According to Pierre Bourdieu, what
characterizes the artistic field, and what gives it its history, is the
struggle of succeeding movements or individuals for legitimacy, which is gained
by supplanting the existing dominant forms by the revolutionary new.
This definition-Who can legitimately be called a
writer? What is legitimate literary practice?-is one of the key stakes of
symbolic struggle in the literary field, and failure to understand it often
results in the blind acceptance of the dominant definition of literary legitimacy.
(Bourdieu.1993, p.12)
According
to Bourdieu (1993) there are three competing Principles of legitimacy:
First, there is the specific principle of legitimacy,
i.e. the recognition granted by the set of producers who produce for other
producers, their competitors i.e. by the autonomous self-sufficient world of
“art for art’s sake”. Secondly there is the principle of legitimacy
corresponding to ‘bourgeois’ taste and to the consecration bestowed by the
dominant fractions of the dominant class and by private tribunals, such as salons, or public, state guaranteed
ones, such as academies, which sanction the inseparably ethical and aesthetic
(and therefore political) taste of the dominant. Finally there is the principle
of legitimacy which its advocates call ‘popular ’i.e the consecration bestowed
by the choice of ordinary consumers, the ‘mass audience’. (Page 50/51)
There was a time when Eliot could be validated by all three. Pound
scorned the second (‘it hits me in my dinner invitations’, he wrote) and the
third (which he was fond of calling The Mob) and was only interested in the
first, but the other two certainly existed in his day. Before Pound began his career in London
it was possible for Elkin Mathews, who would later be Pound’s London Publisher,
to publish Admirals All and Other Verses by a then unknown
Henry Newbolt in his ‘Shilling Garland’ series and for it to go through thirty
reprintings, selling 30,000 copies by 1910 (Nelson, 1989, p.47). Such an
action today, in Australia, is difficult to imagine. The problem
facing the modern poet is that legitimisation has been institutionalised. And
those with power, have power, because they are employed by the institution.
The
shift within the field of poetry in the past 100 years means that currently
those with the power to confer legitimacy tend to be employed by academic
institutions, especially since the burgeoning of creative writing courses in Universities . But
these people are employed because they meet the requirements of the institution
for employment. This does not mean they are not good at what they do or should not
be there, it just means that like any employee they operate within the mandates,
traditions and practices of the institution In terms of creative writing it is
almost inevitable that institutional needs, processes, and what is required for
external justification, will be in conflict with the kind of freedom Graves celebrated
(See here: http://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/graves-on-poets-freedom-and.html
)
Attempts
to justify creative practice in terms of existing definitions of academic
research are bound to alter the process of writing, and since literary theory
is in fashion, its application to creative writing, regardless of how
appropriate that might be in other terms, is one inevitable consequence.
Assessment
has to be based on criteria that are as objective as possible, must be
reportable, must be fair and comparable across cohorts, across time and across
institutions. If genuinely new poetry is radical and revolutionary because it
challenges the existing orthodoxy, how can this happen in a setting where
orthodoxy is institutionalized and therefore a requirement for recognition and
achieving grades?
This
is not a criticism of the institution or the people in it. But for the writing
of poetry and the effect on the Domain, the results of this institutionalizing
of legitimacy is problematic beyond its tendency to emphasize content and to police ideology. Firstly because being within the institution, the reading
practices and the academic thinking fashionable within the institution are
going to affect it. The kind of political or theorised readings, based on assumptions about poetry
and its social and cultural and political role, become the ground on which the
poetry course or the creative writing course might operate and on which the
poem will be criticized. Secondly, as Bourdieu says, the game is to change the field
without disturbing the ground of its existence. Refusing to play the game
according to the rules calls ‘into question not a way of playing the game, but
the game itself and the belief which supports it. This is the one unforgivable
transgression” (P81).
I can
see no other reason except for the institutional processes outlined above why
something like this following piece gets published. In a book by a ‘prize
winning’ author, who at the time of publication taught at Princeton University
where she was director of the creative writing program, in a book bearing the
sticker “National Book award Finalist’:
wait
I’m not done fucking wait I’m not done fucking wait
I’m
not done fucking wait I’m not done fucking wait I’m
not
done fucking wait I’m not done fucking wait I’m not
done
fucking wait I’m not done fucking wait I’m not done
fucking
wait I’m not done fucking wait I’m not done fucking
wait
I’m not done fucking wait I’m not done fucking wait
(p74. This is all there is on page 74.)
When you’ve got over the cute way it reads the
same way downwards at the ends of the lines and the first and last lines what are you
supposed to do with this? You could replace ‘fucking’ with any two-syllable
activity, and what difference would it make? (Ok, so I admit I had fun reading
it with a pause after done, but that was my desperate attempt to find something to keep myself interested).
What
am I, as reader, supposed to do with this? Why did anyone think this was worth charging dollars for?
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