User:Laurier Rochon/readingnotes/bourdieu1/

Concepts

• Structure
• Structuralism
• Post-structuralism
• Subjectivism vs Objectivism
• Kantianism & neo-Kantianism
• Formalism
• Discouse analysis
• Determinism
• New historicism

Notes & quotes > a primer

1. Bourdieu proposes a new model for critical study of cultural practices
2. He dissects the relationships between Systems of though <-> social institutions <-> material and symbolic power
3. Analysis usually comprises of empirical understanding & theoretical frame
4. He argues that art & cultural consumption legitimizes social differences (these differences are also accentuated by the academic institutions)
5. Challenges the Kantian notions of the universality of aesthetics and cultural autonomy (exclusiveness)
6. Bourdieu was a "blissful structuralist". He seemed to have hit a wall with structuralism.
7. Subjectivism is based on the primary experience, the perceptions while Objectivism focuses on "objective conditions which structure practice independent of human consciousness".
8. "Symbolic aspects of social life are inseparably intertwined with the material conditions of existence"
9. Notions of agent, habitus and field
10. The habitus is the intuitive "practical sense"
11. The field is a space with has its own laws of functioning
12. The agents are in the fields, (at different "positions") competing with each other
13. There are many types of 'capital' i.e. economic, political, cultural, linguistic, artistic, etc.
14. For cultural production, Symbolic capital and Cultural capital are very important. They are based on recognition and consecration more than anything else.
15. Agents in their respective fields enter to 'invest' their 'capital' (whatever it may be) in order to make a 'profit'
16. His study of cultural works takes the actual work into account (although finding meaning in only the work itself is absurd) as well as the producers and their 'strategies' (orientation of the practice) and 'trajectories' (series of successful (?) occupations in the same field by an agent)
17. He also wants to analyse the 'broader field of power' (another field) and the complete 'set of social conditions of the production, consumption of symbolic good'
18. 'The full explanation of the works (...) is found in the history and structure ((history of structure also, perhaprs?)) of the field itself'. The specific economy of the cultural field though, is somewhat different from most other fields.
19. The important question : what social preconditions make a text possible VS the meaning that is found in the text itself
20. 'The concept of the literary system is ultimately inadequate, for it fails to recognize that formal properties, both past and present, and themselves socially and historically constituted'
21. 'Discourse analysis' > internal analysis > find the meaning in the work itself
22. Production is not only material, but also symbolic
23. Artistic mediators = agents
24. Ultimately, the analysis of context if paramount. Formalistic analysis is too reductive.
25. Statistical methods fail just like reflective methods, to fully understand a cultural work. The reflective methods tend to transform the producer into a medium. It assumes many things, such as the fact that a given producer is even representative of its field.
26. 'Total context' > 'Only a method which retains a notion of intertextuality, seen as a system of different stances, and reintroduces a notion of agent, acting within a specific set of social relations, can transcend the seemingly irreconcilable differences between internet and external readings of artistic works.'
27. The field of cultural production is in opposition with restricted (high art) and mass (popular) production fields.
28. Interesting : the the mass cultural production field usually delves into the restricted field to renew itself
29. Again, the meaning of a certain text cannot be derived only by its content - rather it is more about the context and the field in question.
30. What is the meaning in Bourdieu's own work then? (If we can't extract it by solely analyzing the formality of it, but rather the field, etc. of it?) (while true ask question) ...
31. 'THe understanding of a work of art depends fully on the possession of the code into which it has been encoded, and this is neither a natural nor universally distributed capability.'