Page 88 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 88
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
ativism, to the levelling of values, to the lowering of greatness, to the
abolition of those differences, which make for the singularity of the
“creator”, always located in the realm of the Unique? (Ibid: p. xvii).
As much as these questions clearly aim at constituting a methodo-
logical basis for what follows in Bourdieu‘s influential book as a complex
analysis of the “literary field”, heavily building upon, above all, Gustave
Flaubert’s work, they mark a very significant period in the modernist and
contemporary discussions on a position of art in the social context; as if
any other broad context existed! The very need to stress the “socialness” of
the context is indicative for the position of art and its activity at the time of
significant transformations of forms of art and a revolution of conditions,
within which it is being produced. Changes of modes in which art is “con-
sumed”, of course, make part and parcel of these varying contexts. At the
time when Bourdieu had put a new emphases on these questions, he denot-
ed what was already becoming a rather common knowledge in different
fields of cultural analysis, shaped gradually through and by various com-
binations of the post-structuralist epistemology, critical discourse analysis,
feminist and postcolonial theories, and so on. Correspondingly, one must
not forget the influences of a multitude of modern and postmodern forms
of artistic practice itself as well. To make my point even clearer, let me just
expose another set of Bourdieu’s questions, which address what happens to
be designated by the notion of transcendence:
Why such implacable hostility to those who try to advance the un-
derstanding of the work of art and of aesthetic experience, if not be-
cause the very ambition to produce a scientific analysis of that in-
dividuum ineffabile and of the individuum ineffabile who produce
it, constitutes a mortal threat to the pretension, so common (at least
among art lovers) and yet so “distinguished”, of thinking of oneself
as an ineffable individual, capable of ineffable experiences of that
ineffable? (Ibid.: p. xvii).
These questions could be read not as a destruction or reduction of
transcendence, but rather as a defence of the notion – to an extent – in the
original Immanuel Kant‘s sense. Addressing the realm of transcendence
as “ineffable” actually represents a renouncing of a potential of subjectivi-
ty, since the transcendental cannot reside anywhere without the agency in
a figure of a subject. Since I do not intend to get caught in the discourse of
Bourdieu on the level of its methodological opening, let me just point out
86
ativism, to the levelling of values, to the lowering of greatness, to the
abolition of those differences, which make for the singularity of the
“creator”, always located in the realm of the Unique? (Ibid: p. xvii).
As much as these questions clearly aim at constituting a methodo-
logical basis for what follows in Bourdieu‘s influential book as a complex
analysis of the “literary field”, heavily building upon, above all, Gustave
Flaubert’s work, they mark a very significant period in the modernist and
contemporary discussions on a position of art in the social context; as if
any other broad context existed! The very need to stress the “socialness” of
the context is indicative for the position of art and its activity at the time of
significant transformations of forms of art and a revolution of conditions,
within which it is being produced. Changes of modes in which art is “con-
sumed”, of course, make part and parcel of these varying contexts. At the
time when Bourdieu had put a new emphases on these questions, he denot-
ed what was already becoming a rather common knowledge in different
fields of cultural analysis, shaped gradually through and by various com-
binations of the post-structuralist epistemology, critical discourse analysis,
feminist and postcolonial theories, and so on. Correspondingly, one must
not forget the influences of a multitude of modern and postmodern forms
of artistic practice itself as well. To make my point even clearer, let me just
expose another set of Bourdieu’s questions, which address what happens to
be designated by the notion of transcendence:
Why such implacable hostility to those who try to advance the un-
derstanding of the work of art and of aesthetic experience, if not be-
cause the very ambition to produce a scientific analysis of that in-
dividuum ineffabile and of the individuum ineffabile who produce
it, constitutes a mortal threat to the pretension, so common (at least
among art lovers) and yet so “distinguished”, of thinking of oneself
as an ineffable individual, capable of ineffable experiences of that
ineffable? (Ibid.: p. xvii).
These questions could be read not as a destruction or reduction of
transcendence, but rather as a defence of the notion – to an extent – in the
original Immanuel Kant‘s sense. Addressing the realm of transcendence
as “ineffable” actually represents a renouncing of a potential of subjectivi-
ty, since the transcendental cannot reside anywhere without the agency in
a figure of a subject. Since I do not intend to get caught in the discourse of
Bourdieu on the level of its methodological opening, let me just point out
86
