Whiskey Ashes

CENSORED LESBIAN SMUT!

Bourdieu is here talking (Rules of Art 58-9) about France in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it applies equally well to Ireland in the middle of the twentieth. And who knows, maybe it applies to other times and places as well.

Thus it is clear that the literary and artistic field is constituted as such in and by an opposition to a "bourgeois" world which had never before asserted so bluntly its values and pretension to control the instruments of legitimation, both in the domain of art and in the domain of literature, and which, through the press and its hacks, now aims to impose a degraded and degrading definition of cultural production.

Bourdieu is referring at the end here to one of his IMO more interesting and useful ideas, about the best way to explain the more or less constant fighting over Art -- and indeed, anything humans seem so driven to create.

All artistic judgements are in one sense arbitrary. You like this, I like that, they liked that 400 years ago, they wore THAT crap in the 1970s! That was horrible! (Well, it was. Most 1970s clothes were indeed empirically horrible. But I digress.) So if it is all arbitrary, why do people get so worked up over arguments that we all know will seem silly in a decade or so? (Whitesnake still, of course, sucks.) What's up with all the fighting?

Bourdieu's great insight (for me, anyway) is that this is an essentially political question. People get so worked up over these sorts of issues because what is really is at stake is what he calls the power to impose the dominant definition of legitimate cultural production.

The point of any specific conflict may be, say, Janet Jackson's tit, or Ulysses, or The Passion of the Christ, but take a step back from each of these controversies, and what do you have? Different groups and individuals struggling mightily over who gets to decide what we can and cannot, what we should and should not, say and do in public.

That is power at one of its most basic levels. What you wear, your haircut, the music you like, the books you read, the films you hate -- all of these define you as an individual and express a whole universe of data about how you see yourself (consciously and unconsciously) and how you relate towards the wider culture in which we all must exist. Ever dyed your hair, picked out a shirt, played a particular song, whatever, knowing that it was some sort of "message" about who you are and what you aspire to be? Ever refused to do so, because it was not who you thought you were, or think you are?

That's some powerful shit, man. Think about what it means to be able to influence such decisions for masses of people. If you can establish control over these obscure, arbitrary, contradictory, confused impulses -- THAT is power.

The natural corollary is that when you can define what people CANNOT so or say, that is also an expression of this same power. (All this explains why NRO gets so hysterical about this kind of nonsense.)

As for the rest of the excerpt I excerpted above, Bourdieu is arguing that in the middle of the 19th century in France, writers like Flaubert and Baudelaire had to struggle against a dominant bourgeois class that roughly, and even violently, asserted its power to define what could and could not be said in public, and deeply resented the capacity of "artists" to express their own unique view of the actual dynamics of the contemporary social and cultural order.

Wait, what was my topic?...

Oh yes, lesbian smut. See, in the debate in the Irish Senate I mentioned earlier, the fighting over Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices centered over a single sentence in that book -- and it is, indeed, in my opinion one of the most shocking and deliberately offensive sentences ever written, considering all the circumstances.

That's why it is, to this day, officially stricken from the official Irish parliamentary records, even 65 years later.

I won't tell you what that sentence was. You won't be able to handle it. It would horrify you to your very marrow. No: I will remain silent, and will not reveal the most awful sentence in all of modern Irish literature to you.

I respect your honor and sense of decency too much.

(PSSSST: The sentence is about teh GAY! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!)

UPDATE: Oh, OK. The sentence is "She saw her father and Etienne in the embrace of love."