When anyone stands in front of a painting, or any other visual art work, what do they see? Maybe they are taken by a range of sensual experiences: they like that shape, those colours, or they do not like them – they are offended. Visual art has the power to provoke personal reactions, to involve emotions and feelings. This aspect of art is perhaps the most fundamental, the most naive. It is also the most personal; something is touched which evokes the individual and is unique. Art can also touch some timeless realm; there can be a feeling of transcendence, or a com- munication with a higher sense of being. Indeed, art can take on an almost reli- gious significance; it can provoke us to spiritual experience as we enter into some sublime realm of hyper-reality which offers a way out of the mundane world of everyday life. However, this is clearly not the only possible response to the visual arts.
When someone stands in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, they react not only to the composition, the colours and the forms of what is before them, but also to the history of this painting. There is an understanding of it as a famous painting with its own provenance and biography. They interpret technique, shape and colour as a sort of iconic deciphering. They ‘read’ the painting in order to understand what it means, what it is representing or suggesting, what the artist had in mind.
On the one hand, they have an affective response; on the other, there is an intel- lectual one. This perspective on viewing art raises a question about where to locate the sources of such reactions. This question goes to the core of what we commonly term aesthetics, or aesthetics sense, and it is the main focus of this chapter. It con- siders the tradition of philosophical aesthetics and how issues to be found there link with these considerations of how we apprehend visual culture. The chapter then sets out Bourdieu’s own interpretation of aesthetics, and the implications this has for both the consumption and production of art. Finally, it provides a method- ological framework which will be used in forthcoming chapters when considering empirical examples of institutional and visual art fields (museums, photography and painting).
Kant and the ‘Problem’ of Aesthetics
Aesthetics can be defined briefly as a branch of philosophy which addresses ques- tions of beauty and taste. By implication, aesthetics is therefore concerned with art 36
itself in the broadest sense of the term, denoting the process and product of cre- ative endeavour. Aesthetic concerns can be traced back to the Greek origins of con- temporary philosophy; both Plato and Aristotle were concerned with art and whether and how it might act as a carrier of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’. For Plato, at least, art could not be a vehicle for truth. The modern tradition of aesthetics stems from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when attention was directed towards beauty in art and nature. The founding father of this approach to aesthetics was the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).
In the last chapter, we referred to the Age of Enlightenment as a time when tra- ditional religious and aristocratic structures were challenged and partly, in France at least, overthrown. Kant lived at this time. This period gave us not only the Age of Enlightenment, but also romanticism, and its preoccupations with individual emotional and intellectual experience. Both movements can be understood as essentially humanist, as asserting human rationality and/or human emotions in the face of colossal social change. Behind such movements, we can also find philo- sophical issues similar to those implied in the opening paragraph of this chapter, namely, the distinction between rational thinking and affective responses. But beyond this dichotomy there is a deeper question about the status of knowledge and, by implication, how we know. Such epistemological issues were central to both the Age of Enlightenment and romanticism. Clearly, we can perceive the objects around us, but that is not the limit of all that we know. Other things seem to be ‘god-given’, or concern matters of value, belief and tradition. Do we imagine these or are they real? How can we know?
For the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76), an immediate precursor to Kant, the external world cannot be apprehended directly through our sense per- ceptions, only our beliefs about that world. These ‘perceptions of the mind’ – impressions and ideas – were merely the products of our own minds, not the things themselves. In the eighteenth century, a spirit of mentalism was thus evidently in the air. For Kant too, the enquiring mind was the means to progress beyond man’s hitherto immaturity of thought and action. Like many philosophers, before and since, Kant wanted to provide a foundation for ‘objective knowledge’; in other words, that which we can know to be universally true, irrespective of individual subjective interpretation. But there was a paradox in how he formulated his views.
In the Middle Ages and earlier, man was indeed the centre of the universe and everything was understood to revolve around him and the earth. The Copernican revolution had displaced man’s pivotal position and established that in fact it was man who revolved around the sun. What Kant did, as Hume before him, is to argue that we can only know what human minds can know. This view, however limiting, must also establish objective knowledge, albeit in a way which, in a collective sense, is profoundly and humanly subjective.
The ideas of our mind were the only basis of knowledge. Even scientific dis- coveries and certainties were essentially ideas. Such idealism formed a link with Plato’s ‘ideal forms’, which exist in a realm beyond materiality. For Kant, this ideal
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world was based on a distinction between unknowable things (noumena), as
‘things-in-themselves’, and the knowable world of material things (phenomena), as ‘things-as-they-appear’ to our senses. He then provided a complete philosoph- ical (ideal) taxonomy of how man apprehends them. In Kantian metaphysics – lit- erally, beyond the physical – there are faculties of the mind (the soul) which do not so much represent objects of perceptions, but animate them through the innate conditions of the human psyche. Such faculties are knowledge, desire, feeling, and man’s cognitive faculties – imagination, understanding and reason. In this sense, cognition becomes an active process beyond the dichotomies of subject and object.
The process involves imagination – representing through intuition an object that is not itself present – and understanding – classifying and ordering of data presented to it by the imagination. Reason then becomes an attempt to organize and make sense of information in terms of three a priori ideas: the soul, the cosmos and god.
These ideas are ‘unconditioned’, that is, they are unrepresentable both in and to themselves. However, they are actualized in the realization of imagination and understanding. The ideas of reason consequently exist in and through under- standing and imagination.
It is possible to see how this philosophical approach acted as a foundation for twentieth-century phenomenology, which was itself a strong influence on Bourdieu (see chapter 2). Phenomenology defined itself as the return to ‘things in themselves’, and as a product of the cognitive process of the human mind. In effect, what Kant did was to define what could be categorized as ‘objective’ in rela- tion to the a priori faculties and ideas of the mind. It is in this way that Kant can be seen to be the founding father of all subsequent humanist metaphysics. It is an approach to which Bourdieu took exception. However, before considering Bourdieu’s disagreement with Kant, we need to say a little more about how the Kantian approach extended to aesthetics.
The first part of the Critique of Pure Reason (1961/1781) has the title ‘The Transcendental Aesthetic’. For Kant, aesthetics is not the preserve of art, but actu- ally relates to the Greek work meaning ‘sensation’ (the opposite being ‘anaes- thetic’ – without sensation). By ‘transcendental’, he means a priori, or needed for experience. It is sensation which provides the data for the faculty of imagination.
For Kant, it is the form which this data takes that is most important. What the data actually is or what it represents is less important. What is necessary to experience objects as such is a priori knowledge; in this case, space and time shapes form. As indicated above, the a priori element in this argument points to what lies beyond sensation, and thus gives rise to experience itself rather than being an element of existence. In other words, space and time are a priori conditions of existence. Kant contrasted such faculties of imagination with understanding. Understanding is a power to form concepts; it is through concepts that understanding ‘knows’. Kant gives ten concepts: Substance, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Place, Time, Position, Possession, Action, Passivity. Here, Kant investigates the process and constituents of how judgements of knowledge are therefore made. However, in The Critique of
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Judgement (1987/1790) he examines the power of judgement itself. It is this book that forms the core of Kant’s exploration of aesthetics as we know it.
Kant’s objective is to locate a higher form of feeling which can be said, a priori, to determine experiences of pleasure and pain. Such questions of taste cannot be based on concepts, since if they were they would not be able to ‘lay claim to other people’s assent’. Kant subsequently makes a distinction between what is beautiful and what is agreeable and pleasurable. The latter is associative and comparative, and connected with simple sensual enjoyment. However, in order for judgements of the beautiful to arise, imagination must present data (in time and space) to understanding. This data is not now converted via concepts, because a ‘non-cog- nitive’ feeling accompanies the intuition by which the data of imagination is pre- sented to understanding. At this point, we connect with a perception of pleasure or displeasure, which serves to define the non-cognitive feeling itself and replaces concepts. Since there are no concepts to provide form, what is presented is the power to form in itself – a consciousness without anything to be conscious of. In this sense, what arises is a ‘disinterestedness’, a contemplative judgement as opposed to a cognitive (conceptual or theoretical) judgement.
For Kant, as for Hume before him, the ‘problem’ with aesthetics can be reduced to this simple question: how can judgements which are essentially subjective, in that they provoke feelings for individuals, also relate to a commonality of assent over value? Kant argued that a judgement can only be considered to be aesthetic when it is disinterested, that is, free from any desires, needs or interest in the actual existence of the objects apprehended which might distort that ‘pure’ appreciation. At this point, there is nothing to differentiate one person’s aesthetic response from another’s – it is shared sensibility (sensus communis). Some objects, by nature of their form and appearance, encourage a ‘free play’ between the faculties of imagination and understanding. Understanding is prompted to speculate when faced by the beautiful, giving rise to both pure feeling and the pleasure of thought. Thinking has sensuality which separates understanding from imagination in such a way that understanding no longer dominates imagination. It creates feeling rather than transforming it. In Kant’s four ‘moments’ of his analysis of the beautiful, he sets out the nature of aes- thetic pleasure in judgements of taste: namely, that it should be disinterested and give an impression of finality, and that it should demand and comply to a universal assent, which distinguishes it from judgements of mere ‘agreeableness’. This appreciation of beauty is tied to a recognition of form and design which is independent of content.
In determining beauty, for Kant, much hangs on achieving universal assent, on reaching shared aesthetic agreements. How does this philosophical discussion connect with Bourdieu’s sociological approach to aesthetics?
Bourdieu and Aesthetics
As discussed in chapter 2, Bourdieu’s interest in art and culture goes back to his earliest empirical work in the 1950s and 1960s. The climate we described in that
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chapter was one of post-war rebuilding and rejuvenation, both at home and abroad.
The spirit of social renewal flourished. Education was seen as a principal motor of such reconstruction. It is therefore probably not surprising that one of his earliest pieces of research was conducted on the student population in France (Les Héritiers 1979/1964), in order to ‘to find out better what it was to be a student’ (see Bourdieu (with Grenfell) 1995b: 22). A central theme to his Algerian studies (1958, 1963, 1964a) was similarly the foundation of a ‘rational pedagogy’, in order to neutralize the sociocultural effects of colonialism on scholastic achievement. In short, Bourdieu saw that in education lay the key to building the ‘emancipated’
structures needed in the new world. The degree to which this was possible, and indeed to which Bourdieu concluded it was likely, is another matter. However, we have noted that education also formed part of the central core of the personalist philosophy of the 1930s and 1940s, with its preoccupation with developing the human potential of individuals. This idea animated a number of projects in the post-war situation; for example, the Maisons de la Culture, instigated by the first minister of culture, André Malraux, whose aim it was to bring culture to the people. Such movements as Peuple et Culture also set about organizing a number of adult education courses and workshops in the name of l’éducation populaire.
Central to all these projects was culture and the place it held in defining the content of education. If education was important in training the workforce for the modern jobs needed in French and colonial reconstruction, it was also important in the way people developed personally in an intellectual and aesthetic sense.
Bourdieu turned his attention to culture at more or less the same time as he was working on education; in other words, the two – education and culture – should almost be regarded as two sides of the same coin. In 1965 Bourdieu published a book on photography (1990a/1965). The reasons for this were simultaneously practical, theoretical and economic. As the young, newly appointed director of the Centre de la Sociologie Européenne, he needed to procure financial backing for research, and for this project the film company Kodak provided some funds.
Bourdieu himself was also a keen photographer (he took literally thousands of photos in Algeria – see Bourdieu 2003). However, he was also interested in con- sidering the content of culture. By taking a popular art form, photography, Bourdieu was implicitly setting it against the ‘high art’ to be found in museums, art galleries and classical music concert halls. No surprise, therefore, to find a second book on culture, L’Amour de l’art (1991d/1969/1966) – this time on art museums – published in 1966. Further articles and papers followed. However, the summation of this work, in its first phase at least, came in 1979, with the publica- tion of La Distinction (1979), in which Bourdieu set out his most developed thesis yet on the nature (both in terms of product and process) of aesthetics and taste. The subtitle of the book itself reveals the allusions to and intended critique of Kantian aesthetics: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. What Bourdieu had to say about museums and photography will be discussed in the individual chapters ded- icated to these topics later in the book (chapters 4 and 6). The present chapter will
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consider why La Distinction is so important (it has become a sociological best- seller, entering the canon of required reading for cultural theorists). First, however, we wish to consider the nature of Bourdieu’s critique of Kantian aesthetics, as addressed in the last section.
At the beginning of this chapter, we asked what it was to look at a painting or a work of art. We then described the sensual engagement with which one is pre- sented, and contrasted it with a more intellectualist response. We have seen that for Kant, and many philosophers following in his wake, aesthetic appreciation was defined in terms of a separation from immediate sensations and reactions. Indeed, for Kant, the aesthetic response is rather characterized by a degree of ‘separate- ness’, the pure gaze of the disinterested in some sublime realm beyond the everyday. In the introduction to La Distinction, Bourdieu announced his project as offering a sociological critique of Kantian aesthetics. In effect, his approach is to attack the very ‘separation’ on which it is founded:
[to abolish] the opposition, which has been the basis of high aesthetics since Kant, between ‘taste of sense’ and the ‘taste of reflection’, and between facile pleasure, pleasure reduced to pleasure of the senses, and pure pleasure, pleasure reduced, which is predisposed to become a symbol of moral excellence and a measure of the capacity for sublimation which defines the truly human man. (1984/1979: 6)
What Bourdieu argued for is a much more socio-historical reading of aesthetics.
For him, an aesthetic response presupposes the possibility of a non-aesthetic response, and, necessarily, such responses are by nature socially differential and differentiated – some have it and some do not. In this, aesthetics is returned to the world and the social structure of societies rather than being definable in terms of a necessary philosophical logic. Bourdieu argued that the pure gaze itself implies a break with the ordinary attitude to the world, an ethic, ‘or rather, an ethos of elec- tive distance from the necessities of the natural and social world’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979: 5). This break is, by definition, a mark of distinction, a claim and legit- imation in the name of rarity by a certain faction of society in its assertion of jus- tified dominance. In many ways, the aesthetic disposition is more or less defined in terms of distance from the social world. The aesthete personified is therefore nothing other than an extreme form of bourgeois denial of the social world when this is pushed to its limit. This is why Kant ‘strove to distinguish that which pleases from that which gratifies and, more generally, to distinguish disinterestedness, the sole guarantor of the specifically aesthetic in contemplation, from the interest in reason which defines the good’ (ibid.).
Bourdieu’s own position argues for a fundamental dichotomy in aesthetic response between the bourgeois and the working class. It is important to under- stand at this point that Bourdieu was not arguing that social class structure can be expressed simply in terms of a bipolar dichotomy, or even a slightly more differ- entiated form of the split, which included factions of both these social groups,
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