Retroactivating the Idea of the Avant Garde

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Marc James Léger
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Contemporary Situation ◽  
Field Of Cultural Production ◽  
The University ◽  
Four Discourses

Abstract In the late 1970s, Pierre Bourdieu argued that the field of cultural production was distinguished along class lines by three different modes of cultural habitus: bourgeois disinterestness, petty-bourgeois allodoxia and working-class necessity. Since that era, the petty-bourgeois habitus has become the dominant predisposition. Adding Bourdieu’s sociology of culture to Peter Bürger’s historicized theory of the emergence of the avant garde as a critique of the “institution art,” a new “avant garde hypothesis” becomes possible for today’s age of post-Fordist biocapitalism. Based on Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses, the contemporary situation is shown to privilege specific forms of cultural production, in particular an activist Discourse of the Hysteric and a technocratic Discourse of the University. Psychoanalysis reveals the limits of these tendencies while also underscoring the archaic aspects of an aestheticist Discourse of the Master and the transferential logics of Analyst avant gardes.

Ugliness and Beauty: the Politics of Landscape in Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Claire Warden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Surrounding Area ◽  
North West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The North ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
Open Fields

The multi-spatial landscape of the North-West of England (Manchester–Salford and the surrounding area) provides the setting for Walter Greenwood's 1934 play Love on the Dole. Both the urban industrialized cityscape and the rural countryside that surrounds it are vital framing devices for the narrative – these spaces not simply acting as backdrops but taking on character roles. In this article Claire Warden reads the play's presentation of the North through the concept of landscape theatre, on the one hand, and Raymond Williams's city–country dialogism on the other, claiming that Love on the Dole is imbued with the revolutionary possibility that defines the very landscape in which it is set. From claustrophobic working-class kitchen to the open fields of Derbyshire, Love on the Dole has a sense of spatial ambition in which Greenwood regards all landscapes as tainted by the industrial world while maintaining their capacity to function independently. Ugliness and beauty, capitalist hegemony and socialistic hopefulness reside simultaneously in this important under-researched example of twentieth-century British theatre, thereby reflecting the ambivalent, shifting landscape of the North and producing a play that cannot be easily defined artistically or politically. Claire Warden is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Lincoln. Her work focuses on peripheral British performances in the early to mid-twentieth century. She is the author of British Avant-Garde Theatre (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and is currently writing Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: an Introduction for Edinburgh University Press, to be published in 2014.

scholarly journals The practice of parodying: YouTube as a hybrid field of cultural production

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lillian Boxman-Shabtai
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Participatory Culture ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Central Component ◽  
Valuable Insight ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
Field Of Cultural Production ◽  
The Relationship

Parody is so pervasive in participatory culture that it is described as a central component of Internet vernacular. Valuable insight has accumulated about parodies as artifacts, however, little is known about their creators. Drawing on the sociology of culture, this article explores YouTube music video parodies as a field of cultural production. Through interviews with 22 YouTubers recruited from a sample of top-ranked parodies, it examines the relationship between practitioner characteristics and their evaluation of parody. Contrary to other studies of participatory culture, the field was predominantly male in its participation and norms. It presented a divide between ‘strategic’ and ‘passionate’ practitioners who used parody to different ends. Nevertheless, interviewees valued similar attributes of parody, often diverging from scholarly definitions of the genre as critical commentary. This dynamic and the genre’s popularity are explained by the hybrid qualities of the field, which encourage diverse uses of parody.

Welcome to the Field

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-448
Author(s):  
Michael O’Krent
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Production Ecology ◽  
Field Of Cultural Production ◽  
Prestige Language

Abstract Videogames offer vast potential for critical reflection by humanities scholars, but the tendency of existing game studies scholarship to treat the rules of a game separately from the game’s social meaning suggests that videogames have no place in humanistic disciplines. This article challenges that notion by contrasting a cultural view of videogames with the dominant mere-technology view. Ecocriticism functions as a prestige language for videogames that permits entrance into what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the field of cultural production. Ecology simultaneously provides metaphors for explaining videogame technology while allowing games to enter ongoing critical and cultural conversations. Humanists interested in but unfamiliar with videogames should therefore start with those with environmentalist themes. This article presents Horizon Zero Dawn (2017) as a case study. Horizon Zero Dawn presents a stylized pastoral pseudo-utopia that embraces ecofeminist calls to reconstruct rationality while challenging existing sexism in computing fields.

scholarly journals The literary field of queer cultural production in contemporary India: considering popular queer texts via Bourdieu

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. e21048
Author(s):  
Anil Pradhan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Queer Culture ◽  
Field Of Cultural Production ◽  
Popular Texts

In The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu puts forward the idea that culture is discursively produced and that the field that informs, constitutes, and problematizes cultural production is crucial towards understanding how cultural transactions, dynamics, and politics work. Since literature is a key marker of society’s outlook on and reception of sensitive subjects like non-heteronormativity, this article focuses on the queer literary field – LGBTQ+-related texts and publication – in/of contemporary India. To this end, I look into trends in publication of Indian queer literary texts in English since 1976 through Bourdieu’s concept of the cultural production of the field of queer literature and consider popular texts like Shikhandi: And Other Queer Tales They Don’t Tell You; Our Impossible Love; She Swiped Right into my Heart, and read them vis-à-vis Bourdieu’s theorization, in order to conceptualize an idea about how texts and contexts interact with each other towards (re-)producing and (re-)constructing contemporary queer culture(s) in the Indian context.

scholarly journals Staging the Delinquent: Edwardian Theatre and The Hooligan

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 344-354
Author(s):  
Martin Heaney
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Drama Education ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Commercial Theatre ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University ◽  
Participatory Arts ◽  
Urban Working

W. S. Gilbert is best known as a dramatist and librettist who produced fourteen comic operas with his collaborator, composer Arthur Sullivan. Less familiar is his last work The Hooligan (1912), one of the first realist representations of the young urban working-class male seen on the twentieth-century British stage. This article explores the Edwardian conditions of social and cultural volatility reflected in the authoring and production of this play. It discusses the period as one where narratives of gender and class that underpin contemporary perspectives were shaped and contested. It demonstrates how hegemonic systems of cultural production created binary distinctions between the ‘ideal’ of the ‘Imperial Youth’ and the alien, working-class ‘other’. Gilbert’s authoring of the working-class male subject and his representation in a commercial theatre were subject to both market controls and middle-class ‘anxieties’. This historical perspective indicates continuities between these factors and the contemporary representation of the young urban working classes. Martin Heaney is a senior lecturer in Drama, Applied Theatre and Performance at the University of East London. He is co-director of the Centre of Applied and Participatory Arts and has published articles in various journals, including Research in Drama Education. His book chapter ‘Edward Bond and The Representation of Adolescence’ is forthcoming in The Routledge Guide to Theatre for Young People (2021).

‘What I Came to Say’: Raymond Williams, the Sociology of Culture and the Politics of (Performance) Scholarship

2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
JANELLE REINELT
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
Cultural Materialism ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
Sociopolitical Context ◽  
Residual Values ◽  
Raymond Williams

This essay seeks to reconsider and appropriate the cultural politics of Raymond Williams for the project of formulating a critique of current ideas about politics and theatre. The residual values of cultural materialism as theorized by Williams, based on a concept of culture as productive, processual and egalitarian, have become less influential under the pressures of post-structuralism and neo-liberalism. The current attraction to Rancière, for example, emphasizes dissensus over consensus and singularity over collectivity. Post-dramatic theatre rejects direct engagement with political discourse altogether. While recognizing that these emerging theoretical ideas continue the historical romance of avant-garde theatre with rupture and dissent, Williams can remind us of still-powerful strategies that are rooted in identifying shared experiences, relating cultural production to its sociopolitical context, and the value of collective struggles.

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