Fields, Capitals, Habitus

Australian Culture, Inequalities and Social Divisions

Tony Bennett, David Carter, Modesto Gayo, Michelle Kelly, Greg Noble, Tony Bennett, David Carter, Modesto Gayo, Michelle Kelly, Greg Noble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429688447
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Fields, Capitals, Habitus provides an insightful analysis of the relations between culture and society in contemporary Australia. Presenting the findings of a detailed national survey of Australian cultural tastes and practices, it demonstrates the pivotal significance of the role culture plays at the intersections of a range of social divisions and inequalities: between classes, age cohorts, ethnicities, genders, city and country, and the relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

The book looks first at how social divisions inform the ways in which Australians from different social backgrounds and positions engage with the genres, institutions and particular works of culture and cultural figures across six cultural fields: the visual arts, literature, music, heritage, television and sport. It then examines how Australians' cultural preferences across these fields interact within the Australian 'space of lifestyles'. The close attention paid to class here includes an engagement with role of 'middlebrow' cultures in Australia and the role played by new forms of Indigenous cultural capital in the emergence of an Indigenous middle class.

The rich survey data is complemented throughout by in-depth qualitative data provided by interviews with survey participants. These are discussed more closely in the final part of the book which explores the gendered, political, personal and community associations of cultural tastes across Australia's Anglo-Celtic, Italian, Lebanese, Chinese and Indian populations. The distinctive ethical issues associated with how Australians relate to Indigenous culture are also examined.

In the light it throws on the formations of cultural capital in a multicultural settler colonial society, Fields, Capitals, Habitus makes a landmark contribution to cultural capital research.

PART I

Fields

Introduction

The actions of the state and economic agencies comprising what Bourdieu called the fields of power significantly influence the positions that agents take up in relation to one another within the ‘space of possibles’ which defines the issues at stake in the struggles which characterise particular cultural fields. It will therefore be useful, in setting the scene for the chapters comprising Part I, to identify some of the key changes in the cultural policy and economic settings that have borne consequentially on the current organisation of the art, literary, music, heritage, television and sport fields in Australia.

We have already touched on these questions in the general Introduction where we identified the 1994 Creative Nation cultural policy statement as a key point of historical reference for the Australian Cultural Fields (ACF) project. It is also important, drawing a slightly longer historical bow, to acknowledge the continuities between the policy trajectories advocated by Creative Nation and the earlier directions given to Australian cultural policies under the 1972–1974 Labor government led by Gough Whitlam, which provided the impetus for the establishment of the Australia Council for the Arts as an independent statutory authority in 1975. This was a significant innovation, particularly in the attention the Council accorded to access and equity considerations in the distribution of funding, in operating at arm’s length from government and in its initiation of Indigenous and community arts programmes. If this constituted a watershed moment in the development of national arts and cultural policies, it did not eclipse the continuing significance of Australia’s State and Territory governments, particularly in the provision and maintenance of cultural infrastructure in the arts and heritage sectors. This is in contrast to broadcasting, where the Federal government is, and has long been, the dominant player in terms of policy and legislation.

The policy agenda highlighted by the continuity between the Whitlam years and Creative Nation has been weakened considerably since the late 1990s by a sharper focus on the economic aspects of creative industry development, an erosion of the power of domestic cultural agents in consequence of the increasingly transnational character of cultural and media production, and a winding back of support for access and equity agendas relative to support for elite cultural practices (Meyrick et al., 2018). The principle of arm’s length autonomy for art and cultural funding was also weakened in 2015 when the then Arts Minister George Brandis redirected $26 million per annum of Australia Council funding to a programme under his direct ministerial control, the National Program for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA). This detrimentally affected individual artists and small-to-medium arts organisations, and was vigorously protested by the arts community but not the Australia Council itself – a silence widely interpreted as casting doubt on the Council’s structural independence as a statutory authority. The establishment of the NPEA hearkened back to 1960s Australian arts funding bodies that foregrounded ‘excellence’ as a singular virtue in contrast to its subsequent melding with other social policy objectives. It was also a move in step with broader trends which have seen the production, management and support of culture in Australia shift from government to market forces. The present context is also more strongly imbricated in transnational processes, ranging from policy settings which place increasing value on the transnational, to developments in technologies and platforms of production, distribution and consumption which present increasing challenges for national cultural and media organisations.

These shifts are among the broader economic and political tendencies that have affected the ways in which the cultural practices associated with ACF’s six cultural fields are produced and consumed. In engaging with these, the chapters in Part I do so through the prism of the more particular tendencies specific to each field.

The discussion in Chapter 1 of the close intertwining of the relations between the visual arts and the higher levels of the managerial and professional classes is thus complicated by a consideration of the role played by the development, largely since the 1970s, of Indigenous art as a distinctive sub-sector of the Australian art field. Chapter 2 similarly pays particular regard to changes in the publishing industry which suggest the need for a reassessment of the forms of legitimation that are now in operation in the literary field. These have weakened traditional conceptions of literary value in favour of a flatter and more dispersed regime of value organised around the concepts of book reading and book culture.

In international debates, the music field has long been interpreted as one in which the dilution of earlier hierarchical divisions of tastes has been most pronounced. Chapter 3 on the music field qualifies these accounts. Drawing on Bourdieu’s approach to the temporal dynamics of fields, it shows how musical works representing different ‘musical times’ in the Australian music field are connected to practices of distinction associated with different class fractions. It also shows how the intensity of such distinctions varies with the degree of immersion in musical events. Chapter 4 stresses the significance of the heritage field’s closeness to the political field. It pays particular attention to the ways in which this manifests itself in a split between ‘public, “elite” or authorised’ heritage on the one hand and ‘personal, vernacular or everyday’ heritage on the other.

Owing to their close imbrication with both market forces and the state, however, television and sport are arguably the fields most directly implicated in the field of power. They are, moreover, deeply intertwined with one other. The point of departure for Chapter 5 is the waning dominance of free-to-air television in the face of new technological actors in the television field: platforms, technologies and distribution mechanisms such as streaming, Netflix, Stan and YouTube. In discussing these developments, Chapter 5 foregrounds the agency of these technological actors in reconfiguring television’s interrelation of the symbolic and the material.

Our studies of individual fields are rounded off in Chapter 6 with a turn to classificatory questions exemplified by the complexity of sport’s definition as a field. The intersection of sport (as an organised, rule-governed activity) with other physical practices; the varying modes of sports engagement ranging from playing to umpiring to club duties to watching live to consuming via media; its high degree of mediatisation generally – all of these contribute to a field characterised by a high degree of porosity.

It should also be noted that the ordering of the chapters that follow moves progressively from the most sharply divisive field (the art field) to the least (the sport field) in terms of their relations to occupational classes and levels of education. The significance of this hierarchy of fields is taken up in Part II.

1

AESTHETIC DIVISIONS AND
INTENSITIES IN THE AUSTRALIAN
ART FIELD

Tony Bennett and Modesto Gayo

In his lectures on Manet, Bourdieu distinguishes his approach to the sociology of art from that of T. J. Clark (1984) by stressing the respects in which art fields act as a set of mediating institutions through which the influence of class and other social positions must pass in order to connect consequentially with art practices. To avoid the ‘sociological shortcuts’ he attributes to Clark’s tendency to interpret Manet’s work too directly in the light of his immersion ‘in the Paris and the streets of Haussmann’, Bourdieu interposes the ‘intermediary social space’ of the field between the artist and the city:

We do not move without transition from Haussmann to the painting: instead, we have to pass through a social universe, which is the world of the painters, the critics, the artists, etc., and which obeys social laws … The painter is himself a part of this world and works within its parameters. When he paints … he is not alone with his work: he has other past and present painters in mind, as well as an audience composed of those for whom he is painting … In fact what makes a picture are all of these things, which, taken together, form a field.

(Bourdieu, 2017: 261–262)

Bourdieu and Darbel (1991) were equally insistent in The Love of Art that audience responses to works of art cannot be read off directly from either the work of art or from the audience’s social position without taking account of the intermediary social space of the art field. They particularly stressed the role that the positioning of artworks relative to one another within the temporal dynamics of art fields plays in distinguishing the tastes of different class fractions.

This insistence on considering the relations shaping the production and consumption of art as interacting aspects of an overarching art field was lost sight of in engagements with Bourdieu’s work in the 1980s and 1990s (Hanquinet and Savage, 2016: 12). The emphasis placed on establishing more routinised connections between culture and stratification tended to abstract these questions from any consideration of the influence of field-specific hierarchies of value. Discerning a return, from the late 1990s, to a sociology of art founded on the relational principles of field analysis, Hanquinet and Savage extol these principles for the potential they afford of a more finely textured approach to the interactions of field-specific aesthetic properties and social dispositions in shaping the social organisations of tastes (see also Hanquinet et al., 2014).

It is with these considerations in mind that we approach our findings regarding the relations between art tastes and practices and social positions through the role played by the contemporary Australian art field in mediating the relations between these. We therefore look first at the distinguishing properties of the Australian art field as a prelude to outlining the rationales for the art field items included in our questionnaire. This paves the way for the presentation of the key connections our survey data demonstrates between different degrees of involvement in the art field, tastes and a range of social positions. We then bring these considerations together with the evidence of our household interviews to explore the distribution of different intensities of aesthetic engagement and the operation of different aesthetic principles among our survey respondents.

There are four main aspects to the argument. First, while qualified and complicated by the force of age and gender, our findings testify to the continuing strength of the relations between family background, level of education and class position in determining both the degree and kinds of involvement in the art field. Second, tastes also manifest the strong influence of education and class. They do so at the most general level in differentiating responses to figurative and non-figurative art forms, albeit that this is complicated by the force of age. Third, the degree of intensity invested in involvement in the visual arts is, more often than not, an inherited disposition strongly connected to family background. Finally, we pay particular attention to the distinctive qualities associated with liking Aboriginal art, particularly the respects in which, even in its abstract forms, it is differentiated from other forms of abstract art in being interpreted as testifying to politically purposive storytelling.

Contemporary dynamics of the Australian art field¹

In contrast to Britain and France, where national galleries and academies were well established by the mid-nineteenth century, and where national arts and cultural policy organisations were developed in the early post-war years, the emergence of a clearly national art field in Australia came later. Proposals for the establishment of a national gallery go back to the period following Federation in 1901 when Australia’s hitherto separate States were brought together under a relatively independent national government. However, these did not acquire any significant political purchase until the ‘new nationalism’ of the 1970s which also provided the momentum for the establishment of the Australia Council, Australia’s first comprehensive arts funding, policy and advocacy body, in 1973. A national gallery was not established until 1982 when what is now the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) opened. Prior to this, the art field was dominated by the major State galleries, particularly the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The connections between such institutions and European art institutions were strong, and artists looked chiefly to Paris and London as the key centres of contemporary artistic practice. Although prefigured by important initiatives in the 1930s, the development of a strongly national school of art criticism and of autonomous arts training schools only gathered significant momentum in the post-war period.

The late 1940s was also when Australia’s connections with European art markets and institutions began to decline relative to those of New York, a tendency which has continued and, since the 1990s, been complemented by closer relations with the developing art markets and gallery sectors of Asia, particularly China. While the State galleries remain significant institutions of legitimation within the Australian art field, their influence is now exercised alongside a number of new players. Although the NGA is one of these, its location in Canberra distances it from Australia’s main centres of population – especially Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane – which are also its main centres of arts training and arts production, where the major auction houses connected to international art markets are located and where Australia’s most significant arts fairs and biennales are hosted. State capitals are also the primary locations for the new galleries which have been the key drivers of new art practices (contemporary, abstract and video art, installation and performance art) since the 1980s: Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA [S]), Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and Hobart’s privately funded Museum of Old and New Art (Mona).² Nonetheless, alongside the State gallery sector and the Australia Council, the NGA has played a significant role in the legitimation of Aboriginal art. The increasing presence of Aboriginal art practices, and the shift in their framing from the categories of ethnography to their validation as art, has been the most distinctive aspect of the Australian art field over the period since the 1970s. However, for reasons that will become clear later, the c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the text
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I Fields
• Part II Class
• Part III Capitals
• Part IV Habitus
• Conclusion: ‘distinction’ after Distinction
• Appendix A. Questionnaire design and survey methods
• Appendix B. Survey questions
• Appendix C. Methods used in analysing the survey data
• Appendix D. Occupational class model with examples of occupations
• Appendix E. Selection of household interviewees
• Appendix F. Profiles of household interviewees
• Appendix G. Australian scales
• Appendix H. International scales
• Appendix I. Key to Figure 7.2: Australian space of lifestyles (participation)
• References
• Index