J103-Reading Analysis-2/10: Distinction & The Aristocracy of Culture; 28th November 2006.

In this reading Pierre Bourdieu discusses the different elements of his ideas of distinction and its actions and reactions within the realms of culture. He isn’t theorising; this is the finished product, with only minor tweaks as time progresses. I agree almost whole-heartedly with these Ideas and their large influence on our daily lives as social and cultured beings. Incidentally, I find it interesting that this was written in the Orwellian year of 1984. Art sees the first awarding of the Turner Prize to Malcolm Morley; an explicit example of what Bourdieu discusses in this piece.
Morley is a photo-realist painter, his receiving of the first Turner Prize was particularly controversial (if only because he hadn’t lived in Britain since 1958), but this was not as controversial as the prize itself. Although I can’t find a comment from Bourdieu (maybe because the prize is, by design, a British institution) I believe he would cite the encouragement of artists to ‘compete’ as a clear example of his theories at work. Also, Morley being the winner might bring condemnation of his pandering to “what Erwin Panofsky calls the ‘sensible properties’”, (his painting of photographs that are particularly pleasing to the eye). Bourdieu quotes this in the text to highlight the two-tier appreciation of cultural artefacts; this is a major component of his reasoning behind ‘Distinctions’.
In places the text is complicated and long-winded, but he adds enough accessible examples into the text to keep you from getting lost within his complicated style. One example of this simplification is that of eating habits working as an illustration of different tastes, (helpfully underlined on my copy). In this passage he describes “The antithesis between quantity and quality”. He explains that the function of food is defined by ‘necessity’. Essentially he says that at times food serves only as a way of filling you up and at others it acts as a form ‘luxury’. When it performs this function he says that it “tends to use stylised forms to deny function”. In this case he is eluding to the fact that nouvelle cuisine disguises food as a means of filling you up and into an art; changing it into an act of appreciation. Bourdieu takes this relatively simple explanation and complicates it with his explanation in the following paragraphs.
This act of ‘complication’ is the main theme of this piece and of his entire body of work. He is a Post-Marxist, Post-Structuralist: he doesn’t try to explain the human consciousness in an ‘over-simplified’ structure as Marx did with economics. Instead he puts emphasis on the simple fact that one human being is an extremely complicated element within an infinitely complicated system.
In using modern art as his basis for exemplifying the proliferation of these “two ‘antagonistic castes’” he himself does himself a disservice because as he himself concludes “The new art is not for everyone”. He himself is producing an essay that is inaccessible to a large proportion of the population.
In conclusion, this inaccessibility is the reading’s major downfall. In trying to explain the exclusion of the ‘mass’ from “the ‘reading’ of a work of art” he himself excludes this same faction, but without the pomposity evident within the majority of critiques “of ‘secondary meanings’”. He attempts (and in my view, fails) to make the mass aware of what is going on when they feel excluded from certain ‘higher’ echelons of culture. Instead, he produces something that within its own right is inaccessible and simply adds to frustrations felt by the large proportion of society. It all depends on what your standing within this ‘dynamic’ framework (distinction from structure) is. If you are studying Bourdieu then it gives a detailed (sometimes too detailed) account of what his theories are. If you approached this piece from a “functional” standpoint then it serves no greater purpose than one of confusion and perhaps over complication of your life experiences.