Miller - Durkheim, the Durkheimians, and the Arts

Durkheim, the Durkheimians, and the Arts

Edited by

Alexander Riley

W.S.F. Pickering

and

William Watts Miller

Durkheim Press / Berghahn Books

Published in 2013 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

2013, 2016 Durkheim Press

First paperback edition published in 2016

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Durkheim, the Durkheimians, and the arts / edited by Alexander Riley, W.S.F.

Pickering, William Watts Miller.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-85745-917-6 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-785332098 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-0-85745-918-3 (ebook) 1. Art--Social aspects. 2. Durkheim, mile, 1858-1917. I. Riley, Alexander. II. Pickering, W. S. F. III. Miller, William Watts.

N72.S6D786 2013

306.47--dc23

2012033462

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-85745-917-6 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-78533-209-8 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-85745-918-3 (ebook)

In memory of Philippe Besnard, almost certainly the only great Durkheimian sociologist to have jammed with Bud Powell at the Blue Note

Alexander Riley

William Watts Miller

W.S.F. Pickering

Jean-Louis Fabiani

Pierre-Michel Menger

Donald A. Nielsen

Marcel Fournier

Michle Richman

Sarah Daynes

Stephan Moebius and Frithjof Nungesser

Alexander Riley

S. Romi Mukherjee

Claudine Frank

Alexander Riley

Not least of the accomplishments of the sociology of art is the fact that the world of literary and art criticism has been influenced, albeit sometimes only indirectly and without proper acknowledgement of sources, for at least a half century now by a vision of the human world that can reasonably be classified as sociological. Most of those who make their professional living talking about works of art now consider it more or less an imperative to at least make mention of the fact that the artist is a human being occupying a particular position in a social world, with a particular history informed by that position, and a view of the world that at least in some vague and imprecise ways is affected by the inevitable sociality of the artists life and experience. To be sure, in some of these circles one still encounters the vocabulary of mysterious, inexplicable individual creativity, but the virus of the sociological vision has fairly well infected art criticism and history, ultimately to the detriment of explanations of artistic work as the singular genius of the isolated, usually tormented, and emotionally unique figure on whose saintly head is placed a laurel reading Artist. Sociology can and should be proud of this influence.

Nonetheless, it remains the case that within the ranks of sociologists, and, it seems, especially English-speaking ones, art remains an object only rarely considered, and, when it is, the analysis is frequently inadequate, if not embarrassing. Contemporary sociologists are not typically knowledgeable about art nor are they generally significantly intellectually or personally drawn to it. A colleague in the humanities once told me, with a sly grin, that if one wishes to despair of the victory of philistinism in the contemporary world, one need not even ask the man in the street what he thinks about art: just talk to the sociologists. Insulting literary stereotypes of sociologists as dull-minded statisticians without even the slightest sensitivity to the aesthetic are commonplace, and it is only with the aid of densely-tinted glasses that one can deny the actual existence of significant numbers of sociologists who neatly fit the literary stereotypes. It is highly recommended that those who believe such accusations baseless should not set foot in an American sociology department lest they come face to face with the proof at the first or second office they pass.

Whence this state of affairs? Some of the explanation might reside in the inevitable reality that a discipline dominated in much of the English-speaking world by positivism and hyperspecialization tends to recruit individuals who are not centrally motivated by humanistic approaches to the study of society and the wide cultural literacy that is their prerequisite. The lab-coat envy of much of American sociology helps produce a state of affairs in which the model type presented to young graduate students is not a scholar well-read in the classics and generally informed about Western cultural history, but one who reads everything in some narrowly defined subfield in the discipline and comparatively little about anything else. Some basic, and true, sociological insights into the nature of cultural production are also distorted and simplified in many sociological circles into an ossified framework for denunciation of all cultural work and workers that would dare to invoke value distinctions. Howard Beckers (Becker 1982; Faulkner and Becker 2009) penetrating insights into the study of art using basically the same sociology-of-work tools that can be used to study the activity and products of automobile mechanics or short-order cooks must be taken seriously by any sociology of art worth its salt, but Becker never intended to suggest that artworks were in every important way indistinguishable from a 1989 Ford Mustang with a cracked head cylinder or a plate of onion rings. While the belief that the distinction of cultural objects and activities into categories of high and low should be interrogated critically certainly has some laudable intellectual and moral motivations, it is not self-evident that any such distinctions can only be the product of the illegitimate imposition of the cultural values of elites. Nor is it true that knowledge of the social processes that inform the classing and hierarchical ranking of aesthetic work should necessarily lead one to suspicion or even rejection of art as merely another ideological brick in the edifice of class domination. Pierre Bourdieu, who is incorrectly taken by some of his readers as an iconic figure in the movement to dismantle any possibility of distinguishing aesthetic works of high quality from those of lesser quality, actually believed quite firmly that a principle by which one could and should distinguish important works does exist. This is craft, askesis, effort, exercise, suffering (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:87); Delacroixs La Mort de Sardanapale or Cezannes Le Panier de pommes are the products of more time and effort than is the case of an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man or even more pretentious contemporary graphic novels, and Beethoven labored significantly more intensely over the Eroica than Lady Gaga did over her latest album, and these distinctions can be seen and appreciated in the products themselves by readers who have put in the difficult ascetic work in learning the conventions required for approaching these works. Bourdieu points specifically to the effort of the reader, viewer, or listener as the key to understanding why his vision of the sociology of culture does not require the adoption of an aesthetic relativism: Thus if we can say that avant-garde paintings are superior to the lithographs of the suburban shopping malls, it is because the latter are a product without history... whereas the former are accessible only on condition of mastering the relatively cumulative history of previous artistic production... It is in this sense that we can say that high art is more universal (ibid.). If too few sociologists recognize what Bourdieus actual position here was, it is perhaps not only because they have read him with insufficient care but also because they have invested the entirety of their professional identities in the patently absurd idea that any and all attempts to make decisions based on categories of distinction are offensive by definition.