Bourdieu can be nearly unreadable, between the allusions to obscure French writers, the neologisms and the nearly endless streams of prepositions, but when you cut through it, you find an engaging argument. For my purposes, I'm most interested in the idea that artists have a different hierarchy of prestige than do the bourgeoisie, but I'm also interested in his habitus-based method of reading, which he gives us an example of in reading "A Rose for Emily" at the end, which is easier than the painful Sentimental Education reading to discuss the hierarchy bits.
“The sociologist [...] stand opposed to the ‘friend of beautiful spectacles and voices’ that the writer also is: the ‘reality’ that he tracks cannot be reduced to the immediate data of the sensory experiences in which it is revealed; he aims not to offer (in)sight, or feeling, but to construct systems of intelligible relations capable of making sense of sentient data” (xviii).
“scientific analysis of the social conditions of the production and reception of a work of art, far from reducing it or destroying it, in fact intensifies the literary experience” (xix).
“There is no better testimoney of all that separates literary writing from scientific writing than this capacity [...] to concentrate and condense in the concrete singularity of a sensitive figure and an individual adventure, functioning both as metaphor and as metonymy, all the complexity of a structure and a history which scientific analysis must laboriously unfold and deploy” (24).
“The charm of the literary work lies largely in the way it speaks of the most serious things without insisting, unlike science writing according to Searle, on being taken completely seriously” (33).
“The relationship between cultural producers and the dominant class no longer retains what might have characterised it in previous centuries [...[ even allegiance to a patron or an official protector of the arts. Henceforward it will be a matter of a veritable structural subordination which acts very unequally on different authors according to their positions in the field. It is instituted through two principal mediations: on the one hand, the market, whose sanctions and constraints are exercised on literary enterprises either directly, by means of sales figures, numbers of tickets sold and so forth, or indirectly, through new positions offered in journalism, publishing [etc.]; and on the other hand, durable links, based on affinities of lifestyle and value systems,” (49).
“An ambiguous reality, bohemia inspired ambivalent feelings” because is closer to the people but also aristorcrats “no less true of its most destitue members who, strong in their cultural capital and the authority born of being tastemakers succeed in providing themselves at the least cost with audacities of dress, culinary fantasies, mercenary loves and refinded leisure, for all of which the ‘bourgeois’ pay dearly” (56-7)
Concern with the institution “those who claim to occupy the dominant positions in it will feel the need to manifest their independence with respect to power and honors” (61).
“in a field reaching a high degree of autonomy and self-awareness, it is the mechanisms of competition themselves which authorize and favour the ordinary production of out-of-the-ordinary acts, founded on the rejection of temporal satisfactions, worldy gratifications and the goals of ordinary action” (68).
“The progress of the literary field towards autonomy is marked by the fact that, at the end of the nineteenth centurey, the hierarchy among genres (and authors) accordingto specific criteria of peer judgement is almost exactly the inverse of the hierarchy according to commerical success” (114)
Painters and commissions “helped reveal to writers [...] the possiblity of a freedom henceforth offered to (and thereby imposed on) anyone wanting to enter into the role of painter or writer” (139).
“Thus the opposition is total between bestsellers with no tomorrow and the classics, lasting bestsellers whcih owe to the education system their consecration, hence their extended and durable market” (147).
“It is not enough to say that the history of the fields is the history of the struggle for a monopoly of the impositin of legitimate categories of perception and appreciation; it is in the very struggle that the history of the field is made” (157)
“cultivated people are in culture as in the air they breathe, and it takes a major crisis (and the criticism that accompanies it) for them to feel obliged to transform the doxa into orthodoxy or into dogma, and to justify the sacred and consecrated ways of cultivating it” (185).
(“in fact, it is probably in Michel Foucault that one finds the most rigorous formulation of the coundations of the scrusctural analysis of cultural works” (197))
National traditions create a hierarchy of arts (e.g. music or painting) or science. Relates to hierarchies of nations, too (200).
“traditionaly entrusted to university people, criticism is the indispensable accompaniment of that profound transformationof the structure of the dividual of intellectual work” (210).
“the literry or artistic fields are characterized, particuarly compared withthe university field, by a weak degree of codification, and, by the same token, by the extreme permeablity of their boundaries adn teh extreme diversity of the definition of the posts they offer and the principles of legitimacy which confront each other there” (226).
Definition of field of power: “the space of relations of force between agents or between institutions having in common the possession of the capital necessary to occupy the dominant positions in different fields” (215) the heteronomous hierarchy which is about economic and political clout and the autonomous which is focused on freedom lack of compromise (216).
“it is in the name of this collective capital that cultural producers feel the right and the duty to ignore the demands or requirements of temporal powers” (221). and “defenders of teh most ‘pure’” can argue exclusion of “a certain number of artists (etc.) are not really artists, or that they are not true artists, they deny them existence as artists” (223). “One of the central stakes in literary (etc. ) rivalries is the monopoly of literary legitmacy, that is, among other things, the monopoly of the power to say with authority who is authorized to call himself writer” (224). “the posts of ‘pure’ writer and artist, like that of ‘intellectual,’ are instituions of freedom, whicha re constructed again teh ‘bourgeoisie’” (257). The formation of “anti-institutional institutions” like salons, avante-garde journals etc. (258).
According to the sybolic capital recognized in her as a functin of her position, each writer (etc.) sees herself accorded a determinate set of legitimate possibles meaning, in a determinate field, a determinate share of possibles objectively offered at each given moment in time” (260).
Wrtiers adn artists situated at the economically dominated (and symbolically dominant) pole of the literary field, itself temporally dominated, can doubtless feel a solidarity [...] with the occupants of economically and culturally dominated positions in social space” (251)
“One [artistic aim] is in fact in an economic world inverted: the artist cannot triumph on the symbolic terrain except by losing on the economic terrain (at least in the short run), and vice versa (at least in the long run) (83).
“Thus the invention of the pure aesthetic is inseparable from the invention of a new social personality, that of the great professional artist who combines, in a union as fragile as it is improbable, a sense of transgression and freedome from conformity with the rigour of an extremely strict discipline of living and of work, which presupposes bourgeois ease and celibacy and which is more characteristics of the scientist or the scholar” (111)
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“the producer of the value of the work of art is not the artist byt eh field of production as a universe of belief which produces the value of the work of art” (229)
“The dominants have always found their best guard dogs, the fiercest anyway, among intellectuals disappointed and often scandalized by the casualness of those heirs who have the luxury of repudiating their hertitage” (280).
“the experience of the work of art as immediately endowed with meaning and value is an effect of the harmony between the two aspects of the same historical institution, the cultivated habitus and the artistic field, which mutually ground each other” (289).
“Production of the work bring into play all the producers of works classified as artistic, whether great or small” the whole artistic community and middlemen (295).
“All position depend, in their very existence, and in the determinations they impose on their occupants, on their actual and potential situationin the structor of the field--that is to say, in the structure and distribution of those kind of capital (or of power) whose posession governs the obtaining of specific profits (such as literary prestige) put into play in the field” (231).
“the literary (etc.) field is a force-field acting on all those who enter it, and acting in a differential manner accordin to the position they occupy there” and also “it is a field of competative struggles which tend to conserve or transform this force-field” (232).
“two persons possessing each a different habitus, not being exposed to the same situation and to the same stimulations, do not hear the same music and do not see the same paintings since they construe them (289) differently” (299).
A double historicuzation of the tradition and the application of the tradition (309) because “to escape (however slightly) from histoyr, understsanding must know itself as historical and give itself the means to understand itself historically” (310).
“The habitus urges, interrogates, make the object speak, while for its part, the object seems to incite,call upon, provoke the habitus” (320). “In short, the habitus is the basis of the social structuration of temporal existence” (329).
“Intellections are two-dimensional figures who do not exist and subsist as such unless (and only unless) they are invested with a specific authority, conferred by the autonomous intellectual world [..] whose specific laws they respect” (340).
anxiety of influence: artists “reject what their most consecrated are and do” (240).