Brooke Bumgarner -- Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu addresses one of the worlds biggest issues, that of class structure. Other theorists have attempted to confront this issue of "high" and "low" culture, however, I believe Bourdieu elaborates on it in a way that is more understandable, and perhaps observable in our culture.

"Even in the classroom, the dominant definition of the legitimate way of appropriating culture and works of art favours those who have had early access to legitimate culture in a cultured household, outside of scholastic disciplines, since even within the educational system it devalues scholarly knowledge and interpretation as 'scholastic' or even 'pedantic' in favour of direct experience and simple delight" (Bourdieu, 250).

This is an extremely important quote, not only in relation to the framing of what Bourdieu calls "legitimate culture" but also in the structure of classes. He is explaining that the dominant way of classifying "legitimate" or high culture is dependent largely on who has access to high culture in the beginning. Think about it this way, the cycle of wealth circulates among the same percentage of people predominately in the US. Unless by some unexpected fortune, someone who has a 9-5 job is not regularly attending the New York City Opera or Ballet.

However, what is interesting to think about on a more personalized basis, is how exactly, and who exactly gets to decide what this "legitimate" culture is. Bourdieu explains that the reading of art demands a certain level of logic and intelligence. He further notes that "a work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded. The conscious or unconscious implementation of explicit or implicit schemes of perception and appreciation which constitutes pictorial or musical culture is the hidden condition for recognizing the styles characteristic of a period, a school or an author, and, more generally, for the familiarity with the internal logic of works that aesthetic enjoyment presupposes" (250).

So, he argues, that one cannot enjoy such legitimate culture within the arts without the proper level of competence which gives us the ability to decode art in a way that allows for the enjoyment of its deepest parts.

When he begins to speak, on page 251, of how "nothing could be obscene on the stage of our premier theatre, and the ballerinas of the Opera, even as naked dancers, sylphs, sprites or Bacchae, retain an inviolable purity" my mind begins to wonder how this relates to our class structure.
 
In this meme, we see this scene on the bed, in full dress, and the caption jokes that it is "basically porn". This makes light of what Bourdieu argues. "The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile-- in a word, natural-- enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences" (Bourdieu, 251). This, is what makes Bourdieu's theory particularly interesting. And this is, he says, is how society validates the creation of social classes.