What's this? A new dispatch is just now coming in on the Samizdat Temporal Distortion Teletype. It seems to be from the late Christopher Caudwell, our correspondent from the 1930s. What's he up to? Ah! It's the usual 1930s business, to start — a big, familiar quote from The Communist Manifesto, the part that praises the energy and transformative power of the bourgeoisie (my people — and yours, probably) and their capitalism:
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Hang on a minute. Let me see where Chris is going with all this. I'm a slow typist, so I'll keep it short. Let's see. How about "Thanks for note stop where are you going with this stop say hi to Auden if you see him stop or Stephen Spender stop all best stop Bob stop." That ought to do it.
Ah! Here's the clickety-clack of his response, coming in on the ticker-tape now!
Capitalist poetry reflects these conditions. It is the outcome of these conditions.... Its art is therfore in its essence an insurgent, non-formal, naturalistic art. It is an art which constantly revolutionizes its own conventions, just as bourgeois economy constantly revolutionizes its own means of production. This constant revolution, this constant sweeping-away of "ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions," this "everlasting uncertainty and agitation," distinguishes bourgeois art from all previous art. Any bourgeois artist who rests upon the conventions of his time becomes "academic" and his art lifeless.
God, Chris types fast. Okay, let me spool up the paper and assess all this....Um hum. Hmmm. Looks like it comes from the notes that'll go into his book Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry. Mmm hm. Yup yup yup... But — but — but — but isn't one of our great sacred cows the notion that aesthetic radicalism is tied to political radicalism? Isn't it a given that experimental poetry is tied to radical leftism? We hear that received opinion echo from Ron Silliman's Palazzo Avant-Posti in Pennsylvania all the way over to the gates of Jeremy Prynne's secret bunker in Cambridge. Is Chris aware of the scuffle his opinion would kick up? I am just now reminded by my assistant Igor that Christopher Caudwell died while operating a machine gun against Fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, so he probably wouldn't be afraid of a few angry poet-professors. Still, I should get back to Chris and tell him what he's getting himself into with this alternate take on poetic innovation. Sadly, though, I've become entangled in the tickertape, and must send Igor off to get the scissors. Until he returns, my hands are tied.
Well, you know, Bob, this post IS quite funny, but Christopher Caudwell (bless his soul and heroic end with the Lincoln Brigades) has long been safely entombed as one of the most vulgar "aestheticians" in the entire Marxist tradition!
ReplyDeleteI doubt even Lukacs would have wanted him on his side during the debates with Brecht.
I agree with Cauldwell. And I think he prefigured especially Bourdieu with whom we get a critique of art production as a function of symbolic and cultural capital -- as a weird inverse of economic capital, yeah, but capital nevertheless.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, Bourdieu says "“Paradoxically, nothing more clearly reveals the logic of the functioning of the artistic field than the fate of these apparently radical attempts at subversion.” PB, TFoCP, p80
I wrote an essay about this very thing, more or less, tho probably more less than more, forthcoming in a book of essays about "the line," edited by rosko and vander zee.
I'm telling you: we need to pay attention to Bourdieu's _The Field of Cultural Production_, who basically expands and makes cauldwell's assertions theoretically intelligible.
The fact that every poet who considers herself a descendent of the avant garde tradition (oxymoron anyone?) has not read and understood PB's TFoCP is evidence of serious theoretical negligence. If only Silliman had read Bourdieu's book 15 years ago he could have saved himself thousands of hours of posturing slash pointless haranguing. If you're reading this, Ron, sorry.
I'm free from the ticker tape, and heading for my protective pile of sandbags! I mean, Kent Johnson and Gabriel Gudding in disagreement — it's an all-Illinois heavyweight champeen match! Duck and cover!
ReplyDeleteI love Bourdieu, too. Since Gabe mentioned an essay he wrote related to Bourdieu, I'm going to position-take him one better and provide a link (something I never do) to one I wrote recently, with reference to PB and extensive quotation of him!
ReplyDeletehttp://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2009/12/kent-johnsons-question-of-attention.html
But Gabe's placement of Caudwell (no 'l' after the 'u', Gabe) as a "forerunner" of Bourdieu? Though he is admired for his sincere efforts and the brave commitments taken in his life, within the field of English-language Marxist literary criticism, CC tends, I believe, to be regarded as a prime example of base-superstructure orthodoxy and vulgar reductionism, the kind of paint-by-numbers Plekhanovist determinism Engels devastatingly pilloried, later in the day. CC's analysis would have doubtless been admired by the Union of Soviet Writers in 1930's, but I doubt the very subtle and non-orthodox Bourdieu would have found much use for it.
But dying in Spain, manning a machine gun against fascists... Now *that's* the way to go (though I think he was an ambulance driver, really).
It really was a dramatic (and tragically early) death. Here's a clip from a short bio of Caudwell:
ReplyDelete"In December 1936, he left for Spain to join the International Brigade in the anti-fascist struggle against Franco. He soon became a machine gun instructor and editor of the Battalion Wall newspaper. Christopher Caudwell was killed by the fascists in the valley of Jarama February 12th 1937, during his first day of battle. He was last seen firing a machinegun, covering the retreat of his section from a hill about to be taken by the Moors."
As a guy who will probably die because a piece of Polish sausage gets lodged in my windpipe, I tip my hat to the man.
B.
When I'm through with Illusion and Reality, I'll be in a better position to asses its vulgarity or lack thereof. So far I'd say the thing bristles with ideas, a few of them crackpot, a few of them very sharp. And even the base/superstructure bit shows well here and there, as it does in his reading of Plato and Aristotle on poetry. But I'm only about a third of the way through it.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think we can't simply kidnap Caudwell into our own time -- I mean, the discursive situation of poetry has changed. Since the Great Trek into the universities, we have to consider innovation in the context of the logic of the academy, which isn't quite the same as the logic of the marketplace, from which it is semi-autonomous (semi-, all too semi-, I think, looking at how the Wall Street debacle has dried up university budgets...).
Anyway. I do know that W.H. Auden was a huge fan of Caudwell's Illusion and Reality, which is neither here nor there on the vulgarity index, but sort of interesting in itself. It's said that when Auden was asked why he never reviewed the book, he replied that he had nothing to say except that he agreed with it entirely.
B.
What I appreciate about the little of Caudwell you’ve twigged me to, Bob, and I’m sorry to lose the l as I liked it, is precisely his, I gather, critique of innovation as a legitimate literary practice -- and his willingness to make liberty and newness targets by insisting that they are not legitimate objects or characteristics of production. In this sense, he seems to prefigure PB.
ReplyDeleteAnd as for PB and Kent: except where Kent in his essay actually quotes Bourdieu, he gets Bourdieu wrong. (By the way, “Attention, Spain,” is an essay, per the link KJ provides, whose title I find suspicious given that our hero dies in a firefight in the Spanish countryside.)
Bourdieu nowhere says that “agonism ... is the life force of cultural production,” as Kent opines. And to suggest as much could be called, to use Kent’s own term, vulgar. PB is not an apologist for art’s agonism. Rather, his sociology vigorously attacks the agonistic and the anomic in art. My brother was a skeptic not a disciple of art. To miss that is to miss Bourdieu. Nowhere does Bourdieu suggest that agonism provides literature life. He clearly shows that agonism creates denial, illusion, contempt, and an “anomic quest” for distinction, one that tends to drive socially palliative content from itself. Kind of like what's happened between Kent and me over the years. :)
It’s precisely for this reason that I think Caudwell’s critique of innovation is a very distinct forerunner of PB’s structuralist Marxist-informed sociology of cultural production. (I mean I just read the guy on yr blog, but he really strikes me as frankly kind of awesome, if dated, sure.) I was just looking at Cary Nelson's Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture and noticing Caudwell being a welcomed and seminal figure in that history.
Gabe!
ReplyDeleteThis is some crazy revisionist shit, as Lunacharsky once yelled at Zhdanov.
Let me quote you:
>Bourdieu nowhere says that “agonism ... is the life force of cultural production,” as Kent opines. And to suggest as much could be called, to use Kent’s own term, vulgar. PB is not an apologist for art’s agonism. Rather, his sociology vigorously attacks the agonistic and the anomic in art. My brother was a skeptic not a disciple of art. To miss that is to miss Bourdieu. Nowhere does Bourdieu suggest that agonism provides literature life. He clearly shows that agonism creates denial, illusion, contempt, and an “anomic quest” for distinction, one that tends to drive socially palliative content from itself.
What Bourdieu have you been reading? I'm talking about his analysis of cultural fields. I'm aware that PB does not anywhere exactly write that "agonism... is the life force of cultural production"; if he had, and I'd presented the clause as my own, then I would be plagiarizing, right? Obviously, *I* wrote that, in a sort of general-statement way, referring to Bourdieu's view.
And the statement is perfectly apropos of Bourdieu, who is absolutely structuralist in his view, yes, of course-- but everywhere in Rules of Art he is talking about *competition and struggle for position* between actors in the literary field. He talks about this in the abstract mode, with all sorts of French theory terms, and he talks about this with the most detailed, anecdotal analysis of 19th century French literature imaginable, naming-names and groups and magazines and coteries and salons and so forth, showing how all these actors and groups were in constant struggle for position and cultural capital. He is talking about struggle (by the way, from Webster-- "agonist: 1. one that is engaged in a struggle") as the central effect of the system and as its motor force. So I'm frankly not sure what your point is here. Maybe you are reading Bourdieu's writings on Algeria, or something?
Surely you know, given the numerous times you've have made reference to PB over the past couple years, that the notion of the agonistic, of position-taking, of competition is at the heart of his analysis of the literary field. It's what the field does. It's what the field makes people do even when they are trying to pretend that they aren't doing it. It's what the field is making me do to you and what it is making you do to me, and no Sutra is going to change that, at least not for the foreseeable future. It's the way things move.
Where you wrote "Attention Spain," I did laugh, though. And don't forget that I still love you!
To quote Gabe again:
ReplyDelete>Nowhere does Bourdieu suggest that agonism provides literature life. He clearly shows that agonism creates denial, illusion, contempt, and an “anomic quest” for distinction, one that tends to drive socially palliative content from itself.
But this seems to suggest that Bourdieu is some kind of hand-wringing moralist about the literary field, as if the struggle for the accumulation of symbolic and cultural capital therein could be somehow mitigated if only people were "better people," or something.
This gets things completely backwards.
Fact is, PB is just about as scientific/structuralist as late-stage Althusser.
To Caudwell's "Any bourgeois artist who rests upon the conventions of his time becomes "academic" and his art lifeless" I counterpoint the following by Peter Burger (a much more astute thinker) (?): "That 'realistic' and 'avant-gardiste' art exist side by side today is a fact that can no longer be objected to legitimately". I'm assuming by 'realistic' art Burger means something like 'formalist' art, with attention to well established norms of versification, etc., which in turn may be what a market-place normally looks for in its poetry.
ReplyDeleteAnd in your comment, Robert,that "we have to consider innovation in the context of the logic of the academy, which isn't quite the same as the logic of the marketplace" you may have to conflate 'academy' and 'marketplace'to get at a truer picture of things. What is sadly all too true today of much poetry is that it's become hopelessly academicized to ensure publisher's returns on a captive university market.
Oh, and by the way check out Silliman's blog for an interesting discussion of names of poets Silliman's LANGUAGE movement may or mayn't have intentionally excluded, marginalized,over the years etc.
ReplyDeleteNone of which is to say that we shouldn't try our best to be better people.
ReplyDeleteComrade Lunacharsky,
ReplyDeleteAs we try to out-Bourdieu each other, please carefully read the following.
Yes, PB's main metaphor, as one wd expect from a student of Marx, is one of struggle. He uses it frequently and he speaks of agonism and competition. But he does not do so to suggest this gives "life force" to the field nor that it is a fait accompli.
In fact he says it is downright “not sufficient to say that the history of the field is the history of the struggle,” because “the struggle itself creates the history of the field.” In other words, to see the field as totalizing struggle is an error.
He wants to see the laws of that struggle and he takes pains to show that this crazy struggle (which he describes passim with metaphors like “exhaustion” and “rupture”) creates “pseudo-concepts,” “anomia,” “illusion,” “denial,” “brutality,” “legitimized dominance,” and the “sad eternity” of debate (kinda like this is shaping up to be?) – and a kind of emptiness in which cultural actors assert “the primacy of the saying over the thing said, sacrificing the ‘subject’ to the manner in which it is treated.” (p 117 TFoCP, Columbia). He is NOT a fan of this. And he does not say that any of this lends life to art. In fact he calls this in sum “symbolic violence,” and he made this analysis to critique the violence of this kind of attitude, not to suggest that it be fatalistically succumbed to or that it should be embraced as some kind of weird bergsonian elan vital. He said his use of sociological analysis was in opposition to all this, calling sociology a “blood sport,” in which such agonism is called out for what it is: symbolic violence.
And he takes particular aim at trangressive, artistic liberty via innovation (esp. as something that creates symbolic violence) as precisely an engine of violence, which is precisely why I say Caudwell seems to prefigure him, tho I know jack about Caudwell except what Bob posts here. And by the way, PB makes a point of saying that he is not against art. What he was against was the violence that this agonism engendered.
“Sociology and art do not make good bedfellows.” And he very firmly came at this analysis from a foundationalist standpoint.
If you don’t have time right now to read TFoCP, I would suggest “The Market of Symbolic Goods.” It is the best critique of stuff like langpo that I’ve seen (not that langpo needs a critique anymore, as you and I well know – happy 10th anniversary, by the way, old comrade).
For some reason, whenever I bump into these debates about the structure of art & its "economy" of change, I think of Paul Celan's little story, "Conversation in the Mountains", which APPEARS, in a very elliptical way, to be marking a distinction between poetry and art; that the fundamental, constitutive alienation involved in making an work of art is somehow reversed again in poetry... so that somehow we are missing something in equating the structural games described by PB with poetry as it actually is (or may be)... a third factor, or something... I don't know.
ReplyDeleteHappy anniversary, brats.
I find it a little strange that Gabriel enters these discussions as if no one else had ever read Bourdieu, but I agree with him that Bourdieu is concerned to analyze the social grounds of aesthetic taste & the ways that art practices legitimate social stratification. His analysis leads rather straightforwardly to a desire to democratize the means of cultural production. But it is not clear that the field can ever exist free of struggle unless the power relations that obtain between classes can be abolished. For although the cultural field is "relatively" autonomous, its struggle exists as a means of reproduction of social relations. This is why any avant-garde is foredoomed to repeat the very gestures it deplores in existing cultural power relations. Agamben treats of an analogous problem in the social field per se.
ReplyDelete"His analysis leads rather straightforwardly to a desire to democratize the means of cultural production."
ReplyDeleteReally? I mean, that sounds good, but do you see this in Bourdieu? I don't recall him offering any kind of prescriptions, but a pile of (by our lame humanities standards, well researched) descriptions. Or do you mean his analysis leads you to this desire? In which case, sure, yeah. Go get 'em.
B.
Bourdieu writes: "What must be changed are the conditions that make this hierarchy exist, both in reality & in minds. We must—I have never stopped repeating it—work to universalize in reality the conditions of access to what the present offers us that is most universal."
ReplyDeleteYeah, but isn't this a passage about making changes in the larger field of power? I mean, is this just about the means of cultural production? When B. talks about the universal, he's talking (if I remember -- this quote is probably from that Reflexive Sociology book, and I think I read that when it came out, around the Ming dynasty) about all forms of allegedly disinterested activity -- law and the professions and all that.
ReplyDeleteI suppose what I mean is, I still just don't see a prescription to — or a straightforward desire to — democratize the means of cultural production in PB, isn't that something that happens as an effect of changes where they matter most, in the dominant field of power from which fields like culture depend? I don't think that for Bourdieu serious political change can be something done by "democratizing the means of cultural production."
Bourdieu midrash aside, it's worth asking what it would mean which would mean what, exactly, to democratize the means of cultural production. Would it mean handing over museum boards and journal editorships to community groups? Spreading arts funding to the provinces? Supporting community theater at the expense of Lincoln Center? It was Nixon who did all that in the US (mostly, I'm told by One Who Was There, to stick it to the New York culturati he thought despised him). It was hardly the path to big-time social transformation.
I'm starting to think we probably agree on this.
B.
"it's worth asking what it would mean which would mean what"
ReplyDeleteHey. I channelled Gertrude Stein.
For that tangle or words, read
"it's worth asking what, exactly, it would mean" or something similarly sane.
I wrote this: "His analysis leads rather straightforwardly to a desire to democratize the means of cultural production. But it is not clear that the field can ever exist free of struggle unless the power relations that obtain between classes can be abolished." Read the second sentence. So yes, I already said that democratization depends upon changes "in the dominant field of power from which fields like culture depend." I'm not sure where the confusion lies. Bourdieu wants to universalize access to cultural capital; this would require structural change in the larger fields of power. This is all quite explicit in my first comment. I don't know how to make it any clearer.
ReplyDeleteBob, I'm going to go play a video game soon, but I wanted to reply to your query to Michael and my cpt kirk chair in the study is calling but wanted to say that the quote Michael furnished succeeds a great sentence: PB is finishing saying that it’s not gonna work to attack hierarchy; instead, the sentence before michael's quote reads, “What must be changed are the conditions that make that hierarchy exist, both in reality and in minds.” Education baby.
ReplyDeleteAnd I get that, Henry. This stuff about the structure or economy of blah blah doesn't matter unless it’s instructive in how we treat one another. Period. Like Kent says (weirdly Kent writes this only as a concession, when this is in fact the heart of it): "None of which is to say that we shouldn't try our best to be better people." Yeah, B isn’t a moralist, Kent, and he isn't advocating revolution in an old sense, but he is someone who wanted, rightly, humanly, “real communication” between people, someone who thought of sociology as a martial art, as a catechism, a weapon, for those who are excluded and kept down. There's a reason why Tom Clark called CB Stalin. Or why Ginsberg should have found such affinity with a Tibetan despot.
And, Henry, about that Celan thing and something about something: I think poetry should always be ready to ally itsself with its fundamental ethical argument: pragmatic kosmophilia.
How do we love one another and all around us wisely and justly. That’s it. Nothing else. But where PB tweaks this for me is his insistence that whatever ethics we forward, it has to be done less by destroying hierarchies (because we can't really, we're too much like chimps) and more by changing how people think about them. That’s why I dig PB and this guy Caudwell. Rock on.
I liked Illusion and Reality when I read it (not recently), and I take Caudwell's claim to apply to modernism-- it may or may not apply to whatever supposedly innovative practice evolved later on. As for Bourdieu, can someone explain how any of the works cited above provides guidance for any practicing artists, since whatever we do, however we do it, will consist inevitably in agonistic position-taking within the field of CP? Doesn't he claim to provide what anthropologists would call an etic, if not indeed a deterministic, account? You guys spend a lot more time than I do within what Kent calls "the entire Marxist tradition": maybe you can clear up my mistakes.
ReplyDeleteAgain, a lovely post, witty and funny. I hope you don't mind if I lead my students here when we reach the period in question later this spring, and ask them to read the comments as well? They'll learn so much!
ReplyDeleteAll the best,
M
Gotcha, Robbins.
ReplyDeleteSince you ask, here's where the confusion came in: I read the sentence beginning "But it is not clear..." as you criticizing Bourdieu for wanting change to occur at the cultural level (that is -- I read it as "PB wants X, but I, MR, think it is not clear that this would work, because"). But you meant the sentence as an elaboration of Bourdieu's point, not a statement of its shortcomings (that is, "PB wants X, but it is not clear that this could occur without larger changes that he also wants."
So I think we're on the same page.
B.
Steve: I think the claim in Caudwell extends to something larger than modernism -- he seems to be making this claim about all poetry since the rise of capitalism, which he doesn't date specifically. I suppose you could conservatively date it back to the Romantics. But of course, writing in the 30s, he didn't exactly have Charles Bernstein in mind.
ReplyDeleteAnd Morrica: if you wish to mislead the young by steering them to this blog, please, by all means do so!
B.
I think Steve asks a good question - that is, it was on my mind when I mentioned Celan... & Gabriel addressed it in a couple ways...
ReplyDeletea theme of "Conversation in the Mountains" seems to be that the motivating force or spirit of poetry runs counter to the larger sphere of art (as a factory of representations, illusions) - with poetry we're dealing with something which manifests a kind of alterity or unaccountability which defies sociological analysis...
I realize there seems to be little empirical evidence for this, & it sounds like mystification - but it's fun to think this way, with Celan... !
I read Caudwell with pleasure back int he early 80s... & with respect to his thesis on bourgeois art & change, & this issue of poetry, let's not forget the famous HG aphorism (famous to me, anyway) from the Days of Buffalo :
"Poetry is avant-garde because it doesn't change much."
Oh, right, now I can see how that would be confusing. My bad. Peace, all.
ReplyDelete@Robbins: my bad, too, in a way. It's not like my response was particularly coherent.
ReplyDelete@Steve: It's a good question -- should poets bother with PB? If so, why?
I'm all for poets digging into whatever pile gives them what they need for fuel. If I were going to make a case for PB, I guess it would be this: that he can help make poets conscious of just what it is they do, socially, when they write. Does this matter? Maybe. I wish I had the Caudwell with me right now, because he's got a good passage on the nature of freedom. The claim, as I remember it, is that we are free only inasmuch as we recognize the forces determining or conditioning our sense of the field of possibilities. If we don't look into what makes us want what we want and do what we do, we're doomed to a kind of autopilot that we mistake for autonomy. But it's different, since Caudwell says we don't achieve this self-consciousness through introspection alone, but through certain kinds of action. Again, I wish I had the book with me. But I think you get the general picture: PB won't help you write poems, at least not in any direct way, but he might help you to see what happens when you do write them, and why.
Actually, this kind of thing can help write poems, too, sometimes -- John Matthias' wonderful poem "Turns: Toward a Provisional Aesthetics and a Discipline" makes these PB-ish themes a theme. Though I think he was reading Marcuse, not PB, at the time.
B.
Gabe wrote:
ReplyDelete>But where PB tweaks this for me is his insistence that whatever ethics we forward, it has to be done less by destroying hierarchies (because we can't really, we're too much like chimps) and more by changing how people think about them. That’s why I dig PB and this guy Caudwell.
Well, if that's what you're saying, that Bourdieu is engaged in demystifying operations of cultural power and control, then I have no quarrel! Such notion is self-evident. But this is quite different from what you started out arguing: that PB's sociology is to be read as an *ethical*, even polemical, commentary on the agonistic dynamics of cultural fields-- as call for their replacement by a more just order.
As Bob points out, there is very little in PB's studies of the literary field that suggests he is being anything but objectively analytical. Bourdieu's emphatic position, in fact, during the time these works were underway, was that sociology is a *scientific* discipline, not an implement of moral activism (see his famous attacks on Sartre, for example, precisely around this disciplinary question).
Now, all this admittedly gets complicated, especially in light of Bourdieu's own prominence as public intellectual later in his career. But to read a moralizing impulse behind studies like The Field of Cultural Production or The Rules of Art, I'd suggest, is something akin to reading revolutionary, egalitarian desire into Chomsky's Syntactic Structures: It's pleasant and confirming to do so, if that idea matches up with your theology, but you're likely going to get some things mixed up, if you do.
This getting "mixed up" reaches frankly theatrical levels in your take, Gabe. For example, your caricature of Bourdieu as stern admonisher of structural relations that produce competitive desires and impulses amongst actors in the literary field leads you to the astonishing suggestion that PB is mainly concerned with criticizing and correcting the employment of symbolic violence by heterodox, innovative writers and groups (I can't believe how long that sentence is). Not only that; you have also intuited that PB is really wagging his finger at the very notion and legitimacy of the "innovative" or "avant-garde"! This is simply ridiculous: Bourdieu describes symbolic violence as inevitable, something that *must* be used by all actors and tendencies struggling for position. And he is quite clear that heterodox tendencies are subjected to the greater brunt of that violence, which they return, of course, as they can, and in necessary measure.
One more thing, though this a general comment, in response to some remarks by others: We need to be careful about assuming that Bourdieu believes broader transformations in relations between social classes would lead, ipso facto, to qualitative transformations in the dynamics of literary fields. While cultural fields are obviously not unrelated to broader systems of power, Bourdieu is insistent that the former are significantly autonomous and operate to large extent by their own rules; PB outrightly rejects, it should go without saying, any direct "Caudwellian" relation between the economic base and the fields of artistic production. Which is another reason Gabe's continuing attempts to find a link between Bourdieu and the doctrinaire, Stalinist Caudwell are so puzzling...
Just a quick note on this from Kent:
ReplyDelete"...while cultural fields are obviously not unrelated to broader systems of power, Bourdieu is insistent that the former are significantly autonomous and operate to large extent by their own rules; PB outrightly rejects, it should go without saying, any direct "Caudwellian" relation between the economic base and the fields of artistic production. "
I think the crux of the matter lies in how much autonomy we see the cultural field as having vis-a-vis the field of power. PB talks about relative autonomy -- that there's a degree of autonomy, but not absolute autonomy. We can read the margin of autonomy as wide or thin, and I think (again, I'm writing on the run, without books to hand) that the width of that margin varies for PB. Propaganda art, commercial film, etc. have a narrower band of autonomy than the world of l'art pour l'art, although even the purest of aesthetic fields is in some way influenced by developments in the field of power.
So. Significant autonomy? Yes and no. Depends on what we see as a significant margin, and on what part of the aesthetic field we're talking about.
B.
And of course what a guy like Bourdieu adds to the analysis of a guy like Caudwell is just this sort of subtlety -- an interest in the mediation of economic determinism. Between the base and the superstructure are all kinds of social formations that influence the way culture and power interact.
ReplyDeleteYes, Bob. The autonomy is relative. To some extent, PB's tour-de-force field studies could be seen as analytical enactments of the basic principle of "relative autonomy" advanced in late-stage Althusser.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I want to know to which posts Morrica was referring when she called them witty and funny. :)
ReplyDelete@ Steve. I guess you could say PB is providing an etic. He clearly says he believes in the ability to be objective, if one practices reflexive sociology. And Henry's right in that I tried, though likely poorly, to show why I say poets should read PB. A basic question, as I take it, is what practical use can reading such analyses have, in general, and, more specifically, for poets. On the "in general" part: The epigraph to CC's Illusion and Reality, thank you Google Books, is the Engel's line, "Freedom is the recognition of necessity," which I think in a basic way speaks to pedagogical theory from the Stoics up through Dewey, in that insight about one's conditions and self leads to a sense of one's own limitations, and that this can in turn lead to flourishing, even in limiting conditions that would have otherwise have caused a sense of loss and despondency.
But as to why poets in particular should read PB: If the above stuff hasn't shown why at least I think that, and if Bob's very good answer is insufficient, I will again say that PB does *not* predict an inevitable round of agonism for those who can see how these cultural hierarchies are made - and that's what, brilliantly, I think, The Field of Cultural Production helps to show, and I'l try this broad analogy by way of PB's insistence that the field of cultural production tends to operate like a religion: PB drew heavily on Durkheim and Weber to show how the consecration of writers, both mainstream and avant, happens, how "illusio" (denial) is manufactured around the fetishizing of the author, how agonism becomes its own force to those who are unaware that they are being spoken by the field; that much of the stuff that happens in the field is in fact a kind of violence. And though he clearly, in TFoCP, does not step over into moral philosophy to proffer an explicit ethics in the face of such a machinic field, I would argue he does so implicitly, in the way he uses disparaging descriptors to show the foolishness of these position takings, and that he is more explicit elsewhere about his advocacy of affiliative egalitarianism. The point?:
All of the above, I would argue, tends to make an average cultural actor (at least me), more inclined to see connections between what the great sociologist C. Wright Mills called ones "personal troubles" and "public issues," how the former are not really personal but are in fact determined by the outside, making one, I think, less inclined to be reactive, less inclined to be angry, more aware of how my work will be misread, more aware of the ways my own motives for writing, for arguing, are created for me and not merely through me, meaning that I am less inclined to argue, more easily available to forgiveness and more likely to cultivate affiliative mindstates.
So, to put it crudely, and perhaps not masculinely enough for an old bull Marxist like Kent, an engagement with the sociology of literature (and there are about a **dozen other, and contemporary, sociologists I could suggest) adumbrates/prefigures an engagement with moral philosophy. In short, I am a happier writer in knowing the flavors of unhappiness that press on me.
**Richard Peterson on the "culture of culture"; Howard "Howie" S. Becker, Ann Swidler, Richard A. Peterson (on production of culture), Jason Kaufman (again on the culture of culture), Howard Becker (on “art worlds”), Paul DiMaggio (on the institutionalization of art), Wendy Griswold (on culture and literature), Tia DeNora (on music and art in everyday life), and Ron Eyerman (on “meaning” in art).
PS, regarding Kent's Bourdieu's attack on Sartre: that stuff about objective non-political amoral sociology was his early position, Kent. In his later career he did a one-80 and "came out" as an activist, speaking in quite "moral" ways. Good for Bourdieu. I know that puts a damper in your use of PB as a legitimating device for "agonism." :) (Love you, too, buddy.)
ReplyDeleteUh, er, of course it can? But again, this is very different from what you set out to argue! You have beat a retreat, and I'm afraid it hasn't snowed yet on the blog, so your tracks are still there.
ReplyDeleteAnd this, in your last comment, informing us that PB "came out" as a public intellectual(something I pointed to myself, in mild qualification), and that this thus shows, I guess, that Bourdieu is something like the reincarnation of Charles Fourier:
>I know that puts a damper in your use of PB as a legitimating device for "agonism." :) (Love you, too, buddy.)
No, it wouldn't, even if I *did* feel that PB was a "legitimating device for 'agonism,'" whatever that could actually mean. There was continuing, energetic discussion about the relation between public activism and "sociological objectivity" during and after PB's rise to public prominence, and some of it was focused on him. The issue is certainly complex and is still under debate; in fact, there are those who accused Bourdieu, even then, of defending the status quo through his continued insistence on sociology's responsibility to avoid polemical partisanship.
You know, Gabe, despite what you're proposing, it's *interesting* that your comments so readily assume an anxiously agonistic tone!
Love you double.
Sorry, my first paragraph (opening "Uh, er, of course it can?") was meant to be in reply to this quote from Gabe:
ReplyDelete>an engagement with the sociology of literature (and there are about a **dozen other, and contemporary, sociologists I could suggest) adumbrates/prefigures an engagement with moral philosophy.
"But again, this is very different from what you set out to argue!" - Kent to Gabe.
ReplyDeleteDude, chillen thee out, or I'm going to drive up to Freeport with my kayaks and demand we go camping on the Kishwaukee together with one sleeping bag.
What I said at the outset was that poets should read PB. And I also said I'd just met this CC guy but he struck me as homologous in some ways to PB. And I also suggested, though in different ways, that PB wasn't some analytical machine, but a guy who put his discipline to ethical use. And yes I agree that his early work really tweaked a lot of people out. The new translations of Ranciere show that he, Ranciere, felt Bourdieu's objective stance, especially in the late '60s, really threw a wrench into aesthetics and set things back. But then I look at Ranciere and can see why he would say that: Ranciere is clearly a guy who, like Marcuse, like Adorno, like Badiou, like Blanchot made a fetish of art as a liberational force.
PB does not do that however. What PB does for me, at his most simplistic level, is to turn down the dial on our propensity to see the artist, in our Romantic and post-Romantic world, as someone who can be unequivocally valorized. And that is important -- especially for young writers. PB shows the games involved in that fantasy (that "illusio").
Gabe,
ReplyDeleteI will, yes, sleep with you in the same habitus, I mean sleeping bag, as once we pleasantly did.
But I will NOT go kayaking with you.
You almost drowned yourself last year!
Kent,
ReplyDeleteThe near-drowning in the icy river wasn't anything compared to the stage-two hypothermia that followed it. :(
Come on, it'll be fun. We could bring our French theory books and spend hours agonistically around a campfire. Then we could compose another parody of "Into the Dusk-Charged Air" using only the names of Illinois rivers.
And we could invite Morrica and all her Swedish students and Bob and Michael and Steve and that guy Conrad and especially Henry we cannot forget Henry, Henry who would bring his banjo. And there would be a great fire. And it would not rain. And you would have your pretty tackle. And we would all be so happy to be there, eating buns and licorice, the river under us -- and talk of nothing but sleeping bags and bunnies and about the babies of the Archambeaus. And we would all of us name and name and name the parts of pines.
It could be great I'm telling you!
Gabe
I'm in, but only if there's booze, and if Henry brings the banjo.
ReplyDeleteOK if it's a dobro? Have been listening to a lot of dobro lately!
ReplyDeleteCan we pitch the tent near Cahokia National Park? I want to see those Indian mounds. & the Gateway Arch.
That's great, Bob. And you can bring booze if you want!
ReplyDeleteA dobro wd be perfect, Henry. And I'd love to camp and paddle down at the Cahokia NP.
I think we should have a Samizdat Blog jamboree this summer. But only if Kent promises to get in a kayak. I'll bring all three of mine. :)
Chris Caudwell Nation! Bourdieu with Grumman shoulder-pads!
ReplyDeleteI'll bring my pet duck, Gabriel - Quackers. He's a Strict Quackstitutionalist! We'll save this country yet!
Gabe,
ReplyDeleteWell, I'm crushed you think that my mountains poem based on "Into the Dusk Charged Air" is merely a "parody."
But I love how your imagined marshmallow roast takes off from Dante's great sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti about sailing in an impossible boat.
There we'd all be, sitting there, singing along like friends, each of us secretly hatching his darkest plots.
We should invite Jordan, too.
My younger son, Aaron, actually got his Level III kayak-instructor certification last summer. So maybe we can bring him along, too, for safety.
I'll go if someone can send me pictures of the Swedish students first.
ReplyDelete>But only if Kent promises to get in a kayak.
ReplyDeleteI'd meant to ask: How much weight can a kayak hold?
Kent, your considerable girth will not matter in a kayak. I myself am very obese. And I sputter along just fine.
ReplyDeleteYes, Brooks had told me after Linh's reading that Aaron had been certified as an instructor. There was some talk of circumnavigating Lake Superior in a couple of kayaks. And you're right, it just wouldn't be a party without Jordan (and his Blackberry).
Henry, the duck should fit right in!
And Michael, photos won't be necessary. We already know that everyone who reads Bob's blog is, ab ovo, beautiful.
Oooo my word verification word is "wribimis"!
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned one American version of this argument--Paul Mann's books Masocriticism and The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde(to say nothing of Fredric Jameson)...
ReplyDelete