Making Distinctions: The Eye of the Beholder

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONPierre Bourdieu’s theoretical and empirical analyses of the art world constitute a substantial component of his published work spanning more than two decades (Bourdieu 1968, 1971, 1980, 1980a, 1983, 1984, 1985f, 1987d, 1988b). His central interest in the formation and reproduction of symbolic practices has drawn him inevitably towards the intellectual fields of art and literature, traditionally neglected areas for sociological study. As with other fields discussed in this book, Bourdieu has used the fields of art and literature to demonstrate that the cultural practices which constitute the production, distribution and consumption of symbolic goods are comprehensible within a theory of practice which admits neither transcendental/idealist categories of individual agency, nor deterministic explanations drawn from formal structuralism.1 By analysing the literary and artistic fields in relational terms, he has been able to understand and demonstrate further the homologies between symbolic and economic production. Moreover, by the constant application of his own powerful explanatory metaphors, he has revealed the extant relations between aesthetic dispositions of individual agents and the objective systems of social differentiations within which acts of artistic creation and appreciation necessarily take place. He has shown that the attitudes which individuals assume towards works of art are manifestations of more pervasive dispositions from which all other attitudes of taste are derived. These dispositions are engendered by a social logic which relates the aesthetic choices (distinctions) made by individuals to the more general strategies of struggle by which groups maintain their social positions — see Chapter 1 for a discussion of general strategies of struggle.