In the field of cultural sociology, the homology argument stresses the close relationship between social and cultural stratification systems. Individuals who belong to a higher social class are those who have exclusive taste for ‘high’ or ‘legitimate’ culture such as opera and classical music. Their counterparts in lower social strata prefer ‘mainstrea m’
or ‘popular’ culture. In other words, individuals tend to reproduce their class-based social positions through models of cultural consumption. This section introduces Bourdieu’s contribution to the development of this argument, which is still influentia l in the area of cultural sociology.
Bourdieu divides the field of culture12 into three class-based categories, which include
‘legitimate’ taste – ‘highbrow’ taste that relates to the appreciation of legitimate works;
‘middlebrow’ taste, including the tendency to approach minor works of dominant art forms; and ‘popular taste’ – namely, what Bourdieu called ‘lowbrow’ taste, which includes a small amount of devalued classical art forms and some other popular art genres, such as comic books, light music, and so on (1979). Bourdieu uses a systematic method to understand how people become assigned to the different categories of cultural taste. Specifically, he utilises the concept of capital to interpret the complex
12 In Bourdieu’s analytical model of cultural production, the artistic and literary fields are encompassed by the field of power (the main struggles in social space) and the field of class relationships. There are four common features of these three fields. First, all three kinds of field are constituted by a hierarchical set of positions. Second, the principles of hierarchy in all three fields are determined by the distribution of certain forms of capital in the system. According to Bourdieu, there are two factors contributing to the position an agent can achieve in a specific field: ‘the overall volume of the different kinds of capital they possess’ and the ‘relative weight of the different kinds of capital, economic and cultural, in the total volume of their capital’ (1994: 7) (e.g. the positions outside the field of cultural production are largely determined by the amount of political and economic capital that individuals possess). Third, all the fields are relatively distinct from each other even while all the fields are influenced by the fields around them (being homologous with other fields); the degree of effect will depend on how much autonomy the encompassed field possesses. Fourth, the struggles between different positions within the hierarchy for the authority of legitimation/domination are permanently at stake in every field, which is also the reason the specificity of the field is defined by its temporal and unstable structures and infiltrated boundaries.
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processes that are used to distinguish particular forms of cultural consumption. There are three main forms of capital: social capital13 , cultural capital14 , and economic capital15. The volume of overall capital and the specific organisation of these different capitals determine an individual’s cultural taste. There are also symbolic boundaries16 between the groups of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow cultural tastes, which required specific strategies to decode the high artworks, which were the preserve of the very privileged. Specifically, in order to appreciate high cultural productions, individuals are expected to apply a classification method that is exclusively operated by privileged social classes. Bourdieu believes that what distinguishes members of a privileged class from others is one’s ability to correctly decode legitimate cultura l productions and to win the competition in the cultural field-aesthetic dispositio n.
Bourdieu echoes Panofsky’s account about the ‘intention’ that an individual has to achieve in order to distinguish the ‘always uncertain and historically changing frontier’
13 Bourdieu considers social capital as a kind of ‘membership in a group’ (1986: 242), which includes the collective knowledge and experience that an agent shares with other agents in various institutionalised relationships (e.g. family and marriage).
14 According to Bourdieu, cultural capital has three forms. First, the embodied state, as a disposition which is inscribed in an agent’s mind and body through a long-lasting temporal accumulation process. Second, the objective state, which includes all kinds of objective cultural goods that one can use to formulate their theoretical knowledge system. Thirdly, the institutionalised state, namely as academic rewards that one can acquire through legitimate/educational institutions such as educational qualifications. Cultural capital can be transmitted and acquired over a durable period, in order to reproduce social inequality; the process of capital acquisition is normally quite disguised and hard to be noticed by others
15 For Bourdieu, economic capital mainly refers to the capital which can be straightforwardly converted into money and can be transferred from different kind of capitals in certain circumstance. Bourdieu believes that economic capital is the ‘root’ of other types of capitals (1986: 249).
16 Lamont refers to symbolic boundary as ‘the types of lines that individuals draw when they categorise people-and high-status signals- the key to our evaluative distinctions’ (1992:2).
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between simple technical objects and works of art (1984: 29). This kind of ‘intentio n’
is an aesthetic capacity by which one could employ a pure gaze in front of juxtaposed works of art in the art museum or gallery, swapping their attention from the functio n and theme of the works of objects to the form and technique of ordinary objects (2012:
46). Only in this way can visitors adopt a ‘pure aesthetic disposition’ to decipher works of art in the autonomous field of exhibiting space and to gain the ‘naive gaze’, which will merely reflect the ‘nature of the object represented’ (Ibid). More specifically, by endowing a ‘Kantian disinterestedness’ and ‘pure’ disposition – namely to ‘distance’
oneself from the ordinary norms of ‘agreeableness and morality’ or the taste of
‘necessity’ – an individual can be guaranteed a kind of aesthetic quality of contemplation (2010: 41). This is in opposition to the ‘popular aesthetic’, which is always pursuing a ‘facile’ participation and ‘vulgar’ pleasure towards the functio na l aspect of cultural activities and works of art. This kind of privileged decoding method is not natural, but closely linked with the academic and cultural capital that one possesses or inherits from their family, education system and the position that one occupies within the social hierarchical system.
As shown in Bourdieu’s theoretical mechanism, social elites start to accumulate cultura l capital and build cultural competence in their childhood and in school. Thus, an agent’s cultural taste is associated with his or her family milieu and educational achieveme nts.
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Bourdieu notes that this is because the system of habitus17 starts to construct itself as early as childhood and tends to reproduce its history through ‘a generative principle of regulated importations’ (ibid). Based on the visitor surveys he conducted in France (1979) and other European countries (1969), Bourdieu explicitly presented how the education system works to consecrate legitimate cultural forms and practices while at the same time sanctioning and legitimatising existing cultural inequalities through disguising the ‘cultural inequalities that they cannot in reality reduce’ (1969: 103).
Pearson agrees with Bourdieu and claims that schooling can be deemed as a ‘hard’
approach that the state utilised in intervening in art and culture (1982: 35), with the purpose of inculcating knowledge and taste into ‘captive’ audiences (ibid). Bourdieu partly in line with this argument on the role school played in sanctioning ‘legitima te’
art forms; however, for him, the school’s primary function is never the distribution of uniform knowledge.
According to Bourdieu et al, once an individual acquires a higher level of cultura l
17 For Bourdieu, habitus can be regarded as ‘second nature’ for an agent (Bourdieu 1977: 37), acting as an essential medium between the field and the agent’s practices. The system of habitus starts to construct itself as early as childhood and the habitus tends to reproduce the history of it through ‘a generative principle of regulated importations’ (Ibid). Habitus has five features. First, the durable continuity of habitus enables itself to assert an influence on an individual’s practical decision-making process, sometimes throughout an entire lifetime. Second, the main difference between habitus and habit is that the former can guide an agent ’s practice in an unfamiliar situation/field whereas the latter is more often than not understood as ‘a mechanical assembly or preformed programme’ (Bourdieu 1977: 218, note 48) or an established discipline based on an individual’s repetitive labour.
Habitus can provide the agent with a kind of intuition or what Bourdieu calls a ‘feel for a game’ in certain circumstances where the individual cannot get practical guidance from accumulated experiences and knowledge (Bourdieu 1990:66). This aspect contributes to the third trait of habitus, namely, its transposability, which can enable an agent to select a set of homogeneous productions and practices in different structured fields without making a conscious effort or needing an explicit reason. More specifically, despite the various principles that dominate the different hierarchical fields, the system of habitus can automatically transform the total amount of acquired capitals and their structures into a measure by which an agent can identify his or her position within the hierarchy of the field.
Fourth, Bourdieu defines habitus as ‘structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures’
(Bourdieu 1977: 1845). The reason for this is that habitus does not arise in a vacuum; it is a mental system based on the ‘product of an internalisation of the structures of the social world’ (an individual can forge his or her habitus from not only personal experience but also from collectives such as family milieu, class, etc., without any conscious effort) and it will not cease to generate practices and reinforce itself across different occasions/fields (Bourdieu 1990:
130). Fifth, the system of habitus always tends to prevent itself from being acknowledged by the agent because the durable process of inculcation has made it ‘inveterate’ in the agent’s mental system (Bourdieu 1997:2025). Thus, habitus can unconsciously generate and regulate the agent’s practices in society.
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capital than others from their formative education, the education system will strengthe n it through its ‘democratic and equitable’ training strategies and helps the members of privileged classes to win the competition in the cultural field. Bourdieu et al. (1969) believe that in terms of forging the necessary cultural disposition to engage with works of higher culture, even underprivileged individuals who learn about art in school cannot compensate for the disadvantage of not having a chance to get familiar with works of art in his or her family environment. This is because the simplistic and superfic ia l aesthetic information and categories (e.g. dates, schools and periods of artwork) that teachers inculcate in schools are not sufficient enough for one to master works of high culture. In other words, the basic aesthetic curriculum provided by the education system enforces and improves cultural competency for students with pre-existing cultura l knowledge from their families and specific aesthetic training (e.g. presupposed methodical training, aesthetic value, intensive and standardised pedagogic communication towards works of high culture, etc.). For underprivileged pupils, this information can do nothing but shape a superficial feeling of ‘belonging to a cultiva ted world’ (Ibid: 36). For Bourdieu et al., this is the reason that privileged students tend to apply their cultural dispositions on revolutionary painters of preceding generations or more innovative contemporary artists, while the students from the lower social classes exclusively engage with ‘older painters devalued through habituation and false familiarity’ (1997: 62). Foucault presents a similar understanding of the education system; he considers school to be a ‘discipline institution’ (1995:156). In his book, Discipline and Punish (1995), school students are ranked according to their ages, performance and behaviour. By segmenting students into different ‘compartments’, the school and classroom are ‘making a hierarchy of knowledge or ability’, and the
‘distribution of values or merits’ functions as a mechanism for ‘supervising,
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hierarchizing, and rewarding’ (Ibid.:147).
Here, we see that through his work Bourdieu highlights the effectiveness of his theoretical mechanism in revealing class cultures. However, I argue that it remains doubtful whether one can directly replicate Bourdieu’s methodological and theoretica l framework in China. I believe that what Bourdieu’s social mechanism needs to face in today’s China, forty-six years after its publication, are the changes that have occurred inside and outside of China’s contemporary art museums. Given this factor, Bourdieu’s methodological framework is thus become less practical in directly measuring cultura l inequalities in China.
First, the adoption of international standardised museological practices and a visitor service system in China’s contemporary art museums might result in differe nt demographic groupings and methods of engagement from visitors than those identified in Bourdieusian studies. For instance, all three of the museums where this current research took place have implemented modern curatorial strategies of displacing and interpreting contemporary artworks. Specifically, the curators of those museums tend to display artworks in an international modelled ‘white box’ (a global trend of contemporary museums designed by Efrat and Kowalsky [Harris 2011: 32]) and tend to provide their visitors with a tombstone panel providing basic information about the artist and artworks (Whitehead 2012: 33). Regarding those changes, one troubling aspect of Bourdieu’s mechanism is the application of negative and conservative attention toward curators and their curatorial strategies in present society, particula rly because this may cause one to overlook the innovative and developmental aspects of today. The political pressures faced by curators to improve accessibility and
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inclusiveness within the exhibitions, and the status of contemporary art as an imported art form, are neglected by Bourdieusian understandings of cultural distinction. Further to this, factors including the changing role of curators (see Rendell 2007; Chaelesworth 2007), the development of curatorial strategies and exhibition interpretive methods (see Fyfe 2000; Hooper-Greenhill 2000; Whitehead 2012), and the changing status of museums (e.g. Hooper-Greenhill 1999; Carrier 2009; McClellan 2003), might affect the visitors’ perception of contemporary artworks and exhibitions, and are not taken into account by Bourdieu’s studies.
Second, the question of whether Bourdieu’s conceptual framework works as effective ly in China as it did in France remains vague. Bourdieu’s social theory is deemed as a form of cultural determinism, since there is no sufficient empirical evidence in his research that can prove the reliability of the cultural distinction he identifies outside of the French cultural boundary. Many research studies have been conducted to examine this point of view; for instance, the findings of Bennett et al (2000) in the UK and Falk’s (2010) research in the US (2010) suggest that museum visitors’ tastes and cultura l preference are very different from those Bourdieu found in France. Peterson and Kern’s cultural omnivorous (1996) theory greatly challenged the status of Bourdieu’s social distinction in terms of cultural studies. Increasingly, a number of social scientists tend to believe that rigorous cultural boundaries between social classes have eroded;
individuals tend to appreciate a variety of broader cultural products rather than unitary kinds of symbolic goods (See Peterson and Kern 1996; Wilensky 2009; Hanquinet 2013). Bryson (1996) even suggests that the concept of the cultural omnivore is another form of cultural distinction, which means that the higher the social position and/or prestige one has, the wider arrange of cultural products one would consume. In this
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regard, it is necessary to update Bourdieu’s theories of cultural distinction for them to be applicable outside of their specific geographic context.
Third, one might argue that, in China, earning higher educational achievements might fail to present itself as a vital indicator of a frequent museum visitor for specific groups of Chinese visitors. Chinese universities were shut down for ten years during China ’s Cultural Revolution18 (Zhang 2014: 97), and during the same period both China’s museums and art education symbolised a break with the past and became politica l propaganda tools (Xi 2008: 78; Chen 2006: 237). Individuals who experienced the political movement might have faced difficulties in achieving higher qualificatio ns, especially those at normal school-attending age during the ten-year shut down. In addition, Bourdieu makes strong claims about the influence of educationa l qualifications as a predictor of cultural taste in France which may not apply to a Chinese context. According to data collected by Bourdieu et al., the largest proportion of museum visitors were between 15-24 years old and he suggests that two factors contributed to their motivation for spending leisure time in the museum: 1) the sense of belonging to the cultivated world introduced through university, and 2) strong encouragement by one’s peer group (Ibid: 62). However, one might argue that overly concentrating on the relationship between an agent’s age and their educationa l qualifications might lead one to ignore multiple forces that could influence cultura l choices. For example, the members of the museum visitor group were ages 15-24 and belonged to the generation born around or after the end of World War II. Along with their educational status, museum-going activities might be stimulated by the post-war social structural changes that included the establishment of an increased number of
18 The Chinese Cultural Revolution 1966–1967
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museums, changing lifestyles, status of genders, work styles, increasing incomes and more (Hudson, 1998). The changes that are described above are specific to the French context, and thus would not apply to China during the same period. Where-as Bourdieu identifies this younger age group as being drawn to museums as a result of the social change they experienced, in China significant periods of social change such as the social reform following the Cultural Revolution saw more middle-aged people visiting museums. In order to examine this issue, this current research will look more closely at demographic patterns of cultural taste, and to what extent any differentiation is linked to age.
Fourth, the question of whether Chinese contemporary art museum visitors, as subjected to intersectional power forces (e.g. gender, cultural norms, class, internationalisation, commercialism, post-colonialism), will interpret contemporary artworks and contemporary art museums in a culturally specific way requires further investigation. Specifically, this research will look at whether contemporary art mus eum visitors consume the contemporary art exhibits in geographically distinctive ways, or whether they demonstrate the same patterns of cultural consumption that have been already identified in Western contexts. Bourdieu argues that different countries have their own specific systems of cultural consumption, but his explanations of these claims has been criticised, as will be explored below.
Bourdieu realises that his theoretical model might face issues in different countries, however, he insists that these are ‘false differences’ – by doing so he means the dynamic power relationships and symbolic struggles in producing ‘common sense’ within different social spaces. One can still probably discover/reveal gaps between those who
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have remote positions in a hierarchical social system and their corresponding homogenous perceptions and reactions towards symbolic productions underlying these differences. In his book, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (1998), he notes that distinctive class-based social reproductive systems can be found in every social space. Within this, a homogenous set of symbolic goods and practices are closely linked to a set of corresponding social positions (Ibid: 4) and can be significantly influe nced by the various ‘national cultural capitals’ that different countries have (Bourdieu et al.
1991:36).
Thus, for him, sociologists who tend to conduct comparative research among differe nt societies or successive periods in the same society might risk falling into a
‘substantialist mode of thought’ (Bourdieu 1998:4). This is a problematic point of view that tends to ignore the structural differences between different societies by treating ‘the
‘substantialist mode of thought’ (Bourdieu 1998:4). This is a problematic point of view that tends to ignore the structural differences between different societies by treating ‘the