Outline Of A Sociological Theory Of Art Perception

From:

Pierre Bordieu The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature
©1984, Columbia University Press

Part III: The Pure Gaze: Essays on Art, Chapter 8

Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception∗
PIERRE BOURDIEU

1 Any art perception involves a conscious or unconscious deciphering operation. 1.1 An act of deciphering unrecognized as such, immediate and adequate‘comprehension’, is possible and effective only in the special case in which the cultural code which makes the act of deciphering possible is immediately and completely mastered by the observer (in the form of cultivated ability or inclination) and merges with the cultural code which has rendered the work perceived possible. Erwin Panofsky observes that in Rogier van der Weyden’s painting TheThree Magi we immediately perceive the representation of an apparition’ that of a child in whom we recognize ‘the Infant Jesus’. How do we know that this is an apparition? The halo of golden rays surrounding the child would not in itself be sufficient proof, because it is also found in representations of the nativity in which the Infant Jesus is ‘real’. We come to this conclusion because the child ishovering in mid-air without visible support, and we do so although the representation would scarcely have been different had the child been sitting on a pillow (as in the case of the model which Rogier van der Weyden probably used). But one can think of hundreds of pictures in which human beings, animals or inanimate objects appear to be hovering in mid-air, contrary to the law of gravity, yetwithout giving the impression of being apparitions. For instance, in a miniature of the Gospels of Otto III, in the Staatshibliothek, Munich, a whole town is represented in the middle of an empty space, while the persons taking part in the action are standing on the ground. This actually is a real town, where the resurrection of the young people shown in the foreground took place. If, in a splitsecond and almost automatically, we recognize the aerial figure as an apparition, whereas we see nothing miraculous about the city floating in the air, it
∗

Chapter 8, ‘Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception’, was originally published as ‘Éléments d’une théorie sociologique de la perception artistique’, Revue internationale des sciences sociales, special issue on ‘Les arts dans lasociété, 20/4 (1968), pp. 5-14. The English translation first appeared in International Social Science Journal, 20 (Winter 1968), pp. 589-612.

is because ‘we are reading “what we see” according to the manner in which the objects and events are expressed by forms under varying historical conditions’; more precisely, when we decipher a miniature of c.1000 AD, we unconsciously assume that the emptyspace serves merely as an abstract, unreal background instead of forming part of an apparently natural, three-dimensional space, in which the supernatural and the miraculous can appear as such, as in Rogier van der Weyden’s painting.1 Since they unconsciously obey the rules which govern a particular representation of space when they decipher a picture constructed according to these rules, theeducated or competent beholders of our societies can immediately apprehend as a ‘supernatural vision’ an element which, by reference to another system of representations in which the regions of space would be in some way ‘juxtaposed’ or ‘aggregated’ instead of being integrated into a single representation, might appear ‘natural’ or ‘real’. ‘The perspective concept’, says Panofsky, ‘makes it impossiblefor religious art to enter the realm of magic . . . but opens to it a completely new realm, that of the “visionary” in which the miracle becomes an experience immediately perceived by the beholder, because supernatural events burst into the apparently natural visible space which is familiar to him, and thus enable him truly to penetrate into the essence of the supernatural.’2 The question of...