a highly autonomous field of production is inseparable
from a specific cultural competence. This historical culture functions
as a principle of pertinence which enables one to identify, among
the elements offered to the gaze, all the distinctive features and
only these, by referring them, consciously or unconsciously, to the
universe of possible alternatives. This mastery is, for the most part,
acquired simply by contact with works of art-that is, through an implicit
learning analogous to that which makes it possible to recognize familiar
faces without explicit rules or criteria-and it ,generally remains
at a practical level: it is what makes it possible to identify styles,
i.e., modes of expression characteristic of a period, a civilization
or a school, without having to distinguish clearly or state explicitly,
the features which constitute their originality. Everything seems
to suggest that even among professional values, the criteria which
define the stylistic properties of the 'typical works' on which all
their judgments are based usually remain implicit.
The pure gaze implies a break with the ordinary attitude towards the
world, which, given the conditions in which it is performed, is also
a social separation. Ortega y Gasset can be believed when he attributes
to modern art a systematic refusal of all that is 'human', i.e., generic,
common-as opposed to-distinctive, or distinguished-namely, the passions,
emotions and feelings which 'ordinary' people invest in their 'ordinary'
lives. It is as if the 'popular aesthetic' (the quotation marks are
there to indicate that this is an aesthetic 'in itself' not 'for itself')
were based on the affirmation of the continuity between art and life,
which implies the subordination of form to function. This is seen
clearly in the ease of the novel and especially the theater where
the working-class audience refuses any sort of formal experimentation
and all the effects which, by introducing a distance from the accepted
conventions (as regards scenery, plot etc.), tend to distance the
spectator, preventing him from getting involved and fully identifying
with the characters ( I am thinking of Brechtian 'alienation' or the
disruption of plot in the nouveau roman). In contrast to detachment
and disinterestedness which aesthetic theory regards as the only way
of recognizing the work of art for what it is, i.e., autonomous, selbstandig,
the 'popular aesthetic' ignores or refuses the refusal of 'facile'
involvement and 'vulgar' enjoyment, a refusal which is the basis of
the taste for formal experiment. And popular judgements of paintings
or photographs spring from an 'aesthetic' (in feet it is an ethos)
which is the exact opposite of the Kantian aesthetic. Whereas, in
order to grasp the specificity of the aesthetic judgement, Kant strove
to distinguish that which pleases from that which gratifies and, more
generally, to distinguish disinterestedness, the sole guarantor of
the specifically aesthetic quality of contemplation, from the interest
of reason which defines the Good, working-class people expect every
image to explicitly perform a function, if only that of a sign, and
their judgements make reference, often explicitly, to the norms of
morality or agreeableness. Whether rejecting or praising, their appreciation
always has an ethical basis.
Popular taste applies the schemes of the ethos, which pertain in the
ordinary circumstances of life, to legitimate works of art, and so
performs a systematic reduction of the things of art to the things
of life. The very seriousness (or naively) which this taste invests
in fictions and representations demonstrates a contrario that pure
taste performs a suspension of 'naive' involvement which is one dimension
of a 'quasi-ludic' relationship with the necessities of the world.
Intellectuals could be said to believe in the representation-literature,
theatre, painting-more than in the things represented, whereas the
people chiefly expect representations and the conventions which govern
them to allow them to believe 'naively' in the things represented.
The pure aesthetic is rooted in an ethic, or rather, an ethos of elective
distance from the necessities of the natural and social world, which
may take the form of moral agnosticism (visible when ethical transgression
becomes an artistic parti pris) or of an aestheticism which presents
the aesthetic disposition as a universally valid principle and takes
the bourgeois denial of the social world to its limit. The detachment
of the pure gaze cannot be dissociated from a general disposition
towards the world which is the paradoxical product of conditioning
by negative economic necessities-a life of ease-that tends to induce
an active distance from necessity.
Although art obviously offers the greatest scope to the aesthetic
disposition, there is no area of practice in which the aim of purifying,
refining and sublimating primary needs and impulses cannot assert
itself no area in which the stylization of life, that is, the primacy
of forms over function, of manner over matter, does not produce the
same effects. And nothing is more distinctive, more distinguished,
than the capacity to confer aesthetic status on objects that are banal
or even 'common' (because the 'common' people make them their own,
especially for aesthetic purposes), or the ability to apply the principles
of a 'pure' aesthetic to the most everyday choices of everyday life,
e.g., in cooking, clothing or decoration, completely reversing the
popular disposition which annexes aesthetics to ethics.
In fact, through the economic and social conditions which they presuppose,
the different ways of relating to realities and fictions. of believing
in fictions and the realities they simulate, with more or less distance
and detachment, are very closely linked to the different possible
positions in social space and, consequently, hound up with the systems
of dispositions (habitus) characteristic of the different classes
and class fractions. Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.
Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish
themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and
the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position
in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed. And statistical
analysis does indeed show that oppositions similar in structure to
those found in cultural practices also appear in eating habits. The
antithesis between quantity and quality, substance and form, corresponds
to the opposition-linked to different distances from necessity-between
the taste of necessity, which favours the most 'filling' and most
economical foods, and the taste of liberty-or luxury-which shifts
the emphasis to the manner (of presenting, serving, eating etc.) and
tends to use stylized forms to deny function.
The science of taste and of cultural consumption begins with a transgression
that is in no way aesthetic: it has to abolish the sacred frontier
which makes legitimate culture a separate universe, in order to discover
the intelligible relations which unite apparently incommensurable
'choices', such as preferences in music and food, painting and sport,
literature and hairstyle. This barbarous reintegration of aesthetic
consumption into the world of ordinary consumption abolishes the opposition,
which has been the basis of high aesthetics since Kant, between the
'taste of sense' and the 'taste of reflection', and between facile
pleasure, pleasure reduced to a pleasure of the senses, and pure pleasure,
pleasure purified of pleasure, which is predisposed to become a symbol
of moral excellence and a measure of the capacity for sublimation
which defines the truly human man. The culture which results from
this magical division is sacred. (cultural consecration does indeed
confer on the objects, persons and situations it touches, a sort of
ontological promotion akin to a transubstantiation. Proof enough of
this is found in the two following quotations, which might almost
have been written for the delight of the sociologist:
'What struck me most is this: nothing could he obscene on the stage
of our premier theatre, and the ballerinas of the Opera, even as naked
dancers, sylphs, sprites or Bacchae, retain an inviolable purity.'
'There are obscene postures: the stimulated intercourse which offends
the eye. Clearly, it is impossible to approve, although the interpolation
of such gestures in dance routines does give them a symbolic and aesthetic
quality which is absent from the intimate scenes the cinema daily
flaunts before its spectators' eyes . . . As for the nude scene, what
can one say, except that it is brief and theatrically not very effective?
I will not say it is chaste or innocent, for nothing commercial can
be so described. Let us say it is not shocking, and that the chief
objection is that it serves as a box-office gimmick.... In Hair, the
nakedness fails to be symbolic.'
The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile-in a word, natural-enjoyment,
which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation
of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated,
refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever
closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are
predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social
function of legitimating social differences.
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