Film Cultures

Janet Harbord

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781446228180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

" Film Cultures is thought-provoking and challenging. By opening film theory up to the many simultaneous networks of relation (that is, the cultures) of film, it asks both viewer and student to take film more seriously." - Communication Research Trends

" Film Cultures weaves together insights from cultural theory and film studies to provide a complex and absorbing theoretical account of contemporary film culture. Harbord writes with authority, imagination and wit and her delicate deployment of modernist and postmodernist cultural accounts makes rewarding reading." - Christine Geraghty, Professor of Film and Television, University of Glasgow

Film Cultures argues that our tastes for film connect us to social, spatial and temporal networks of exchange and meaning. Whether we view film in the multiplex, arthouse or the gallery, as cinema premiere, video hire or from a cable channel, whether we approach film as a singular object or a hypertext linked to ancillary products, our relationship to film is inhabiting a culture. Shifting the focus of film analysis from the text to paths of circulation, Film Cultures questions how film connects us to social status, and national and global affiliations.

CHAPTER ONE

Breaking with the aura? Film as object or experience

If the starting point of this book is the notion that film is embedded in taste cultures, and therefore part of a system of social reproduction, this assertion immediately raises questions about how taste cultures are manifested and their mode of operation explicitly as film cultures. Further, where have taste cultures emerged from, and what historical and discursive formations provide for the current situation of film embedded in systems of opposition? These questions are complicated by the different historical lineages that they are connected to and, to an extent, are situated within. In addressing the first part of this formulation I turn to the work of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and in particular his thesis in Distinction (a culmination of many of his writings prior to this publication) of how tastes are mobilized relationally, that is in tension with other positions within the social field. Yet Bourdieu’s work, based on ethnographic research conducted in France in the 1960s, opens a vista onto another historical plane of the late eighteenth century. From the opening pages Distinction makes it clear that it is written in explicit dialogue with the philosophy of aesthetics set out by Immanuel Kant (1790), a philosophy worked out in an historical milieu of social transformation of relations of state and subject, art and patronage. For Bourdieu, the mechanism of reproduction travels onwards into the present, untroubled by the effects of modernism and, more recently, the postmodern; in The Rules of Art (1992), Bourdieu affirms the narrative albeit with adjustments to the particular artistic movements.¹

Against Bourdieu’s fairly linear account of the history of taste and social reproduction, I want to suggest that the narratives of modernism and postmodernism have and continue to exist simultaneously, providing a tension between the forces of change and stasis operating in taste cultures. This is a view that sits uneasily not only with Bourdieu’s account, but also the argument in film scholarship that film is indelibly marked by modernism and, in turn, reveals something of modernism’s essence. ‘If we cannot understand the birth of cinema without the culture of modernity, ‘writes Leo Charney, ‘we also cannot conceive modernity’s culture of moments, fragments, and absent presents without the intervention of cinema, which became a crucible and a memorial for modernity’s diverse aspects’ (1998: 7). Unlike Charney, I do not envisage cinema as a memorial to modernity, nor modernism as a temporally defined epoch. The characteristics of modernism carry forward the discourses of the Enlightenment (centredness, imperialism, the hierarchy of races, knowledges, classes), as much as rupture. Into this context of order and disruption, a nascent cinema evolves, caught within paradigms of social tradition and a discourse of radical futurism. In returning to this moment, there is a specific juncture at which old paradigms of taste are inflected by a new concern: the imbrication of culture and technology. The tension between individually crafted artworks and the industrially produced cultural commodity is fundamental to the discourses of value and discrimination in which cinema developed. In early cinema we find the struggle for film as either art or commodity, its affinity with older forms of culture (vaudeville performance, songs, novels) and a concern to locate the particular new ‘essence’, the innovative nature of cinematic culture in the moving image. This chapter traces the tension between, on the one hand, historical continuities of aesthetic discourse within the institutionalization of cinema, and on the other, the disruptions to paradigms of value that film evokes. The first point of this analysis turns to the historical roots of discourses of taste, before moving on to the specificity of film as a ‘new’ cultural form at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

distinctions

Bourdieu opens Distinction with the analogy between sociology and psychoanalysis; confronted with a subject such as taste, the task of the sociologist is to dig beneath the surface of received cultural wisdom that taste is natural, a given, to upend such ideas through the illumination of less visible structures of interest and claim. Indeed, Bourdieu’s notion of accumulated cultural preferences, the habitus, situates taste across the spheres of conscious and unconscious psychic life. The habitus is the sedimented effect of our individual histories, created through the systems of family and education, legitimated and consolidated by systems of reward (the titles of nobility), and the assumption of social position within a hierarchy (aristocracy). The analogy with psychoanalysis is a telling one, for it sets the tone for an argument that is a denaturalization of commonly held assumptions (not a particularly radical treatise for an academic work), but, moreover, points to the difficulty to prove the manifestation of taste empirically. Bourdieu’s recourse to science in the introduction (and subsequent claims to objectivity) trouble the text as it shifts between the statistical ‘evidence’ of research, the suturing in of almost anecdotal extracts from interviews, and polemical analysis.

Part of Bourdieu’s recourse to a late eighteenth-century text is perhaps motivated by a desire to locate the abstract effects of aesthetic distinction in a material textual form, an origin of sorts. Against Kant’s thesis of judgement as disinterested, free-floating as it is applied to cultural works, Bourdieu asserts that such forms of valuation derive from and in turn reproduce the structure of the social classes; taste is interested, motivated. The move that Bourdieu makes in the initial moments of the book is reminiscent of Raymond Williams’s reworking of the term ‘culture’, conventionally referring to artworks, to culture as the practices of everyday life.² For Bourdieu, culture extends beyond the discrete boundaries of texts into the myriad practices of daily life; the survey traces the discourses of taste through preferences for food, interior design and politics, as well as particular cultural forms and genres. The horizontal reach of taste (as lifestyle) is not Bourdieu’s trump card. Rather, the ranking of such preferences within a system of hierarchy, or the imposition of the value of those tastes is what concerns Bourdieu – the ability of the dominant class to impose its judgement across the social terrain, and therefore to reinforce its position within the structure. Here culture, rather than bare-faced economic capital, is the site of social discrimination and the enforcement of class difference; discrimination manifest in the micro details and semi-conscious acts of choice in everyday life.

How then does a system of classification operate as a dominant set of ideas? Here Bourdieu springboards from Kant’s thesis more directly, mapping out particular class relationships to culture. This set of relationships operates through a grid of binary oppositions concerning distance and proximity, luxury and necessity, pleasure and gratification. In a Kantian aesthetic, the ideal relationship to the work of art is distant, retaining a critical space between the artwork and subject, a space of abstraction and reflection. This approach Bourdieu characterizes as the aristocratic gaze. In contrast, argues Bourdieu, a popular relationship to culture is proximate, involving a recognition of self within the space of representation. This spatial relation to the text is underpinned by an economic imperative; the popular appreciation of culture turns on a concept of necessity, whilst the aristocratic gaze is removed from the context of need and practical purpose. This in turn helps define the cultural preferences each class makes as well as the relationship to the work. Working-class subjects, through necessity, value use, which in the sphere of culture becomes self-recognition, a validation of art as life, culture that is recognizable and that can be incorporated within a system of daily life. Bourdieu describes it thus:

Everything takes place as if the ‘popular aesthetic’ were based on the affirmation of continuity between art and life, which implies the subordination of form to function, or, one might say, on a refusal of the refusal which is the starting point of the high aesthetic, i.e., the clear-cut separation of ordinary dispositions from the specifically aesthetic disposition. (1979: 32)

The relational element of taste is clear here: the aristocratic cultural taste is predicated on a refusal of culture as life, as ordinary, whilst the working-class preference is forged in opposition, the refusal of the aristocratic denial of culture as ordinary. But a further binary division opens up here in the description of the relationship to culture, which is a way of thinking culture as either form or content. For Bourdieu, the popular appreciation of culture blurs the distinction between life and art and in so doing prioritizes the content of work, its expressive function. Conversely, the aristocratic relationship, through its insistence on a division between art and life, the ordinary and the sublime, places a premium on form. The apprehension of cultural objects then is tied into our socially stratified systems of classification, where the working-class subject has few cultural resources to contextualize artworks, therefore reverting to everyday life as a yardstick, whilst the aristocratic subject, wielding significant amounts of cultural capital, situates the work within an intertextual paradigm of previous art movements and practices.

The relationship forged by Bourdieu between individual competencies, relationships to cultural forms and preferences for particular types of culture roll the argument into the general and macro universe of class antagonisms. These are problems that cause us to pause and point to the limits of this account. One difficulty is the formulation of the working classes through this set of elisions. In Distinction Bourdieu’s ‘objectivity’ (assuming that we accept this as a possibility) gives way to a more active skewing of cultural value, reversing the dominant legitimization of disinterest with the proximate engagement of the working classes. Indeed, a positive notion of participation is counter-posed to cold contemplation when Bourdieu claims ‘popular entertainment secures the spectator’s participation in the show and collective participation in the festivity which it occasions’. In a manner that echoes a Bakhtinian celebration of the popular, he continues in the same paragraph to argue that moments of collective ‘festivity’ ‘satisfy the taste for and sense of revelry, the plain speaking and hearty laughter which liberate by setting the social world head over heels, overturning conventions and properties’. The popular relationship to culture is then warmhearted, engaged, bodily, which in turn is potentially revolutionary, threatening to ‘overturn’ convention. Apart from the radical proposal of this statement, Bourdieu’s description of the working classes, valorizing the underdog, spills over into a sentimentalization and, I would argue, infantilization of this social category. They are the group rendered simple in need by their dependence on necessity. Further, their proximate relation to culture, unable to discriminate between life and art, suggests an over-investment, a collapse into the space of identification. If the aristocracy are imaged as narcissists, the working classes are stuck in the ill-defined and powerless space of the preoedipal.

There are further critiques of Bourdieu’s work from various quarters. John Frow, in a text committed to the exploration of cultural value, diagnoses a double essentialism at work in Distinction that unifies cultural tastes and class affiliations. The first essentialism involves the projection of a single class experience onto a range of disparate groups that form the dominant class (we may add that the same is true of the forging of a unified working-class experience). The second refers to the unified aesthetic logic which adheres to each class. As a result, Frow argues ‘the effects of this is a binary construction of the concepts of a “high” and a “popular” aesthetic understood as something like class languages, fixed and ahistorical class dispositions with a necessary categorical structure’ (1995: 31). Whilst this is a valid criticism up to a point, there are two responses that might be made to this. The first is that Bourdieu’s project is ambitious in its claims for the central importance of taste in structuring the class system, and in such an account the most extreme symbolic charge of the high and the low, of good and bad taste, appears to make the case most forcefully, if somewhat parodically. Yet, these are only the outer parameters or poles of the field, the middle distances of which Bourdieu goes on to elaborate. This leads to the second point, that Bourdieu does offer a more nuanced account of class fractions in his subdivision of the social structure into the dominant (the aristocracy), the dominated fraction of the dominant class (artists and intellectuals), the middle classes as petite bourgeoisie (or the nouveau riche) and the conservative middle classes, as well as the working classes.

Where Frow refutes Bourdieu’s claims as too generalized, his turning to de Certeau’s account of the uses of culture is a substitution of a different kind. In de Certeau we are offered a picture of the tactics and strategies of consumers as agents operating against and between the structures of social classification. This is altogether a different project, pursuing different goals. In Distinction the questions concern the role that taste plays in obfuscating social interest and in reproducing social relations, whilst in The Practices of Everyday Life the pursuit is precisely to locate the practices of subterfuge that obscure social control (de Certeau, 1984). Yet Bourdieu cannot be positioned simply as a structuralist; indeed, in his work we find a constant movement between structure and agency, objectivism and subjectivism in a dialectic that is a refusal of these categories of approach. In his concept of practice (a regulated range of perceptions and responses within which improvisation occurs) we find the possibility of transformation or change. But this is always a process conducted within specific social structures, and in a culture in which politics has become culturalized (the socially given narrative of the conformist anti-conformist; ‘political’ positions fulfil given socio-cultural roles). If Bourdieu emphasizes the structure of social relations in Distinction at a cost to agency, his particular rendering of how power operates through culture offers, in compensation, the nuances of the lived, bodily effects and the nuances of structural relations. In comparison, de Certeau removes culture to the private sphere, takes it out of the circuit of value and the terms of exchange that determine its worth, and pits agency against a monolithic power that simply dominates, or which we escape.

Frow’s most pertinent criticism is in his dispute of Bourdieu’s splitting of form and content. This division occurs in Distinction as a consequence of the aristocratic and popular relations to culture, outlined above. For if the popular aesthetic values content, and conversely the aristocratic aesthetic values form, there is the implication that culture can be divided into two separate parts. Of course, it would be possible to defend this split in terms of how culture is perceived by particular groups rather than a division that can be made; in other words, the binary is the result of class interest, determined to establish different systems of value that support their own disposition and classificatory system. It is a split that retains a common usage, for example in debates on pornography and art – the representation of erotic or explicit sexual acts is framed by supporters as art valued for its formal qualities and relationship to a history of other representational practices, defended in the discourse of liberalism and freedom of expression, whilst it is condemned for its explicit ‘content’ by its critics. The split however does effect a certain reductiveness to debates on cultural value and cultural effect (MacCabe, 1992). A more central division that operates in the institutionalization of culture, as I shall go on to argue in relation to film, is the desire to establish a singular pure cultural object against the demand for culture to proliferate into practices and experiences.

taxonomies: art and life

Distinction contains a ghostly presence of Kant throughout its pages, hovering over the contemporary divisions and struggles, and yet there are reasons to question whether this demonized figure is representative of all there is to say of Kant’s work? Isobel Armstrong argues otherwise, suggesting that Bourdieu’s emptying out of the aesthetic is fighting a rearguard action (Armstrong, 2000). For Armstrong, the moment of Kantian influence has passed, killed off critically and thoroughly through the discourses of structuralism and poststructuralism, stamped on as the ruling ideology by Eagleton and Bourdieu among others, leaving little in its place; aesthetics rendered a cartoon of a flattened body. In her account, the pressing issue has become how to think the aesthetic progressively, without which aesthetics remains a discourse abandoned to the forces of conservatism (see Chapter 6 for a fuller discussion of aesthetics). What Armstrong draws our attention to is the context of Kant’s thesis as a key moment in the disengagement of aesthetic and economic value. This is a digression worth pursuing here as it informs the ongoing debate of the relationship between art and life, which returns at the moment of film’s emergence in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Viewed in the broader context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, Kant’s work ironically returns us to issues of economy and social structure. If the late eighteenth century witnessed the increased separation of art and economy, it was a movement that claimed some autonomy for art from its affiliation with Church and State, a shift away from explicit ideological control through patronage. As part of the enlightenment project, art, and cultural ideas more generally, were resituated in civic society within and as facilitators of a discursive space (albeit a bourgeois forum), free from state control (Garnham, 2000). Kant’s thesis on judgement figured thus purports to a different set of principles based on rational discrimination and guaranteed by freedom from economic interest. The fact that such a disinterested position then becomes a new aesthetic ideology less apparent in its social affiliations and support (Eagleton, 1990) does not detract from this moment of social restructuring as progressively imagined.

The implications of this freeing up of art from the sphere of economics are several-fold. First, the liberation of art from economics was simultaneously a process of increased social regulation, as spheres of economic and cultural mixity came under scrutiny and administration. Stallybrass and White offer a pertinent example of such a process in the late eighteenth-century reorganization of the fair as either commercial ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Breaking with the aura? Film as object or experience
• Chapter 2 Spatial effects: film cultures and sites of exhibition
• Chapter 3 Film festivals: media events and spaces of flow
• Chapter 4 Marketing films and audiences
• Chapter 5 Postmodern praxes: production on the national and global stage
• Chapter 6 Aesthetic encounters
• Chapter 7 Digitalization and its discontents
• References
• Index