Thursday, February 7, 2008

It's about the prize

In the Economy of Prestige, James F. English continues Bourdieu’s (and Weber’s) work of disenchantment. Bourdieu demystified ‘pure’ art’s illusion of transcendence by identifying its inner logic as one moment in a dialectic of merchandise and signification, money and art, bourgeois and avant-garde. This antagonism generates the cognitive pre-conditions necessary for the field of cultural production to exist and allows for symbolic value to be consecrated on its products. English isolates a specific moment in the process of consecration, the attribution of artistic and literary prizes, and demystifies it by exposing its unacknowledged rules and dialectical workings. His main idea is that works of art receive symbolic value, not through the awarding of prizes, but through contempt for the awards process itself: that critics rail against misguided awards committees incapable of recognizing true art presupposes that the latter exists and maintains the unconscious collective belief (illusio) that art is a special commodity owing its prestige to the fact that it inhabits a realm above crass political or mercantile interests. The prize is an example of symbolic value production, in which value is conferred onto that which lacks it intrinsically. In the symbolic economy, products such books or paintings have little value as physical objects; what counts is that they be recognized as valuable, which is neither automatic nor intuitive but constructed by institutions, among them the prize industry, that allocate worth onto that which is otherwise worthless. Prizes maintain the illusion that recognition of good art is intuitive, self-evident; when they go to the wrong pearson (such as Sully Prudhomme and not Tolstoy, or Larry Heinemann and not Toni Morrison), the resultant scandal—“the instrument par excellence of symbolic action”—confirms our belief that artistic greatness announces itself while obscuring the fact that artistic value is a cultural commodity socially produced by critics, professors, award committees, by all those agents with vested interests in believing in it. Distaining the prize industry reassures us that art has value; or rather, it reassures those of us who need to believe that art is valuable. I am one who needs such an illusion.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

It's about the money

Bourdieu’s analysis of the field of artistic and literary production would seem to support the claim that, in the post-Enlightenment France, art has replaced religion. By analyzing the dialectical opposition between the logics of money and art, Bourdieu expands on Weber’s characterization of rationality as either instrumental or substantive, the former being oriented toward economic efficiency, the latter toward ultimate ends whose value is judged according to religious or metaphysical worldviews. Weber saw modernization as the progressive rationalization of all aspects of social life, a process in which instrumental rationality becomes embodies itself in capitalism and substantive rationality dissolves into autonomous cultural value spheres (Bourdieu’s fields), each with its own logic. Modernization for him was also the disenchantment of the world, or the de-sacralization of social life in which “the old mysteries of religion are clarified in the cold light of scientific day”. Bourdieu’s sociology, which investigates the unthought, pre-reflexive conditions underlying social practices, participates in this disenchantment and his analysis of symbolic goods de-mystifies art much like Enlightenment thinking demystified religion.

What is striking in Bourdieu’s analysis is just how much the logic of ‘pure’ art functions in secular France like that of religion in pre-modern societies. Bordieu views schools as homologous to churches, both of which, in Weber’s words, "found and systematically delimit the new victorious doctrine and defend the old against prophetic attacks, establish what has and what does not have sacred value, and make it penetrate into the faith of the laity”. Something of the Protestant work ethic, the impetus behind capitalist modernization, survives in the (anti-) economy of pure art, which must appear disinterested in money order to make money: “The vision that makes of asceticism in this world the condition of health in the hereafter finds its principle in the specific logic of symbolic alchemy that maintains that investments will not be recouped unless they are (or seem to be) operating at a loss”. Avant-gardism, which “offers no other guarantee of its conviction than its indifference to money”, thus only appears as the new asceticism. The logic of pure art partakes in Weber’s substantive rationality as residue of the pre-modern and pre-enlightenment in a fully rationalized world, but the artwork’s ‘economic angelism’, its claim of transcendence, of obeying a telos superior to the merely instrumental, of existing as the metaphysical purity of the thing-in-itself (l’art pour l’art), is an illusion. This illusio is constitutive of art’s very mode of being; the appearance of transcendence is its fundamental law. Art obeys a theological logic and must be permanently produced and reproduced by celebrants and believers whose conviction is based on a collective misrecognition that art is not all about the money. This is the only way Editions de Minuit’s 1952 publication of Beckett’s En attendant Godot could make money, and making money, even if it must be deferred as the symbolic capital of consecration is accrued, is the reason why was published in the first place. There is nothing outside of instrumental rationality.

Bourdieu does not explain why this post-Enlightenment transfer took place, why the illusion of religion was replaced by the illusion of art. Could it be that, imprisoned within the iron cage of capitalist-instrumental rationality, we have no choice but to collectively generate illusions to make it bearable?