THEORIES OF PIERRE BOURDIEU AND KARL MARX

A Comparison between the Theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Karl Marx



A Comparison between the Theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Karl Marx

Pierre Bourdieu is currently the Professor of Sociology at the Collège de France, Paris. He is someone who has experienced in his own life a double transition from a pre-capitalist world to a capitalist one: initially, in his move from Denguin, in the peasant Béarn area of the Pyrenees, to metropolitan Paris, and once again, after his return from the rural South of Algeria, where after being drafted with the Army he became a self-taught anthropologist. Thus Bourdieu is well-placed to argue that the fundamental element of modernity is the historical shift towards the greater significance of the economy within the whole society. From being a "thing in itself" the economy becomes a "thing for itself". In particular, the gift exchange of goods and labour, which had once been totally organised around reciprocity, is largely replaced.What is substituted for it, of course, is the production and circulation of commodities, but also the enclosure of a sacred island of Art, where an inversion of commodity values emerge, in such a way that high sales no longer count as an acceptable measure of aesthetic value:

The denial of economic interest Éfinds its favourite refuge in the domain of art and culture, the site of [a] pure [form of] consumption,of money,of course,but also of time convertible into money.The world of art,a sacred island systematically and ostentatiously opposed to the profane world of production,a sanctuary for gratuitous,disinterested activity in a universe given over to money and self-interest,offers,like theology in a past epoch,an imaginary anthropology obtained by the denial of all the negations really brought about by the economy (1977). Bourdieu himself is particularly concerned with the fate of art in late capitalist society, arguing that the sociological study of culture is the sociology of religion of our time. Adorno and the theorists of the Frankfurt School saw painters such as Kandinsky as adopting a language of form which was out of reach of the commercial "culture industry", not least because of the epiphanies offered within their works and their two-dimensional grasp of social realities. But Bourdieu forcefully proposes a disturbing, new, demystifying stance. He asks whether the avant-garde might not have become set in an entirely different context once the structures of the modern art market had been established.Thus when the leading exponents of the various modernisms became highly-valued in the art market and their works came to be used to prove that their owners had "a spiritual soul", a fundamental "misrecognition" occurred.

Increasingly, a hagiographic approach to "the artist as saint" has emerged.With it, any attempt to introduce a scientific study of art and its social relations are denounced as reductionist. But such an approach, taken seriously, means looking once again at the evolution of artistic autonomy within capitalist modernity and especially at the split phenomena of "the appearance of cultural production specially designed for the market and, partly ...