Continuing My irregular translation of Pierre Bourdieus Manet, a Symbolic Revolution. I have skipped quite a bit of the book to find an important paragraph which I translate as follows: It is important to remember that one characteristic of the fields is that they determine what acts in each field. To understand that, one can take the metaphor of a dog in a game of skittles: a dog will destroy the game of skittles, but he doesnt bowl (note: in French, the translation for a bull in a china shop is literally a dog in a game of skittles). It is the symbolic poet who would go and read a sonnet at the stock exchange: not having the competence called for by the field, people would think he was crazy. One has to ask oneself what Manet was, for him to be able to revolutionize the artistic field. Manet had some assets and skill which one must characterize through a constructed analysis, which is completely different from doing a biography: it is not about telling that he was the son of a judge, etc. It is a Manet that has to be sociologically constructed: it is not the biographers empirical individual that you find in countless useless biographies which forget the essential. It is about constructing Manet around the collective expectations that have built and that he contributed to build. One has to construct Manets habitus, his dispositions, and describe what enabled him to create an artistic field and a pole opposed to the academic pole, an autonomous pole, with its own law, capable of getting himself to be recognized to the point of upending the balance of power, the dominated pole becoming the dominating pole.
Posted on: Sat, 17 May 2014 13:13:16 +0000
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