Reckoning with Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Policy

On the weekend John Ganz had an interesting discussion of our rich tech-elites and aesthetic taste, of which they have little, and who would hope to destroy what for now remains that is human and beautiful. This leads him to consider Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), where the latter book’s title is clearly meant to evoke the former. I won’t try to summarize Ganz - I recommend you read him yourself (not just this one piece) - but I will take this opportunity to try to wrestle with my own thoughts on Bourdieu, from the perspective of working for many years in the cultural policy field.

Let me take the excerpt from Distinction that Ganz uses:

The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile—in a word, natural—enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences.

In Distinction Bourdieu makes two claims, one about society and one about aesthetics, and I think it is important to separate the two, since it is possible for a reasonable person to believe that either one of the claims is true but not the other. This is but a blog post, so I know my treatment here is a bit sketchy.

Bourdieu’s sociological claim is that people can use their cultural taste, whether genuine or simply an affectation, as a signal of how they ought to be classed, and can use this “cultural capital” to their advantage in making social and economic connections. If they acquire this cultural capital from their parents and their social standing, then cultural taste works to preserve the transmission between generations of class status. In the translation of Bourdieu I have he says cultural capital can be “exchanged” for social and economic capital, but I wouldn’t put it that way; it’s not actually exchanged or traded - once you have it you don’t need to part with it - it is simply useful in obtaining other sorts of capital.¹

Is this claim true? Maybe, though I think it might have been much more the case in prior generations (Bourdieu was writing about France in the 1960s). Demonstrating elite taste in art is neither necessary nor sufficient for getting on in our world, though I would grant that having a least basic manners, dress sense, and the ability to hold intelligent conversation still matter. But art? Enjoy any movies, music, or reading you like and no one in your economic world is going to care very much.

I’m not sure Bourdieu’s sociological claim is falsifiable - what evidence would prove him wrong? If I say that our elites mostly listen to bad music and watch junk movies, could a counter-claim be that “well, yes, but they are snobby about that too?” I’m really not sure what to do with this.

Bourdieu’s aesthetic claim is that cultural judgments are nothing more than expressions of personal taste (used for social reasons), and have no truth-standing beyond that. Kant makes the distinction between matters of purely personal preference - “I prefer a pinot noir to a malbec” - where I don’t expect everyone to feel the same, nor feel that everyone should prefer pinot noir to malbec, to judgments regarding art, where the claim “Chopin’s Nocturnes, especially as recorded by Ivan Moravec, are beautiful” is meant to convey something greater than my personal enjoyment of them, and that other people ought to find them beautiful too, and when they do we can enjoy the work communally. But Bourdieu (in common with the logical positivists) holds that it’s all personal preference, nothing more.

Of course taste is subjective, that’s why even people very knowledgeable about a sub-genre of art can still disagree about the relative values of different works. But Kant (and Hume before him) think that there are principles we ought to be able to agree on, regarding what works are beautiful, well-crafted, intelligent, respectful of their audience, subtle, expressive, and original, and which are ordinary, slipshod, banal, condescending, obvious, mechanical (these days, literally so), and formulaic. (I’m not saying I have the masterful eyes and ears that enable me to discern all these things, far from it, but I can still recognize the existence of such standards, and to try to better understand them).

I come to cultural policy through economics, and there is something of a rule in the social science (economics or sociology) of the arts that you don’t make aesthetic claims in your research. As a social scientist you might personally believe that there are legitimate distinctions we can make about the value of art and artists, but in the paper you are submitting to the International Journal of Cultural Policy or the Journal of Cultural Economics or Poetics you keep it to yourself. This is a good norm: it allows the reader to assess the social science claims on their own terms, without the empirical findings being muddied by the researchers’ views on the subjectivity of cultural taste, and of their own tastes. But that norm doesn’t mean Bourdieu and other skeptics are correct.

As I said above, one can believe one of Bourdieu’s major claims without believing the other. One the one hand, I could say, yes, people sometimes try to acquire, or at least feign, an enjoyment of the high arts and make pronouncements on cultural value to improve their social standing, but that doesn’t mean there is no such thing as legitimate judgment in the arts; my claim that Moravec’s recordings are something beautiful (I might say) comes from experience of listening to piano recordings, of reading others who are more knowledgeable than I am about the genre, of carefully listening for the subtleties in his approach, and so on.

On the other hand I could say that the arts and judgments of beauty simply don’t matter any more, if they ever did, in social and economic standing. But while Bourdieu was wrong about that, he is right that all this elevated talk we get in art and cultural criticism is literally nonsense, and just amounts to someone saying “I like the colour blue, pinot noir, and Chopin”.

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What does this mean for cultural policy? In my book, The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts, I wrote this in the concluding chapter:

One can insist on a neutral state regarding the good, but it is not how the Arts Council (and all the subsequent arts councils) were founded, and the rationale for public spending on the arts quickly withers without the guiding assumption that there is something intrinsically good in appreciating beauty and the arts (these not being the only intrinsic goods) and that people are better off with encouragement and subsidy that connects them to the arts. Further, the point of arts funding is to promote the intrinsic value of aesthetic appreciation, which means that there must be judgments in the funding body as to what artists and presenters rise to the level of artistic excellence where such appreciation is warranted. It is not simply a matter of “more art”, but art that enhances people’s well-being beyond the cultural goods that are easily and cheaply obtained in commercial markets.

If you are going to have some sort of arts council that gives money to artists and arts organizations, they have to make some sort of judgment about what is worth funding and what is not.

If someone wants to make the claim that all judgments of cultural taste are nothing more than the expression of the likes and dislikes of the speaker, then the rationale for giving any funds to any particular artist or presenter dries up. Why fund this instead of that? Why publicly fund any art at all? Let citizens figure out themselves how to spend their income. Saying, “well, we can still have an arts council, we just need to tweak how it makes its grants” does not get you anywhere. Handing out money through a lottery doesn’t get around the problem of asking how public arts funding is justified in the first place.

If you also follow Bourdieu that consumption of elite-approved art just serves to reinforce social distinctions, that the only purpose of opera is to let the Sir Humphrey’s of the world feel superior, and use the intermission for political networking, then the case for funding the arts gets even worse - high art becomes a public bad, and instead of being subsidized ought to be assessed a special tax, like we do for cigarettes.

You can still study the political economy of the arts through Bourdieu’s lens, how elites have captured the arts and directed public money to uses that preserve their privilege. But your days as a “public funding for the arts advocate” are over.

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(from the Los Angeles Times)

John Ganz concludes his post (rightfully) somberly:

Now, a clever reader might object at this point, “Well, what about a hipster type who doesn’t want people to know about their special tastes? Aren’t they just hoarding social capital?” Yes and no, perhaps. No one gets it like I get it could be someone essentially saying, “Other people who engage with this will see it as agreeable at best, or as a piece of cultural capital to show off their taste, but I perceive the beautiful in this thing, and I want to preserve that experience.” So paradoxically, an apparent snob might be invested in the universality and permanence of an aesthetic experience, while a popularizer might be using it a) to make a buck, or b) to pose with it and have a moment of fashionability before they discard the thing in the trash heap along with all the other fads, thereby destroying the sensus communis, the universal and timeless moment of beauty. I think people who work in museums and art education probably struggle with this: how to make aesthetic experience accessible enough to the public, but also communicate its importance and rarity. I think the best art criticism also does this: it’s welcoming without dumbing down.

To bring this full circle, we can already see how the communication revolution is actually quite corrosive to a sense of community. I think part of what’s so dispiriting about the almost cancerous growth of AI and technology is what it seems to be doing to aesthetics: it’s pulping it, turning it into slop, into another material to keep the engines running. And it’s sad and angering that there are many people, who I think are insensitive to the experience of the beautiful and the sublime, who seem to be celebrating this destruction. There’s a real sense in which it is really the destruction of humanity or a distinctly human way of experiencing the world.

1. Suppose you have inherited a house. Now you have a place to live and store your things. You can also have people over and entertain them, and this could enhance your social capital, and, if this actually led to some connections in the labor market, your economic capital. But there is a provision in the inheritance: you cannot sell this house, nor can you rent it to a tenant. You can live there as long as you like, or walk away from it, but you can’t sell it or rent it for cash. Cultural capital is like that house.