From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-gwi.net>
Subject: Re: Aesthetic Labour
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 20:03:23 +0300


Hi Carsten--

>What I meant in my rather obscure post was not training in the sense of
>practising on a violin or the sort of training you get when you have
>written twenty short stories. It was rather that to be an (succesful)
>artist or literary writer in a specialized field with a structure and a
>history demands a considerable knowledge (not necessarily in a conscious
>form, rather an embodied one) of this structure and history, and that this
>knowledge is acquired in a very long process where you have to understand
>what your predecessors was doing, what the difference between your
>contemporararies are, what the different editors (or musuems and art
>galleries), critics, magazines and journals, etc are up to. I think one
>could consider this process of acquisition of knowledge as a specific labor
>which the field requires as a sort of entrance fee. This is just another
>way of putting George's point that it is the field which is the subject of
>creation (of the value of the work), only it is here seen from the
>perspective of the individual who has to internalize the structure and
>history of the field in order to act in it in a competent way.

Yes, your point is well taken.  I had suggested something similar in
mentioning the inculcation of a habitus as part of training, but didn't
follow it through.  However, you hint at something distinctive about "high
brow" cultural institutions, which is their possession of a history (in
contrast to what might be described as "low brow traditions").  History is
authoritative, basically because it is constructed by authorities, and it
authorizes particular practices.  In fact it may be better to say that
*institutionalization* is what marks an art work as "high brow."  I'm of
course referring to Bourdieu's discussion of "rites of institution" and all
the power relations that create it and it creates.  Institutionalization in
that specific sense is what "low brow" culture generally lacks (until it
becomes "high brow," of course: think of jazz and blues).

>It is true that there is a sort of circularity in the social definition of
>dominant positions, since only the dominant (e.g. in art or science) have
>the competence and power, acquired through the long process described
>above, to decide what could count as dominant. Still, as I see it, there is
>a danger to the simple denial of cultural hierarchies. If one does not
>understand that there is a qualitative difference between Proust and
>Barbara Cartland - residing in the different relations to history and the
>investment in the the field, i.e. in a competence produced by work - I
>can't see how one would explain the superiority (i.e. the dominant
>position) of Bourdieu, Foucault, Durkheim, Weber, or Marx over some
>journalist pouring out his unfounded prejudices about the social world in a
>newspaper.

My apologies if I wasn't clear: I don't deny the existence of cultural
hierarchies or of qualitiative differences among cultural products.  I am
only rejecting the idea that the two are *identical*.  (They overlap, of
course.)

Let me give a contentious example if this non-identity (at the risk of
inviting flames).  There's little question that deconstruction (or a version
of it) is a high cultural theory/practice within humanities departments at
U.S. universities.  In fact in some circles, if you aren't doing
deconstruction, you aren't doing theory.  (Yeah, even today.)  So not only
have there been tons of publications using deconstruction, it has gotten
predictable.  Pick up an article, and you can pretty well predict what the
author will say, what sorts of puns and etymologies s/he will use,
etc--there's a sort of routine cleverness about it all.  (I call this
"cookie-cutter postmodernism.")  My claim is that this stuff has retained
its high brow status, and even (in a sense) its sophistication, but has
become pretty valueless, even complete poppycock.  In aesthetic terms, we're
getting highly skillful bad art.  IMHO.

>Bourdieu's strategy in this respect has always been to show that the
>dominant (e.g. philosophy in relation to sociology) were often dominant for
>forgotten historical reasons, i.e. that in a number of cases dominance was
>the result not of competence and work, but of a historical heritage,
>against which a superior specific competence could be used. In this respect
>he may be said to use a meritocratic model against an
>aristocratic-hereditary one - which is not necessarily to say that Bourdieu
>really prefers a (even truly) meritocratic model, but only that this is the
>sort of instrument available in the present state of things in the
>intellectual field. Applied to the artistic field, such a meritocratic
>model would urge one to reconsider cultural hierarchies in the light of the
>merits of different cultural forms or works - but here things become really
>complicated.

I'll agree that within intellectual fields, including the arts, merit plays
an important role.  But it is not the only criterion.  As in any other
domain in which power and capital of various sorts is invested, certain
ideas and behaviors are approved and people who have them receive
advancement, while the others don't.  One has to pass through certain hoops
(get a PhD, study under Person X, publish in Journal A, etc) to have certain
kinds of authority, a process which generally weeds certain thinkers out.
(Again, Bourdieu's rites of institution.)  Academia and the arts, like
religion, can have brilliant heretics and outcasts.  I can't imagine
Bourdieu would say that virtue is always rewarded by the powers that be, or
that what the powers reward is always virtue!

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-gwi.net *or* tobin.nellhaus-AT-helsinki.fi
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce


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