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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
What is a 'symbolic revolution'? What happens when a symbolic revolutions occurs, how can it succeed and prevail and why is it so difficult to understand? Using the exemplary case of Édouard Manet, Pierre Bourdieu began to ponder these questions as early as the 1980s, before making it the focus of his lectures in his last years at the Collége de France. This second volume of Bourdieu's previously unpublished lectures provides his most sustained contribution to the sociology of art and the analysis of cultural fields. It is also a major contribution to our understanding of impressionism and the works of Manet.
Bourdieu treats the paintings of Manet as so many challenges to the conservative academicism of the pompier painters, the populism of the Realists, the commercial eclecticism of genre painting, and even the 'Impressionists', showing that such a revolution is inseparable from the conditions that allow fields of cultural production to emerge. At a time when the Academy was in crisis and when the increase in the number of painters challenged the role of the state in defining artistic value, the break that Manet inaugurated revolutionised the aesthetic order. The new vision of the world that emerged from this upheaval still shapes our categories of perception and judgement today - the very categories that we use everday to understand the representations of the world and the world itself.
This major work by one of the greatest sociologists of the last 50 years will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, art history and the social sciences and humanities generally. It will also appeal to a wide readership interested in art, in impressionism and in the works of Manet.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Editors’ Note
Notes
Translators’ Note
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1998/9: The Manet Effect
Lecture of 6 January 1999
Lecture objectives: the symbolic revolution that Manet started
A successful symbolic order
Pompier painting
The construction of modern art: what was at stake in this struggle
Parenthesis: a social problem and a sociological problem
State art and avant-garde academicism
The mock revolution
Parenthesis on scientific populism
An impossible research programme: the space of criticism
From the familiar to the scandalous
A painting full of incongruity
The clash between the noble and the ‘vulgar’
The affinity between the hierarchies
‘Realism/formalism’: a false dichotomy
Notes
Lecture of 13 January 1999
Question on the revolution in art
The game of the educated guess (‘That makes me think of …’)
Constructing the field of criticism
The effects of the work of art
The ‘intersubjective unconscious’
The intentionalist theory
Aesthetic transgression and solecisms
The rhetoric of euphemism and the effect of a title
The effects of composition
A symbolic bomb
The rationale of a painting
Using a painting within a painting to question painting
Intention and disposition
Notes
Lecture of 20 January 1999
Reply to a question on dialectics
Transgressions of the ethical order
Manet and Monet
The academic eye
Dispositional theory
The philosophy of intention
Intention and disposition
When a habitus comes into contact with a space of possibilities
The example of writers
Critique of the notion of sources
The hypothesis of coherence
Notes
Lecture of 27 January 1999
Reflexive return to the previous lecture
Pre-constructed objects and technical impeccability
Epistemological breaks and social breaks
The theory of dispositions and scholastic bias
The philosophy of intention and the philosophy of disposition
Critique of genetic criticism
Critique of the iconographic tradition
The hermeneutic posture
Copies, parodies and pastiches
A very strange exercise
Knowledge through the body
Notes
Lecture of 3 February 1999
Replies to two misunderstandings
On the right use of sources
Listening to a lecture
Internalists and externalists
Youthful works and student exercises
The intelligence of the body
The structural conditions of creation
A total social fact
An institutional crisis
A formalist theory
Finishing with the ‘finish’ of the pompier painters
Notes
Lecture of 10 February 1999
Return to a hasty reaction
Limits of the formalist approach
The illusio as metabelief
The trap of dichotomous logics
Questioning the academic system and the historicization of the work of art
Social history of academic art
Studios as elite schools
Corps and field
The field of publishing
Notes
Lecture of 17 February 1999
An academic art
Pompier art, aristocrats and nouveaux riches
The academic aesthetic
An integrated academic institution
Studios and rites of initiation
Consecration and the production of belief
A gradus ad parnassum
The Academy and academic painting
Technical and historical virtuosity
An aesthetic of readability
A ‘dehistoricized’ history
An aesthetic of the finished
Notes
Lecture of 24 February 1999
Manet’s critics
Parenthesis on the line separating the private from the public
Lifestyle and style of the works
The abolition of meaning
The heretics and the orthodox
Nomination
The struggle for monopoly
Exhibition and consecration
The transformation of the school system
The defence of the corps
A crisis of belief
Durkheim’s morphological model and its limits
Notes
Lecture of 4 March 1999
External factors and the logic of fields: the surplus production of diplomas
The reproduction of differences
‘Refuge’ disciplines and positions
The weakening of the state monopoly
The contribution of the public to the revolution
The sclerosis of the Salon and the generalized crisis of belief
A comparison of the artistic milieus of Paris and London
Manet and the Pre-Raphaelites
Manet seen by Mallarmé
Notes
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1999/2000: Foundations of a Dispositionalist Aesthetic
Lecture of 12 January 2000
Doubts and reflexivity
Birth of the artistic field
A commentary on Mallarmé’s text on Manet
A critique of criticism
The Zola–Manet–Mallarmé paradigm
The inconsistencies of Bar at the Folies-Bergère
Mallarmé on Manet
The structural homology between the artistic and religious fields
Belief and the return to the sources
Notes
Lecture of 19 January 2000
Zola and Mallarmé
Formalism, materialism and symbolism
‘Throwing yourself into the water’ as a philosophy of action
A practical aesthetic
Notes
Lecture of 26 January 2000
A critical look at the previous lecture: the need for a double historicization
A parenthesis on art criticism
Back to Mallarmé’s article
Framing the picture to make cut-outs of the world
A new economy of production
When two histories meet
Notes
Lecture of 2 February 2000
Summary of the previous lecture
Accounting for artistic forms: the infrastructure/superstructure model
Models of historical processes
The approach I take in this lecture series: the habitus-field model
Manet and the challenge to analysis
Analytical method
Beyond the continuous/discontinuous alternative
Notes
Lecture of 9 February 2000
Breaks vs. continuity
The Salon des refusés of 1863
For a rational form of eclecticism
The Impressionist break with continuity (1): Impressionism foreshadowed
The Impressionist break with continuity (2): parody
The paradox of symbolic revolutionaries
Accounting for charisma
Technical factors
Morphological changes
Factors linked with demand
A multifactorial model
Specificity of the economy of symbolic goods
Notes
Lecture of 16 February 2000
The artistic field
Social transformations and formal transformations
A parenthesis on being ‘economical’ with research
The ‘painter of modern life’
The fallacy of the shortcircuit
The gaze in Manet’s work
The field as intermediary social space
Artist societies
A parenthesis on pseudo-concepts
Aesthetico-political attitudes and positions in the field of art
The field of criticism between the literary and artistic fields
A revolution in the field of art
Notes
Lecture of 23 February 2000
The production of belief
The usefulness of the notion of field
The field of criticism: its two dimensions
Portraits of critics
How the field of criticism operates
The principle of competence
When the notion of field guides the analysis
Manet, the subject and object of the artistic field
Notes
Lecture of 1 March 2000
Mechanistic explanations and structural causality
Bodily hexis
Manet’s cleft habitus
Manet’s capital
The places where Manet accumulated social capital:
(1) The collège Rollin
(2) The salon of Commandant Lejosne
(3) The salon held by Manet’s wife
(4) The studio of Thomas Couture
(5) The Louvre
(6) The cafés and their fashionable bohemian crowd
(7) Painters’ studios
Notes
Lecture of 8 March 2000
A reminder my approach
Art as a ‘pure practice without theory’
The author’s point of view and relationship to the public
An aesthetic of effects
Manet understood as a concrete individual
Form and content
The Manet effect
Foils and fulcrums
Analyses of Manet’s works
Notes
Opus Infinitum: Genesis and Structure of a Work without End (by Christophe Charle)
What is a symbolic revolution in painting?
Why France?
Fragments of a dispositionalist aesthetic
Notes
Manet the Heresiarch. Genesis of the Artistic and Critical Fields (Unfinished Manuscript by Pierre and Marie-Claire Bourdieu)
Introduction
Notes
1: Pompier Art as an Academic Universal
A prelude to Manet’s aesthetic
Notes
2: The Crisis in the Academic Institution
The explanation based on the morphological factor
The invention of the new specific economy
The economic and social context
The symbolic revolution (Mallarmé)
Notes
3: Break and Continuity
Breaking with the myth of a radical break
Official art bears the signs of decadence
The differentiation of the producers
Official art was not academic art
Breaking with continuity through continuity
The pastiche
Notes
4: The Field of Criticism and the Artistic Field
Manet and criticism
What were the major bones of contention?
The structure of the field of criticism
The problem of competence: does it constitute an independent factor?
Criticism marked out its distance from the public
The constitution of the field of criticism
The contribution of the literary field to the invention of the artist
The exchanges between the fields of art and criticism
Notes
5: ‘The Heresiarch and Co.’
Manet’s dispositions
Manet’s advantages
Consecration through stigmata
Notes
6: Manet’s Aesthetics
The artistic revolution
The principles of a dispositional aesthetics
The act of painting is inscribed within a double social relationship
Manet’s great challenges to, and rejection of, other artists
The foundations of Manet’s aesthetics
Analysis of some of Manet’s paintings
Notes
Appendix
Notes
Self-Portrait as a Free Artist: or ‘I Don’t Know Why I am Telling You That’ (by Pascale Casanova)
Notes
Appendix
Summaries of the Lectures Published in Annuaire du Collège de France
1998/9
1999/2000
Image Credits
Index of Paintings Cited
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Manet
Pierre Bourdieu
A Symbolic Revolution
Lectures at the Collège de France (1998–2000) followed by an unfinished manuscript by Pierre and Marie-Claire Bourdieu
Edition established by Pascale Casanova, Patrick Champagne, Christophe Charle, Franck Poupeau and Marie-Christine Rivière
‘Opus Infinitum’, by Christophe Charle
‘Self-Portrait as a Free Artist’, by Pascale Casanova
Translated byPeter Collier and Margaret Rigaud-Drayton
polity
First published in French as Manet. Une révolution symbolique © Éditions Raisons d’Agir/ Éditions du Seuil, 2013
This English edition © Polity Press, 2017
Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Institut français.
This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Français.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station Landing, Suite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0009-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bourdieu, Pierre, 1930-2002, author.Title: Manet : a symbolic revolution / Pierre Bourdieu.Other titles: Manet. EnglishDescription: English edition. | Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017002454 | ISBN 9781509500093 (hardback)Subjects: LCSH: Manet, Edouard, 1832-1883--Criticism and interpretation. | Art and society.Classification: LCC ND553.M3 B6813 2017 | DDC 759.4--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017002454
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Bruno Auerbach, Laure Bourdieu, Simon Bourdieu, Inès Champey, Olivier Christin, Adrien Fischer and Gilles L’Hôte for their contribution to this book. We also express our gratitude to all the individuals in and outside France who were consulted by Pierre Bourdieu and helped him with this project on Manet, especially his two direct collaborators, Rosine Christin and Martine Dévé.
Editors’ Note
This volume combines the lectures that Pierre Bourdieu gave on Manet at the Collège de France in 1999 and 2000, with an unfinished book on the same artist written in collaboration with his wife Marie-Claire Bourdieu, who, after contributing to the research for the book, ended up helping to shape its very conception. Both the title of the book and the titles of the two years of lectures were chosen by the editors. The guidelines used to establish the texts follow the editorial policy adopted for the publication of Sur l’État in 2012.1
Our transcription of Bourdieu’s lectures at the Collège de France respects the approach taken by Bourdieu when he himself revised his lectures and seminars: polishing the style, ironing out the rough edges of oral discourse (repetitions, slips of the tongue, etc.) and suppressing some developments that are off the topic or too impromptu. Beyond these general principles, other changes were necessary because of the unfinished nature of the argument, as Bourdieu himself recognized. More precisely, one of the interesting aspects of this publication is that it is a work in progress, which reveals a process of thinking. This explains why there are some changes in the content of a planned exposé, hesitations, interrupted arguments, partly improvised or merely sketched topoi, and occasional repetitions or reminders designed to capture the attention of the audience: although these things were not a problem when the lectures were delivered, they would have rendered the reading of an overliteral transcription difficult. Even though there was never any question of ‘rewriting’ the lectures in the way that Bourdieu himself would have done, some structural reshaping was nonetheless necessary, since he did not write out his lectures, but used his notes to speak his thoughts out loud and felt free to follow up ideas that occurred to him during the course of his exposé. Where these developments address the topic at issue, they are placed between dashes; where they indicate a break in the argument, they are noted in brackets; and where they are too long, they may become the subject of a separate section. The editors are responsible for the division of the text into sections and paragraphs, as well as for its subtitles and punctuation, and for the footnotes that provide references to the works mentioned and explain some of the allusions. So as not to overburden the critical apparatus, the choice was made to restrict all non-bibliographical notes to the information necessary for the elucidation of an allusive passage, or to the contextualization of items too summarily mentioned. However, when Bourdieu mentions the artists and critics who were Manet’s contemporaries, particularly those less well known, he usually provides their biographical details during the lectures as and when the argument requires it.
In the manuscript of the book, the bibliographical references indicated by the authors have been complemented when they were not sufficiently informative. Similarly, in the lectures, some notes have been added to facilitate the understanding of the text: explanations, cross-references, complementary details. As we have said, this book remained unfinished: the fully developed passages of the manuscript are interrupted by other passages of varying length, either in the form of rough drafts, indicated by italics, or sometimes by notes left in their raw state, which we have decided to publish despite their fragmentary nature. This is because they give an idea of how Bourdieu worked and provide insights into his writing process. Although the juxtaposition of the lectures and the manuscript does sometimes give rise to a number of repetitions, we chose not to use this criterion to make cuts, considering that the value of the complementary information they provide outweighs the disadvantages of repetition. On the other hand, we made other cuts, for reasons that will be clarified as and when they occur.
A text by Christophe Charle, ‘Opus Infinitum’, highlights the links between the lectures and the manuscript, situates these studies of Manet in the sociologist’s work and reconstructs their genesis. Drawing up a report on the research undertaken since, he gives an idea of potential developments and revisions of the perspectives opened by Bourdieu. And finally, a brief postface by Pascale Casanova, ‘Self-Portrait as a Free Artist’, closes this collection. She evokes the parallels between the painter and the sociologist, which comprise one of the driving forces of Bourdieu’s analysis of Manet. She also reminds us of the high cost of being a ‘symbolic revolutionary’, and of how improbable it was for someone to do that ‘very strange thing’, as Bourdieu said, i.e., turning their mastery of a system against the system itself in order to subvert it.
The summaries of the lectures at the Collège de France have been reproduced in an appendix, as have a general index and an index of the paintings cited.
Finally, the works by Manet and other artists which have inspired Bourdieu’s richest and most far-reaching analyses are reproduced in a central insert. The reader is referred to these by figures in square brackets in the text the first time they occur within each chapter.
Notes
1
. Pierre Bourdieu,
Sur l’État. Cours au Collège de France 1989–1992
(Paris: Raisons d’Agir/Seuil, 2012). Translated into English as
On the State
by David Fernbach (Cambridge: Polity, 2015).
Translators’ Note
In the case of Manet, Bourdieu argues that the artist is faced with a series of practical problems as much as any application of theory. Thus with the translator. In practice, each and every translation requires the mobilization of a certain savoir faire, that is, a specific set of technical procedures and skills. However, we have had to consider our approach especially carefully in the case of this posthumous work.
This book is the work of a sociologist who has created his own perspectives, categories and vocabulary, a school in fact, whose very style is part of its vision. The translators must transmit this vision. We have taken great pains to convey the sometimes shifting sense and often complex intellectual context of concepts such as ‘corps’, ‘field’, ‘disposition’ and ‘habitus’ in such a way as to convey their imaginative as well as their analytical force. Another challenge was the multidisciplinary nature of the material that Bourdieu harnesses to develop his ambitious sociological argument, moving seamlessly from discussions of art history, theory and practice, to reflections on literature, literary theory and philosophy. Where possible, we use the published English translations of the texts cited.
Perhaps most awkwardly, the work is unfinished. Bourdieu did not have time to revise the text of his lectures. They have been reconstructed, for the French edition, from recordings taken at the time, and his notes. Anyone who has heard Bourdieu lecture, or lead a seminar, will know that he was an inspired improviser rather than a literal pedagogue. The repetitions, the asides, the offhand references and ironic allusions are part of the performance of a gifted teacher who listens to and interacts with his audience. Here we have sometimes simplified the syntax in order to render more clearly to the reader the sense that might otherwise seem confusing on the silent page. We have however tried to remain faithful to Bourdieu’s usage of metaphors taken from economics, anthropology and religion, and to capture the polemical tone of his skirmishes with other critics and scholars, without losing their peculiarly French historical context. The unfinished manuscript is even more difficult of access. There are fragmentary phrases, which can be rather enigmatic. There are algebraic notations, which are there to remind Bourdieu to take a certain direction. Certain passages resemble shorthand rather than longhand. We have sometimes taken the decision here to interpret – which is also the task of the translator – rather than leave the reader faced with an enigma compounded.
This posthumous work is in many ways the fruit of a collective effort. The book’s French editors have pieced together a book from a wide range of sometimes fragmentary material that was not yet ready for publication. However, they scrupulously tried to note their every intervention, adding missing words and phrases between brackets and correcting small errors. We have tried to strike a similar balance. However, as translators, this had led us to take somewhat different decisions. We have done away with most of the brackets added by the editors when these impeded the reading of the text, on the grounds that a translation is neither a transcript nor a transliteration. Despite the work of the French editors, a few factual errors and slips of the tongue remain in the French text: we have either corrected them or called attention to them in a footnote. Bourdieu’s own footnotes are often very allusive, and we have followed the lead of the French editors and left them as they are, unless we felt that a clear reference to a quotation was needed.
Ultimately, this is a very personal work. As we weave our way through a labyrinth, sometimes a minefield, of detailed sociological data and controversial critique of art criticism and technical details of painterly practice, we never cease to hear the voice of the auctor, as Bourdieu would have said. It is ultimately this impassioned, inspirational voice that we have tried to convey.
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1998/9: The Manet Effect
Lecture of 6 January 1999
Lecture objectives: the symbolic revolution that Manet started.
A successful symbolic order.
Pompier
painting
.
The construction of modern art: what was at stake in this struggle.
Parenthesis: a social problem and a sociological problem
.
State art and avant-garde academicism
.
The mock revolution
.
Parenthesis on scientific populism
.
An impossible research programme: the space of criticism
.
From the familiar to the scandalous
.
A painting full of incongruity
.
The clash between the noble and the ‘vulgar’
.
The affinity between the hierarchies
.
‘
Realism/formalism’: a false dichotomy.
Lecture objectives: the symbolic revolution that Manet started
This year, I am going to speak to you about what one might describe as a successful symbolic revolution: the revolution that Édouard Manet (1832–83) started. What I wish to do is to help us to understand both the revolution itself, with all its details, and the works that provoked it. More generally, I would like to attempt to make the very notion of symbolic revolution intelligible.
If symbolic revolutions are particularly difficult to comprehend, especially when they are successful, it is because there is nothing more difficult to understand than what appears to go without saying, in so far as a symbolic revolution produces the very structures through which we perceive it. In other words, just like the great religious revolutions, a symbolic revolution overturns cognitive, and sometimes social, structures. When it succeeds, it establishes new cognitive structures, which become invisible the more they become generally recognized, widely known and incorporated by all the perceiving subjects in a social universe. Our own categories of perception and judgement – those we ordinarily use to understand the representations of the world and the world itself – were created by this successful symbolic revolution. The representation of the world created by this revolution is therefore self-evident – indeed, it is so self-evident that the scandal provoked by Manet’s works itself is surprising, if not scandalous. In other words, we experience things in reverse order, as it were.
I shall try to make the rather abstract argument of this first lecture more concrete, although this is not as easy as it might seem. The topsyturvy perspective that this reversal gives us makes it impossible to see and understand the work of collective conversion which was required in order to create the new world of which our very eye is the product – I am deliberately using the religiously connoted term ‘conversion’ here. Of course, when I speak of our ‘eye’, what I mean is a socially constructed organ, as in the very fine book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, where Baxandall attempts to analyse the social genesis of a period eye, which is a system of embodied categories of perception.1 This process of conversion, which is what I shall attempt to analyse here, can only be understood if we ourselves are prepared to convert the way in which we perceive our perception: more precisely, it requires us to strive to defamiliarize the revolution which created the way we see the world: i.e., what the very success of this revolution has familiarized – that is to say, the objective and embodied structures which it established, starting with those which underpin the gaze we cast on the world.
I deliberately use the language of familiarization and defamiliarization here, in order both to evoke the Russian formalists’ notion of estrangement,2 and in the process to reconcile two traditions that stand very far apart from each other: the traditions of Russian formalism and Weberianism – the emphasis Max Weber places on what he calls the routinization of charisma.3 A symbolic revolution is a classic case of a charismatic revolution. As with the religions of the great religious founders, a charismatic revolution establishes itself as a set of mental structures, and as a result tends to make what we perceive through these familiarized categories appear routine and self-evident. However, these perceptions are the very thing we wish to defamiliarize, the very object of defamiliarization. The paradox at the heart of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Grand Inquisitor’,4 or more exactly the principle underlying this paradox, pervades these analyses. It is by no means surprising that a religious message, and especially its subversive power, should self-destruct at the very moment when it becomes successful and universal.
A successful symbolic order
In order to understand this symbolic revolution – which, as I have tried to explain in terms that are perhaps rather abstract, is intrinsically difficult to grasp – we must first try to understand the symbolic order that Manet overturned, and what it consisted of. A successful symbolic order is an order that seems self-evident, to the extent that it would not occur to anyone to question it. In other words, a successful symbolic order accomplishes5 the feat of ensuring that this symbolic order is perceived as self-evident and is taken for granted. In order to reconstitute the full potency of this symbolic order, we must take into account the fact that, although the impression that something ‘goes without saying’ is extraordinary, it paradoxically strikes us as ordinary: it is extraordinary because it supposes an almost perfect concordance between the objective structures of the world – what we perceive – and the cognitive structures through which we perceive it. Untainted by discord, dissonance or dissent, this immediate concordance is what produces the impression that ‘This is how things are’, ‘It goes without saying’, ‘It couldn’t be any other way’.
A traditional symbolic order makes it impossible to imagine that things might be different or done any differently: any other order than this particular order is unthinkable, the categories of perception that might allow us to anticipate another order do not exist. Utopia, for example, is more or less ruled out by a completely successful symbolic order – although in practice almost no symbolic order can in fact ever be completely successful, except perhaps in certain so-called ‘archaic’ societies that have been completely preserved from the type of contact with other civilizations, which means that what was experienced as natural (phusis) starts to be perceived as nomos – i.e., based on a convention, an order, a law. Understanding a symbolic order therefore means understanding the concordance between the objective structures of the social world and our cognitive structures. In other words, this means adopting the perspective of an ethnologist who does not consider that world from the outside and does not adopt a normative outlook, a perspective which seeks neither to condemn nor to rehabilitate. Although, to be fair, when it comes to what I am talking about here, the tendency to condemn is already implicit in the language which we use to discuss it.
Pompierpainting
We shall speak of pompier painting6 – the term ‘pompier’ was part of the jargon of academic artists, or at least of the rapins7 – to refer to what today we might call ‘costume drama’, that is to say works representing people in classical dress. Faced with the productions of pompier art today, we are still implicated, we are not indifferent. We oscillate between condemning and rehabilitating this art. One might say that it is passé, done for, as people say today – in intellectual or artistic debates, the best way to shoot down your opponent is to tell him that he is finished, and to consign him to the past (either relegating him to classicism if you want to be kind, or telling him that he is past it, done for, when you want to finish him off). Pompier art is dismissed as archaic and outmoded, unless an attempt is made to rehabilitate it, as sometimes happens – indeed, this is an increasingly popular stance. Some will say that ‘At the end of the day, pompier art is not that bad’, and I could quote several perfectly eminent and respectable people who try to show in their writings that pompier art was in many ways not as detestable as people say – oddly enough, the conservative imagination is endless. Some emphasize the fact that pompier artists often came from more modest social stock than the revolutionaries who toppled them, which is true. This social paradox is interesting: when a universe is relatively autonomous in relation to the social order – i.e., when this universe is what I call a ‘field’, in my terminology – revolutionaries are often privileged, well-heeled people. Manet was an example of this phenomenon, and his revolutionary disposition certainly had something to do with the fact that he was born into privilege, and even more importantly, perhaps, that the success of the revolution he started – this is one of the arguments I am going to develop – would have been inconceivable if his considerable capital had consisted merely of the requisite academic and academically certified skills, and if he had not also had social capital, connections and therefore a certain amount of symbolic capital linked to his friends, etc. The matter I am raising with you is not over and done with, as historical debates so often suggest. If some have a tendency to adopt the ill-conceived perspective of historicism or relativism, which argues that there can be no historical truth, on the pretext that objective historical truth lies beyond the reach of the historian, since he is part of history, this is because historical debates – that is to say, debates among historians – remain rooted in social debates that to a greater or lesser extent are still burning issues today.
Manet’s revolution has been called – erroneously, in my view – an ‘Impressionist revolution’: however, I think that Manet has almost nothing in common with the Impressionists, and that it is a category mistake, as philosophers would say, to lump them together despite his constant wish to keep his distance from them, not just to mark his distinction but because he wanted to do something entirely different. The revolution that Manet started, which was in fact the revolution of modern art, remains a historical challenge which is still a matter of debate today.
The construction of modern art: what was at stake in this struggle
I shall now briefly evoke the contemporary debates surrounding modern art, very loosely defined, and its construction, which calls for analysis. There have been attempts to analyse the social history of the construction of the Musée d’Orsay, and in particular the choice and presentation of the pictorial works exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay. This ought to be the start of an in-depth analysis (I speak in the conditional tense because I shall not attempt to do this, as this is not what this lecture is about; however, I shall tell you enough to make you sense that the problem at hand is hardly academic, so to speak).
One may argue that the Musée d’Orsay makes a half-hearted attempt to historicize the revolution of modern art. It grants The Romans of the Decadence (1847) [10], the much-touted masterpiece by Manet’s master, Thomas Couture, pride of place opposite Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1863) [1]. Yet, the fact is that this half-hearted attempt to historicize art succeeds only in making us wonder whether it seeks to contextualize or rehabilitate. Is Couture’s work there as a standard – in order to remind us what Manet defined and constructed himself against, what his attempt to conquer new forms had to confront – or is its presence to be understood more literally as an attempt to rehabilitate an episode in the unfolding history of art? The ambiguity of the Musée d’Orsay is also emphasized by a current debate, for which I don’t have the precise chronology to hand but which it would also be very easy to retrace: you have all heard of the debate which Jean-Philippe Domecq launched – coincidentally? – in the journal L’Esprit,8 and which – another coincidence? – Le Monde then took up, etc. This debate seeks to call to account so-called ‘revolutionaries’, as they are dubbed in such cases, and to challenge the very intentions of contemporary artistic subversion, given the fact that some revolutionaries were impostors, opportunists or double dealers.
Parenthesis: a social problem and a sociological problem
(I raise this issue for two reasons. First, because it is important to keep in mind the fact that this conundrum is challenging partly because it remains topical today. I think that this is a very significant factor: the social sciences themselves are constructed in opposition to, or at odds with, the social world, and, as I like to repeat, a social problem is not inevitably predisposed to become a sociological problem. Burning social problems are the hardest to convert into sociological problems. The sociologist is not someone who encounters pre-existing, already constituted, ready-made social problems and whisks them away to his laboratory for analysis. As a social scientist, his first task, or move, is to remove himself from social problems in order to convert them into sociological problems. The fact that the issue I am going to explore this year – the artistic revolution achieved by Manet – not only still constitutes a social problem today, but is perhaps more acutely problematic now than ever before, and the fact that we are in what might bluntly be termed a phase of restoration (and not just in the domain of art)9 do not predispose this issue to become a sociological problem.
The second reason concerns what I would like to argue concerning the heresy that Manet introduced, and the symbolic order into which he brought this heresy, as well as the conversion he achieved and led a certain number of people to achieve. I would like you to mentally bring these analyses into a comparative perspective by keeping the present in mind. Contrary, once again, to what one often hears, keeping the present out of mind does not a good historian make: the opposite is true and I shall give you examples of this when I come to discuss what has been written about Manet. When it is repressed and left unexamined, the present returns to haunt the scholar’s unconscious, possibly influencing his analytical procedures, his hypotheses, his global view of the problem, etc. In other words, I think it would be fantastic if historians worked on the contemporary equivalent of the object of their historical enquiry: for example, a historian working on Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, who published L’Encyclopédie méthodique, would also have to study the Grasset publishing house – actually no, Grasset is a very bad example, something loftier would be better. I shall now close this parenthesis.)
State art and avant-garde academicism
Let me rapidly sketch out the import of the sustained comparisons which I am inviting you to draw. During the Second Empire (1852–70), when Manet emerged, French art was state art. The Salon, the Institut, the Beaux-Arts, museums, etc. formed what one might call a bureaucratic system for managing the tastes of the public – I shall return later to these institutions. The works presented to the public were selected through a process which implicitly suggested that the works on show deserved to be exhibited, and that those which were not shown did not deserve to be. Thus, some works were genuinely art and others were not – museums continue to produce this classification today. What is an art work if not a work consecrated by its inclusion in a museum (cf. Duchamp’s urinal)?10 The state clearly intervenes in the realm of aesthetics, and it does this by being a body that creates categories and classifications: it is a classifying institution. There are equivalents today, and just as academic institutions – the Institut, the Salons, etc. – produced academic art, one may wonder today whether museums, museum curators, the subsidies given to artists, the buying of art, etc. do not produce academic art or whether their effect is not to make certain art works academic. This is a question worth asking – although I disagree with him, my colleague Marc Fumaroli, for example, vehemently and virulently questions the academicism that state art produces.11
Having said this about academicism, it is important to note that the above-mentioned debate focuses on the academicism of the avant-garde. Manet’s situation was more straightforward: there was a break with academic art, there were innovators who were being castigated by the institution, and there was the institution which was castigating them. It took thirty to forty years to produce a new academic institution and an avant-garde academicism, or academic avant-gardism, which raises the question of the role of state intervention in artistic institutions, as well as the authenticity of artists consecrated by institutions. It could be said that this is one of the major issues confronting critics today, not just in the domain of the visual arts, but also in the domain of literature: how to distinguish between authentic revolutionaries and cynical mock-revolutionaries. Is the appropriate criterion sincerity, which was invoked, for example, in debates on Manet? People wondered whether he was an impostor or a cynical show-off, and whether he was doing it all just to draw attention to himself.
The mock revolution
One of the fundamental issues raised by this enquiry, one which historians cannot set aside, is the issue of artistic intention. The critics of the time – figures such as Jules-Antoine Castagnary, Théodore Duret and Théophile Thoré-Bürger – systematically raised the question of the author’s intentions and ceaselessly reminded their readers that everything depended on this. It is the same today. Impostors started to appear during Manet’s lifetime: having grasped early on that a revolution was under way, they underwent a conversion, or at least seemed to do so, and were able for some time to combine the profits yielded by conservation and those offered by conversion. In Zola’s The Masterpiece, there is a character called Fougerolles who exemplifies this phenomenon particularly well. In real life, the name of this character was Jules Bastien-Lepage,12 who represented an ‘ideal type’ found in all fields. Thus, for example, in the field of haute couture, you have revolutionaries such as Courrèges, and then you have ‘orchestrators’, such as Saint Laurent.13 In all areas, orchestrators are people who generally come after the innovators, understand what has happened, know how to produce a soft version of the hard revolution, and make a lot of profit from this. There was a time when Bastien-Lepage was more highly regarded than Manet, even among Manet’s own friends. This was no laughing matter: before Manet was even recognized, his imitators – those who aped his genius – were making a profit while he was still being reviled. Indeed, he was still despised when he died. If we subscribe to the mystique of the artiste maudit, it is a good sign to die condemned: but I don’t think it can be very pleasant to live like this.
As soon as the symbolic revolution started, this carved a space for a pseudo- or mock revolution. In other words, there are significant analogies to be drawn between the current state of affairs in the art world, which I have only sketched out so that you would have it in mind, and the state of affairs in the art world during the Second Empire, except for one major difference: today, avant-gardist stances are recognized and considered legitimate, even though it is fashionable to claim that there is no such thing as an avant-garde. In other words, there are legitimate avant-gardist stances, and these legitimate avant-gardist stances even have their legitimate guardians: i.e., the curators of the great museums of contemporary art. In turn, these curators of the avant-garde are of course the main targets of the curators of high art: artistic curators seize on the curators of the avant-garde, or of conservative avant-gardist – i.e., mock avant-gardist – stances, in order to justify their blanket condemnation of all avant-gardes.
Here I am pointing out what I consider to be a significant issue raised by the detractors and the first critics of the avant-garde. I shall presently give you an account of these people. This account is the product of some considerable hard work, because, instead of considering these critics one by one, I have tried to recreate the space of the critics and its development. I have drawn a rather long, tedious, and necessarily incomplete list of sorts – some know-all will of course tell me that I forgot to mention what’s-his-name in relation to this or that painting – but I have tried to recreate the space of the critics and its development in such a way as to help us to understand how and why the critics, whose discourse was initially reactionary, gradually and partially converted to this artistic revolution.
Parenthesis on scientific populism
(Conservative denunciations rely essentially on one weapon. This is what one might call ‘the laughter of the people’ – as in: ‘Look at them, just look at how they [people looking at Manet’s paintings] are laughing.’14 In Zola’s The Masterpiece, a novel which is not that interesting from either a literary or a documentary point of view, but which illuminates a few issues overlooked by all historical analyses, Zola vividly evokes the atmosphere of uproar that surrounded Manet – ‘charivari’ in French: in fact, Le Charivari was the title of a satirical journal which hounded Manet every week.15 This interesting journal calls to mind a religiously connotated ritual subversion, the atmosphere of a ‘witch hunt’ – any metaphor of this type would be appropriate – in which the critics of the time lived, feeling that their virulence against Manet the Heresiarch was justified because they had the people on their side.
In other words, there was a sort of spontaneous populism, just as there is today […]. There is a contemporary equivalent to this type of populism, and some sociologists support it. I therefore cannot mention it without saying something more about it, even though most of the sociologists here [i.e., in this room at the Collège de France] would not expect me to raise this issue [laughter]. If the conservative critics who were Manet’s contemporaries wielded spontaneous populism as a weapon, it was because spontaneous populism was an authoritative stance. It conferred great – and to a certain extent implacable, inevitable – authority on aesthetic criticism. Although I cannot develop this theme now, a specific revolutionary will direct his revolution at those who occupy a dominant position in the relatively autonomous universe within which he struggles. He wages his revolution against the Academy, he wages it against the mandarins, but whether he likes it or not, he also wages it against ‘the people’ between inverted commas – that is to say, in fact, the bourgeoisie: the people who went to the Academy’s exhibitions came not from the popular classes but from the bourgeoisie. In other words, the specific revolutionary, the revolutionary located within a field that is either relatively autonomous or still in the process of being constituted, is himself in the completely paradoxical situation of waging a revolution – which can be genuinely revolutionary, and even in the interest of the people – against the people. This can make him vulnerable to accusations of elitism. I am groping for words here, as you can well see, because I am walking on hot coals: what I am saying touches on a burning issue which has led to much character assassination in Parisian newspapers, and for which some would not hesitate to assassinate me in the same newspapers. I am also aware that I ought to be less categorical when I speak about this …
The contemporary struggle against what one might call the neo-academicism of the avant-garde, or avant-gardist academicism, is often led by great experts on the avant-garde. Although this is not the case with Domecq, it is with Jean Clair,16 for example, who is someone who knows very well what he is talking about, and is perfectly able to spot an impostor and to tell who is using the modern and legitimate image of modern art as conserved by curators in order to make conservative projects appear revolutionary. This is why this struggle is so challenging: because denunciations of avant-garde art can use the excuse of denouncing impostors and are to a certain extent not without foundation – cum fundamento in re, as people said in classical times.
Although we have to admit that there are some people who do take advantage of the state – who take subsidies, etc. – the driving force of this critique of contemporary art is a regressive populist stance, to which some sociologists contribute. There are sociologists – such as Raymonde Moulin to a limited extent, or Nathalie Heinich to a greater extent17 – who advocate regressive stances.18 Such sociologists use their scholarly knowledge of the social determinants of the consumption of art and avant-garde art works, and therefore their scholarly knowledge of the distribution of tastes in painting, to justify a certain kind of condemnation of avant-garde art. Condemning this populist sociological stance, which is often attributable to the ‘Bastien-Lepages’ of sociology, leads to a (scientifically justified) condemnation of reactionary art. Here again I find myself in a difficult position, having sketched out a very superficial analysis, while wishing to avoid allowing this lecture on Manet to strike you simply as a historical evocation, which, although genuinely interesting, is neutralized by historical distance – which is one of the great problems with Manet. With Luncheon on the Grass, which I will discuss later, Manet brought the nude back to the present, which had consigned it to the past. In short, what I seek to achieve is something like the ‘Manet effect’ …)
An impossible research programme: the space of criticism
I am now about to make a proposal that may seem both peremptory and arbitrary, but I hope that the ensuing argument will provide a research programme that is more substantial than it might seem at first sight, although I shall not have the time to develop it fully. In the anti-academic condemnation of academicism which is dominant today, we can see, as in the nineteenth century, the conjunction of a right-wing and a left-wing critique. This becomes most interesting when we look at the strictures often pronounced in the name of the same ethical presuppositions.
The reason for this excursus, however tentative and awkward (difficult to formulate at any rate) is that I think that the work of the sociologist raises an ethico-political issue. I think that sociological research, which fashionable artistic circles consider to be incompatible with any possible understanding of artistic creation, has become an aesthetic weapon, in a very specific conjuncture. And when a sociological argument is applied to aesthetic ends in this way, sociology seems to me to constitute the indispensable ally of any exercise in criticism. I have a very modest proposal to make, which will be the thesis underpinning everything that I shall go on to argue: art criticism can only be radical and successful if it arms itself with a ‘historico-sociological’ analysis of the space of production and the space of reception. My message is a plea for both criticism and sociology to accept their responsibilities. It is as simple as that. This, then, was my first point, and fulfils the first objective of these analyses, at least, this is the primary use you can make of these analyses of the artistic field in the time of Manet and the subversion he introduced to it.
Another precondition for the study of a case like that of Manet and the art of his time concerns the quite special status that historical research is led to give to criticism. In fact, an essential part of the knowledge of nineteenth-century art to which we have access, comes from the critics. Yet, I have seen only one art historian express surprise that art critics do not undertake a critique of art criticism itself – in other words, that art historians do not develop a history of the history of art, which would act as a preliminary to the use of the products of this history. You will say that this is, yet again, the reflexive imperative which I always set out as my first requirement. In fact, I do think that one of the objectives of my work is to demonstrate that this reflexive relationship to criticism is the most fundamental condition for understanding Manet’s discourse, discourses on Manet, and the works of Manet and his contemporaries.
An analysis of the space of criticism at the time of Manet has a twofold justification. First, just as we ordinarily undertake a critique of documents, and their authenticity, asking ourselves whether a signature is genuine or not, whether the document is a forgery or not, etc., so, surely, should we undertake a social or historical critique of critical documents. For instance, when we take a text by a critic like Thoré, or Duret, Castagnary, etc., we should want not only to know whether it is genuine, when it was written, how it was composed and where it was published, etc. For it is also important for us to know where to situate this discourse in the space of discourses, and the position of the producer in the space of the producers of these discourses. A historical document of any kind – any document – positions itself in a space, which derives its own significance partly from other, homologous positions and partly from its relation to the space which articulates these particular positions. That is, therefore, the first justification of my critique, of this preliminary call for a critique of criticism.
There is a second reason which persuades us to take this critique as an object: I said at the outset that if the revolution operated by Manet is difficult to understand, this is precisely because it succeeded, because it has imposed itself upon us, because it has imposed the mental structures that it constructed. In fact, if we understand this criticism, and the progressive evolution of the space of criticism, we shall understand the conditions in which the revolution took place. Thus, it is only if we understand the genesis of a space of criticism and the transformation of this space that we may come to understand the passage from an academic criticism to the invention of an aesthetic criticism, and of the figure of the critic as we understand it – an invention which is one of the transformations produced by Manet’s revolution, and which was itself a product of this revolution. There is much talk of a ‘sociology of reception’ and of ‘reception theory’. But we might say that, in the particular case of Manet, the interest of a critical analysis is to serve as the basis for a ‘sociology of reception’.
