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Manet: A Symbolic Revolution
What is a ‘symbolic revolution’? What happens when a symbolic revolutions occurs, how can it succeed and prevail and why is it so difficult to understand? Using the exemplary case of Édouard Manet, Pierre Bourdieu began to ponder these questions as early as the 1980s, before making it the focus of his lectures in his last years at the Collège de France. This volume of Bourdieu’s previously unpublished lectures provides his most sustained contribution to the sociology of art and the analysis of cultural fields. It is also a major contribution to our understanding of impressionism and the works of Manet.
Bourdieu treats the paintings of Manet as so many challenges to the conservative academicism of the pompier painters, the populism of the Realists, the commercial eclecticism of genre painting, and even the ‘Impressionists’, showing that such a revolution is inseparable from the conditions that allow fields of cultural production to emerge. At a time when the Academy was in crisis and when the increase in the number of painters challenged the role of the state in defining artistic value, the break that Manet inaugurated revolutionised the aesthetic order. The new vision of the world that emerged from this upheaval still shapes our categories of perception and judgement today the very categories that we use every day to understand the representations of the world and the world itself.
This major work by one of the greatest sociologists of the last 50 years will be welcomed by students and scholars in sociology, art history and the social sciences and humanities generally. It will also appeal to a wide readership interested in art, in impressionism and in the works of Manet.
Bourdieu treats the paintings of Manet as so many challenges to the conservative academicism of the pompier painters, the populism of the Realists, the commercial eclecticism of genre painting, and even the ‘Impressionists’, showing that such a revolution is inseparable from the conditions that allow fields of cultural production to emerge. At a time when the Academy was in crisis and when the increase in the number of painters challenged the role of the state in defining artistic value, the break that Manet inaugurated revolutionised the aesthetic order. The new vision of the world that emerged from this upheaval still shapes our categories of perception and judgement today the very categories that we use every day to understand the representations of the world and the world itself.
This major work by one of the greatest sociologists of the last 50 years will be welcomed by students and scholars in sociology, art history and the social sciences and humanities generally. It will also appeal to a wide readership interested in art, in impressionism and in the works of Manet.
- GenresArtPhilosophyNonfiction
576 pages, Hardcover
First published November 7, 2013
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About the author
Pierre Bourdieu
359 books1,355 followersBourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.
Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).
Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 30, 2018
Manet: A Symbolic Revolution primarily consists of the series of previously unpublished lectures that the twentieth-century French sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher, and public intellectual, Pierre Bourdieu, gave towards the end of his period of academic tenure (1981–2002) at the Collège de France, with those from 1998/9 focusing on the Manet effect, and those from 1999/2000 focusing on the establishment of the foundations of a dispositionalist aesthetic. The book concludes with the approximately hundred pages that remain extant from a book co-authored with his wife, Marie-Claire Bourdieu, centered on Édouard Manet as a heresiarch, giving rise to extensive innovation as a fundamentally innovative painter whose approach was deeply reflective of, and yet fundamentally uprooting of, the sociocultural milieu in which his artistic output was embedded.
That the lectures were presented orally is evident from Bourdieu’s use of such rhetorical devices as repetitions and paraphrasing of what he has already said, as well as the sense of rapport that he establishes with his audience. A number of the lectures start with a response to a query or argument with which others have presented him, and there are occasions of interjection, with the response of his listeners (such as occasions of laughter) being recorded. The informality of the presentation therefore makes for lively reading, and the tone is kept far from intellectually remote. Bourdieu’s work tells of an informed, but neither elitist nor separatist, approach to his subject material, with him being very much in touch with those around him, as befits the role of a sociologist.
The ramifications of the central concepts of Bourdieu’s thought are unpacked in relation to Manet’s chief works, with three notable instances being symbolism in relation to Luncheon on the Grass (1863), habitus in terms of The Nymph Surprised (1861), and reflexivity with bearing on Olympia (1863). The transitional nature of the burgeoning arguments concerned transformed this work into a springboard of ideas from which later analytical argument regarding the artist Manet has since emerged. Bourdieu, despite his long history of scholarly endeavor, remains ever on the alert for new and alternate meanings emanating from the critique surrounding Manet’s work, whether such criticism was contemporary or entered into over the intervening period of time since Manet first produced his primary works in the 1860s and 1870s (of which many are reproduced in full color as the centerpiece of this fine volume).
Both of the translators/editors are Fellows of the University of Cambridge, with Dr Peter J Collier being attached to Sidney Sussex College, and Dr Margaret Rigaud-Drayton having been attached to Christ’s College since 2003. While the former has previously co-edited the innovative Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France, the latter’s primary research interest lies most significantly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry and the visual arts, especially in relation to the interplay between identity and creativity beyond the conventional bounds of the accepted prevailing order.
That the lectures were presented orally is evident from Bourdieu’s use of such rhetorical devices as repetitions and paraphrasing of what he has already said, as well as the sense of rapport that he establishes with his audience. A number of the lectures start with a response to a query or argument with which others have presented him, and there are occasions of interjection, with the response of his listeners (such as occasions of laughter) being recorded. The informality of the presentation therefore makes for lively reading, and the tone is kept far from intellectually remote. Bourdieu’s work tells of an informed, but neither elitist nor separatist, approach to his subject material, with him being very much in touch with those around him, as befits the role of a sociologist.
The ramifications of the central concepts of Bourdieu’s thought are unpacked in relation to Manet’s chief works, with three notable instances being symbolism in relation to Luncheon on the Grass (1863), habitus in terms of The Nymph Surprised (1861), and reflexivity with bearing on Olympia (1863). The transitional nature of the burgeoning arguments concerned transformed this work into a springboard of ideas from which later analytical argument regarding the artist Manet has since emerged. Bourdieu, despite his long history of scholarly endeavor, remains ever on the alert for new and alternate meanings emanating from the critique surrounding Manet’s work, whether such criticism was contemporary or entered into over the intervening period of time since Manet first produced his primary works in the 1860s and 1870s (of which many are reproduced in full color as the centerpiece of this fine volume).
Both of the translators/editors are Fellows of the University of Cambridge, with Dr Peter J Collier being attached to Sidney Sussex College, and Dr Margaret Rigaud-Drayton having been attached to Christ’s College since 2003. While the former has previously co-edited the innovative Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France, the latter’s primary research interest lies most significantly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry and the visual arts, especially in relation to the interplay between identity and creativity beyond the conventional bounds of the accepted prevailing order.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews