The cult of 'popular culture' is often simple a purely verbal and inconsequential (and therefore pseudo-revolutionary) inversion of the class racism which reduces working-class practices to barbarism or vulgarity. Just as some celebrations of femininity simply reinforce male domination, so this ultimately very comfortable way of respecting 'the people', which, under the guise of exalting the working class, helps to enclose it in what it is by converting privation into a choice or an elective accomplishment, provides all the profits of a show of subversive, paradoxical generosity, while leaving things as they are, with one side in possession of its truly cultivated culture (or language), which is capable of absorbing its own distnguished subversion, and the other with its culture or language devoid of any social value and subject to abrupt devaluations.. which are fictiously rehabilitated by a simple operation of theoretical false accounting
Pierre Bourdieu, Pascallian Meditations
5 comments:
I’m inclined to agree with M. Bourdieu’s analysis here, but accepting the legitamacy of his terminology and practices, it is surely not unreasonable to analyse these practices in the same way.
And it is surely hard not to find in Bourdieu a simple operation of theoretical false accounting that credits the author’s own disavowed social class with an illusory integrity at the expense of the sentimental orientation of this same social class, representing as such a purely verbal and inconsequential (and therefore pseudo-revolutionary) inversion of the class racism which reduces working-class practices to barbarism or vulgarity.
Chalotte Street, of course, I find creditable
Regards
Er, thanks Luke. What do you mean by Bourdieu's 'disavowed social class'? Are you talking about his class of origin (I understand his father was a tenant farmer and then postman), and where's the 'disavowal'?? and where's the 'illusory integrity' (is all integrity illusory?)? and.. well, if you could just explain a little more what you meant..
I hope this is not going to sound plain reactionary (at least not unjustifiably so):
Should one have total faith in one's paranoia, accepting that there is enough uniformity of idealogy among individuals making up a class to reduce all hope of consequential auto-criticism within the system to a bare minimum?
The rhetoric used in the Bourdieu text, his manner of presenting his arguments, sadly reminds me of the way our leaders (everywhere) try to make their policies seem even more popular than they are (!) by suggesting the society is one homogeneous blob, ready to be served (or served up).
A sort of inverted populism (?) is what I'm trying to suggest here.
Personally I quite like Bourdieu’s writing style which seems to be modelled on Lenin or maybe Guy Debord, with the obvious caveat that this kind of populist jurisprudence; clear, detailed and impassioned, isn’t the presage of the populist jurisprudence of the kangaroo court, or the anti-populist jurisprudence of the cheka.
A quotation from Bourdieu and some conclusions:
“Only a pedagogic authority can break the circle of “cultural needs” which allow a lasting and assiduous disposition to cultural practice to be formed only by regular and prolonged practice”
1. “Only a pedagogic authority can break the circle of ‘cultural needs’” really does imply the operational integrity of the apparatus of pedagogic authority, singular.
2. The social position from which this pronouncement is made is clearly, but not indisputably, that of a leftist academician, and not that of a tenant farmer or a postman.
3. The argument could be (or perhaps in its undecidability definitely is) the refutation of two alternative counter arguments:
A. That the sentimental orientation of the bourgeoisie is basically progressive
B. That the bourgeoisie, in reality, lacks on operational integrity
4. My contention is that Bourdieu’s sustained polemic against A, accidentally, as it were, negates the more serious B, and that this itself is related to the social position from which he writes.
I hope this provides some elucidation as to my thinking on this, I’m afraid any more detailed explanation must resort to the black arts of Hegelianism.
I really do like Charlotte Street, I wasn’t joking or nothing.
Talk about pretentious rubbish!
Sorry, you already do!
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