A Note On Pierre Bourdieu.pdf

A Note On Pierre Bourdieu’s Notion of ‘Economy of Symbolic Goods’

Sibaji Bandyopadhyay

The introductory passage of Pierre Bourdieu’s 1977 essay ‘The Production

of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic goods’ is like an

intimation forewarning the reader that he is about to enter a complex

language-game. The first sentence of the essay—loaded as it is with

expressions, such as, ‘the art business’, ‘a trade in things that have no price’,

‘class of practices’, ‘pre-capitalist economy’, ‘economy of exchange’—

unmistakably reminds one of the set of standard Marxist vocabulary, albeit,

in a slyly sarcastic manner. Bourdieu then, in the next sentence emplaces the

word negation at its centre; and, the translator alerts the reader in his

footnote that the French original dénégation unambiguously echoes the

German word Verneinung, a key Freudian term.[i] The opening gambit of

‘The Production of belief’ is thus akin to the staging of the spectacle of

conjuring up the spirits of the two Fathers of Modern Theory, Karl Marx

and Sigmund Freud. The promise implicit in the gambit is that the essay will

deliberately, even mischievously, conjoin Marxian and Freudian languages

to lay bare the ‘science of belief’ which underpins practices commonly

regarded as ‘Art’. It therefore is profitable to begin by taking stock of the

Freudian terms favoured by Bourdieu before we investigate how he

intertwines them with conceptual categories gathered from the Marxian

arsenal.

It is common knowledge that at the initial stage of his intellectual career, for

example in Studies in Hysteria (1895), Freud was in the habit of using the

words ‘repression’ and ‘defence’ indifferently, even indiscriminately.[ii] But

later he succeeded in endowing a peculiar quality of piquancy to the word

‘repression’. In his 1926 book Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud

chose to reserve the term ‘defence’ as ‘a general designation for all the

techniques which the ego makes use of in conflicts which may lead to a

neurosis’[iii] and designate ‘repression’ as a ‘special method of

defence’[iv]. The remarkable thing was that the more ‘repression’ gained in

specific density, the more it began to converge upon the term Unconscious

and clearer it became that ‘repression’ and the ‘unconscious’ were like

inseparable companions. It however took some years before Freud could

express the relationship between the two in the algebra of formulas. He put

it succinctly in his 1923 opus The Ego and the Id: ‘the repressed is the

prototype of the unconscious’[v]; then again in Inhibitions, Symptoms and

Anxiety: ‘the repressed is ... as it were, an outlaw; it is excluded from the

great organization of the ego and is subject only to laws which govern the

realm of the unconscious’[vi].

But it was in Freud’s short but celebrated essay titled ‘Die Verneinung’ or

‘Negation’ published in 1925 that the camaraderie between ‘repression’ and

the ‘unconscious’ became, to borrow the word from Lewis Carol the author

who pictured the image of the continually fading but perennially lingering

smile of some mysterious Cheshire cat, truly ‘curiouser’. Therein Freud

propounded the thesis: it is not affirmation but negation that holds the key to

the unconscious; and, negation is an Aufhebung of the repression, though

not an acceptance of what is repressed.[vii] Commenting on Freud’s

employment of Aufhebung, a word to which both Hegel and Marx were

particularly attached, a word that combined in one the dual role of

‘annulment’ and ‘preservation’, Jean Hyppolite remarked in a conversation

with Jacques Lacan while participating in one of Lacan’s seminars on 10th

February 1954 that for Freud the function of ‘negation’ was to constitute an

ambivalent form of self-proclamation which could be transcribed as: ‘I am

going to tell you what I am not; pay attention, this is precisely what I

am’[viii]. It is impossible to articulate such a double-edged mode of

judgment unless two distinct operations are assigned to the act of ‘negation’:

one that of disavowal and the other that of denial. According to Hyppolite

(and also Lacan), the masterly achievement of Freud lies in his formulation

that ‘one always finds in the ego, in a negative formulation, the hallmark of

the possibility of having the unconscious at one’s disposal even as one

refuses it’.[ix] The implication is, while disavowal connotes ‘a lifting of the

repression’[x] or a ‘recognition of the unconscious on the part of the

ego’[xi] and denial connotes the ‘persistence of the [same] repression’[xii],

this two-fold negativity is the pre-condition for ‘thinking [to] free itself from

the restrictions of repression [and thereby lay the ground for] creation of

symbol[s] of negation’[xiii].

Pierre Bourdieu, in his turn, banks precisely on ‘disavowal’ and ‘denial’ in

order to penetrate the mystery of production of ‘belief’. His central

proposition in the piece under consideration hinges upon the interplay

between the two. Confident that, treated as analytic categories the two

would yield a rich theoretical dividend, Bourdieu applies them to the

domain of ‘Art’ and proceeds to demonstrate with great élan that the tension

between ‘disavowal’ and ‘denial’ is simply the other name for the

mechanism which allows for the investment of a negative form of capital,

namely, symbolic capital.

Drawing upon Freud’s Negation essay even more than Bourdieu himself

does, Bourdieu’s arguments may be recast in the following manner:

1.To recognize ‘symbolic capital’ is to recognize that its very recognition is

premised on an elaborate system of misrecognition. In truth, ‘symbolic

capital’ is a variant of ‘economic or political capital’. But, a calculated

marshalling of a host of ‘protective screens’ ensures that the artist and the

market remain distanced; and this ‘distancing’ is mystifying enough to make

one oblivious of the profit-motive that underlies every artistic practice.[xiv]

2.Situated at the pole of ‘production’ the artist adorns himself with a mask-

like screen which has the effect of flashing a showy dark crack between

‘price’ and ‘value’. The artistry involved in that masking technique consists

in adopting the famous stance of disinterestedness. Transforming the boast

of aesthetic transcendence, the superior urge for the ‘refusal of the

commercial’ into a permanent feature of artistic persona, authors posit

themselves as ‘anti-economic’ beings. This snooty attitude towards vulgar

money-making and gross material gains combined with spiritual

impeachment of market-driven forces actually gives the game away. It

speaks of the ‘disavowal’ aspect of Freudian negation. But while

‘disavowal’, even if unconsciously, makes space for the ‘lifting of

repression’ associated with economic ends, the consistent ‘denial’ of the

same keeps reproducing the impression that artistic labor is intrinsically

antithetical to profit-oriented enterprises. ‘Disavowal’ framed in terms of

(Kantian or Neo-Kantian) ‘disinterestedness’ turns the favored self-

representation of the artist into a mockery. That representation can then be

re-phrased as: ‘I am telling you I am not interested in money; pay attention,

that is precisely what I am interested in’. On the other hand, by obstinately

‘denying’ the truth that the equally obstinate act of ‘disavowal’ signals, the

artist manages to constantly refurbish his (market-friendly) image of being a

sworn enemy of the institution of market. It is this ‘disavowal-denial’ nexus

which both paves the way for ‘creation of symbol[s] of negation’ in the form

of ‘Art’ and keeps alive the process of accumulation of symbolic

capital.[xv]

3.In a universe where the paradox of ‘deriving profits from

disinterestedness’[xvi] reigns supreme, it is natural to expect that symbolic

productivity would be directly proportional to the degree of invisibility of

investment. In other words, more a person succeeds in matching his ardour

of ‘disavowal’ with his passion for ‘denial’ more he gains in prestige, and

therewith, material benefits. This also explains why discourses on art are

pathologically compelled to repeat binary oppositions such as ‘best-sellers

vs. classics’, ‘bourgeois vs. intellectual’, ‘traditional vs. avant-garde’,

‘commercial vs. cultural’, ‘big houses vs. little magazines’, ‘low vs. high’

with a tedious regularity.[xvii] The monotony is itself a pointer to the fact

that in their battles against ‘establishment’ the proponents of ‘anti-

establishment’ rhetoric employ an always-already blueprint; to dethrone

consecrated authors, that is, those whose power of ‘denial’ become

progressively weak because they receive prizes, critical approvals or public

adulation, the greenhorns the greenhorns determined to consign ‘canonized

bones’ to fire play upon ‘disavowal’ with greater and greater alacrity. To use

a much-recited phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the tragedy that revolves

round the ever-lurking apparition of the departed Father, the aspirants or

pretenders ‘protest too much’. ‘Over-protestation’ clearly indicates, the

relationship between the out-dated and the new-comer is over-determined by

the age-old ageist ideology and in the final instance the son-like challengers

only endorse their fathers’ ‘bad-faith economy’[xviii] which from the start

was predicated upon the creed of ‘disinterestedness’. In place of providing

an antidote to the original ‘repression’, subversion ends up giving a fresh

lease of life to it; instead of burying the dead and moving on, the new

entrants remain haunted by the spectral presence of their elders. This never-

ending circularity, this ‘collective mis-recognition’[xix] is what bestows on

clichés like ‘intellectuals think less of writers who win prizes’ or ‘success is

suspect’ or ‘failure is the proof of authenticity’, an endearing as well as an

enduring quality.

4.The dominance of ‘bad-faith economy’ or the economy ‘based on

disavowal of the “economic”’ in the field of Art condemns all its players to

engage in a ‘game with mirrors’.[xx] New styles appear, new schools evolve

and newer labels, very often manufactured by loosely pre-fixing ‘post’ or

‘neo’ to previously popular nomenclature, continually proliferate but since

the ‘will to be different’ is always subject to the law of ‘creation of

symbol[s] [by] negation’, the space of Art also gets to be systematically flat.

This steady ‘homogenization’ is reflected in the near-homology between

various art-practices and their critical appraisals. It is as if each lot, whether

it be championed as ‘Sentinel of Tradition’ or ‘Harbinger of Newer Tides’,

has a slot of its own. ‘Disavowal’ coupled with ‘the homology which exists

between all fields of struggle organized on the basis of an unequal

distribution of a particular kind of capital’[xxi], spell out the general

principle for the production of belief surrounding the myth of self-

sufficiency in the arena of Art.

5.The process of ‘accumulation of symbolic capital’ gets better told if we

admit two more words to the discourse. They are: habitus and ethos. Habitus

is a synonym for any regulating principle which enables ‘agents to cope

with unforeseen and ever-changing situations’[xxii]; far from being a

random series of dispositions or erratic, habitus enunciates a logic of

practice which ‘integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a

matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions [and by] analogical transfer

of schemes permits the solution of similarly shaped problems’[xxiii].

Imbibed by ‘internalization’, habitus necessarily operates unconsciously. It

is thus a family, group or class. Moreover, being a unified phenomenon,

habitus produces an ethos that relates all the practices generated by a habitus

to a unifying set of principles. Once we accept that a cogent definition of

class is implicit in the notion of habitus, it becomes plain, the practice of art

is a component of a particular class-ethos and is determined by struggles

between fractions within the dominant class. And, since the principle of

‘disinterestedness’ is a governing habitus of the ruling elite, its political

unconscious as it were, all conflicts between class-fractions on questions of

taste, style, form, content, modes of discrimination etc. in various subfields

such as painting, literature, theatre or social science remain orientated,

albeit, asymptomatically, towards reproduction. This means, in the arena of

art patronized by the cultivated, ‘difference’ is no more than a prop essential

to the promotion and perpetuation of Theatre of class-inequality. Perhaps,

this rather convoluted pattern of artistic reproduction has been, although

unwittingly, best described by the fifteen year old hero of Mark Haddon’s

novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). Although

the boy has severe ‘behavioral problems’ and finds it difficult to

‘understand’ other human beings, it is he who supplies a three-step formula

for unraveling the mystery of the ‘accident’ that made life possible on earth.

First is, replication, meaning, ‘Things have to make copies of themselves’;

second, mutation, meaning, ‘They have to make small mistakes when they

do this’; and, third, heritability, meaning, ‘These mistakes have to be the

same in their copies’.[xxiv] Isn’t this what exactly happens in the universe

of art? Begin with the Big Bang of the self-preoccupied, independent

Author, i.e., take recourse to the ideological construct which encourages one

to think that ‘the ultimate basis of belief in the value of a work of art is

charisma’[xxv]; then, in replicating the founding principle introduce

displacements in such a manner that all mutations remain enclosed within a

limiting fold and the faith in Author with its concomitant principle of

‘disinterestedness’ gets passed on as an invaluable heirloom. Suitably aided

as it will be by ‘the disavowed economic enterprise of art dealer[s] or

publisher[s], “cultural bankers” in whom art and business meet in

practice’[xxvi] and by specialists who in the task of elaborating upon the

intricacies of inter-textually opulent innovations craft equally esoteric

‘intellectual commentaries’[xxvii], this montage of fade-in and fade-out of

‘trademarks or signatures’[xxviii] is bound to culminate in the fortification

of ‘racism of class’[xxix] and nostalgic whimper of heritability, a whimper

that would nevertheless succeed in suppressing the all-important question,

which is, ‘what, [in the first place], authorizes the author?’ or to put it in

theological terms, ‘who creates the “creator”?’[xxx]

Pierre Bourdieu’s article can well be re-named ‘A Contribution to the

critique of apolitical economy of Aesthetics’. That this re-naming is quite

legitimate is vouchsafed by two major figures in the area of Culture and

Communication Studies: Raymond Williams and Nicholas Garnham. In

their essay ‘Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of culture’, the two

theoreticians go to great lengths in demonstrating that Bourdieu is

uncompromising in retaining the same critical flavour for the word ‘critique’

as it is to be found in Marx’s work. They argue: for both Marx and Bourdieu

‘critique’ signifies a critical exercise, which ‘provides the very conditions of

its own potential scientificity’. Thus, just as Marx’s theories of fetishization

and ideology cannot be pushed to the margins or regarded as a more or less

dispensable spin-offs of his general theory, so also Bourdieu’s ‘theoretical

and empirical analysis of symbolic power’ cannot simply be relegated to the

safe region of cultural studies.[xxxi] To wrench his theory on ‘accumulation

of symbolic capital’ from the cozy bosoms of cultural studies and give to it

the sprite of a biting ‘critique’, Bourdieu, in a vein similar to that of Marx,

takes it upon himself to systematically interrogate a host of dominant critical

tendencies. And, unremitting as he is in his confrontation, Bourdieu has

many adversaries. For example:[xxxii]

1.Those who in their haste to establish one-to-one correspondences between

ideological substance of artistic products and class-interest of producers

bypass the specific logic of the field of production. The party most guilty of

such crude reductionism and by extension responsible for the populism of

pandering to the vulgar taste of the artistically insensitive is, of course, the

party of Orthodox Marxists.

2.Those who seduced by the narcissistic charms of ‘subjectivism’ tend to

give far too credence to the individual actor and upon the experimental

reality of social action. Jean Paul Sartre with his brand of humanism called

‘existentialism’ provides one prime example of this one-sided proclivity.

3.Those who in counter-acting ‘subjectivism’ submit themselves to the

equally one-sided drift of ‘objectivism’. Lured by the Truth-claims of

‘Science’ spelled with capital ‘S’, they inexorably finish up by turning

‘structure’ itself into an object of fetish. Levi Strauss’ Structuralist

Anthropology and Louis Althusser’s fiction of ‘structure without subject’

are two prominent instances of this school.

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: