The Manet effect: Bourdieu, theorist of symbolic revolution

Abstract

In this book based upon Pierre Bourdieu’s classes on the “symbolic revolution” incarnated by the painter Édouard Manet, the French sociologist performs a sociological unmasking that inverts the one most commonly identified in his works: rather than revealing the reproduction of deep structures that undergirds apparent changes, Bourdieu points out how radical structural and symbolic transformations have resulted in artistic practices that a contemporary gaze, shaped by the success of these very transformations, perceives as natural and self-evident. This sociological operation involves a detailed reconstruction of the status quo ante, the academic, “pompier” art within which Manet was trained, but against which he invested in subversive works that have contributed decisively so that the social microcosm of painting transformed historically from a state-controlled body into an autonomous field. In the contrast between “before” and “after” Manet’s revolution, Bourdieu discloses the ties between external institutional structures, on the one hand, and the internal properties of content and form of the works themselves, on the other. Finally, against any slide into the myth of the “uncreated creator”, the sociologist points out not only the convergence of objective factors (morphological, technical, market-related, etc.) that contributed to the success of Manet’s initiatives, but also the socially acquired dispositions that the painter has harnessed in his revolutionary enterprise.