sociology and consumption of cultural goods (music)
AJM
http://www.homme-moderne.org/societe/socio/bourdieu/distinct/introUK.html
(source)
article:
There 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.
Michael Weinstein
> How do you think this applies to classical music?
>
> http://www.homme-moderne.org/societe/socio/bourdieu/distinct/introUK.html
> (source)
>
> article:
>
> There 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
...enormous and mighty "SNIP".......
> 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.
Having some verbal diarrhea today, are we?
--
Michael Weinstein | Never underestimate the power of
Nashua, NH | stupid people in large groups.
paramucho
>How do you think this applies to classical music?
"classical music" can't be used as a single collective noun in this
case, even if we apply the term to a single composer from a single
period. The "economy" of Hadyn's Baryton trios consisted largely of
three people whereas his last major works were clearly populist. There
are many other such "economies".
The definition of "economy" in the article seems to be very limited.
For example, how do we relate "supply and demand" in a dynamic sense
to dead composers?
AJM
- sociology aims to understand the context of art - the social
circumstances of the people that make it, and what they and the
consumers think of it
- you must be within this context to fully understand it
- taste in art is a product of upbringing and education
- upbringing and education don't simply allow you to have taste, they
dictate what that taste is (to an extent)
- upbringing and education tend to stress the immediate pleasures of
art
- there is hierarchy in all artforms, eg. the purists and the casual
listeners, the artists and the audience, what society sees as fine art
and low brow, primary witnesses to the art and people who learn about
it remotely...
- your position on this hierarchy/scale determines how you approach
the art. it will be different for each perspective.
- so you might say something is bad, but you weren't thinking about
the thing which made it good to other people
all that was kind of scene-setting, I think the real argument comes
afterwards:
- art seeks anonymity for the artist
- since the artist isn't a variable in his own equation (anonymous),
he is more in control
- since the artist is not a variable, art becomes detached from real
life experience
- soon any artform starts to exist separately from real life and each
work of art can be appreciated purely in respect to other works
- therefore knowing a lot of the art will help you understand each
work better
- the audience, however, is primarily concerned with the issues of
their daily lives
- all art struggles to reconcile its self-specialization with normal
life, in order to attact a wide audience
- however there's a specialized audience who reject the tastes (normal
life - sex, profanity, crudeness...) of the wider audience
- this rejection was not the initial purpose of the artform, but since
the specialized audience mold the artform, the rejection ultimately
becomes present in the art itself
- thus all art becomes a tool for keeping a social hierarchy, for
separating audiences
Dr.Matt
Michael Weinstein <notreall...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>On 2004-05-31 15:15:22 -0400, plec...@lineone.net (AJM) said:
>
>> How do you think this applies to classical music?
>>
>> http://www.homme-moderne.org/societe/socio/bourdieu/distinct/introUK.html
>> (source)
>>
>> article:
>>
>> There is an economy of cultural goods, but it has a specific logic.
>> and at the same time to describe the different ways of appropriating
>
>
>...enormous and mighty "SNIP".......
>
>
>> fails to be symbolic.'
>>
>>
>> The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile-in a word,
>> or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social
>> differences.
>
>Having some verbal diarrhea today, are we?
It had all the markings of computer-generated pseudoscholarship.
http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/
--
Matthew H. Fields http://personal.www.umich.edu/~fields
Music: Splendor in Sound
"Hey, don't knock Placebo, its the only thing effective for my hypochondria."
Brights have a naturalistic world-view. http://www.the-brights.net/
Dr.Matt
The summary still buries the alleged topic sentence. I remain
skeptical that any human wrote this or thought it.
If the thing has a topic, here it is:
>- thus all art becomes a tool for keeping a social hierarchy, for
>separating audiences
Since artwork of all sorts has been part and parcel of every overthrow
of a social hierarchy, I contend that this neo-Marxist article--if indeed
it is that and not just a bunch of computer-generated blather--is demonstrably
a load of crap.
AJM
that you should see who was watching you: