What Familiarity Teaches Us to See

Bourdieu, Judgement, and Aesthetic Education

A photograph of a kitchen table hangs in an exhibition. Two chairs, an oilcloth, a coffee cup. One chair has been pulled out a little. Light from a window beyond the frame falls diagonally across the table and stops about where the cloth creases.

A woman pauses to look at how the light divides the picture. The man beside her points to the cup.

“It’s right at the edge,” he says. “That’s where I used to put Dad’s cup when he started having trouble reaching across the table.”

The woman looks at the photograph again. She had seen where the cup was. Now she sees that it may have been put there for someone.

What can familiarity with the world of everyday life enable us to see? Aesthetic education also takes place when everyday experience makes us more attentive to the form of a work. The man’s memory draws our eyes back to the photograph, to the distance between the cup and the chair that has been pulled out. Pierre Bourdieu helps us understand both how the man learned to notice that distance and why his observation can so easily be heard as a personal aside.

A Way of Seeing Has a History

In Distinction, Bourdieu examines how taste is shaped by upbringing, education, and encounters with art. Some people learn early to look for composition, style, and departures from tradition. They may learn by listening to adults talk about pictures, by seeing many pictures, or by having the chance to spend a long time in front of one. Eventually, this way of seeing becomes second nature. It is an expression of what Bourdieu calls habitus. What we learn by living under particular conditions continues to shape how we perceive, judge, and act.

When this familiarity is taken for an innate gift, what Bourdieu calls the ideology of natural gifts takes hold. Someone who quickly finds the words for what she sees appears naturally talented. The years she spent learning to see and speak in this way fade from view. Taste then becomes a way of judging the person standing in front of the work.

In the postscript to Distinction, “Towards a ‘Vulgar’ Critique of ‘Pure’ Critiques,” Bourdieu engages with Kant. For Kant, aesthetic pleasure is disinterested. I can find something beautiful regardless of whether I want to own it or have any use for it. Bourdieu asks what conditions of life allow people to cultivate this distance from the practical uses of things. In front of the photograph, the woman can follow the light across the cloth without asking what the table is used for. That freedom lets her see something in the picture. What happens when this way of looking also determines which other observations count?

The Popular Aesthetic

The man’s remark comes close to what Bourdieu describes in Distinction as a popular aesthetic. He keeps the connection between art and life open. He sees the cup in light of what it can be used for, and its position in light of what it might mean to the person reaching for it. In Un art moyen (1965), Bourdieu and his colleagues examine how different social groups use and judge photographs. A picture may be valued because it preserves the memory of a family occasion or because it invites us to linger over its composition.

In the kitchen, the man had learned to gauge how far his father could reach. In time, a glance at the table was enough for him to know where to put the cup. This is a form of what Bourdieu calls practical sense. Experience has taught him to notice what matters in the situation and act accordingly. In front of the photograph, that practised attention takes on a new significance. He notices how the cup and the chair are positioned in relation to each other.

His observation is attentive to form. Had the cup been in the middle of the table, he would have had less reason to make the remark. Had the photographer cropped out the chair that has been pulled out, the connection he sees would have been harder to notice. The practical question of who can reach the cup sharpens his attention to how the photograph is composed.

Here I want to take a step further with Bourdieu. He helps us see how different ways of looking at a work come to carry different degrees of authority. The photograph gives us a chance to ask what we lose when we draw too sharp a line between them. The man has no more idea than the woman why the cup ended up there. Even so, he has noticed something she can examine. How far is it from the chair to the edge of the table? Which way does the handle face? As she follows his gaze, she can see how the diagonal light holds her attention on the part of the picture where the distance between the cup and the chair becomes apparent.

Learning to See Together

In L’amour de l’art (1966), the museum study Bourdieu wrote with Alain Darbel, with contributions from Dominique Schnapper, the difference between access and familiarity becomes clear. An open museum door gives people access to the room. Feeling at home with what goes on inside has a longer history. When schools leave the conventions of art implicit, pupils who already know them from home have a head start. Schools can do something about this by teaching explicitly how works are put together and how they can be read.

Imagine the two visitors standing with a museum educator. She can show them how the framing brings the edge of the table and the chair into the same composition. A word like framing takes on meaning when they imagine shifting the edge of the picture a few centimetres. The educator can also follow the man’s pointing finger and ask what happens to the image if they imagine looking at the table from the place of the chair that has been pulled out. The teaching now goes both ways. The visitors gain a language for how the photograph works, and the educator has a new question to pursue because one of them knows how to set down a cup for someone who has trouble reaching it.

I use paideia for this aspect of education. The Greek word refers to the broader formation of a person through upbringing and education. Here, in a sense close to the German Bildung, it carries the idea that we ourselves are changed by what we learn to notice and judge. The man has learned something from setting out the cup for his father. In front of the photograph, the woman can learn something from the way he sees the cup. Her judgement comes into play when she lets his observation inform her own assessment of the picture.

Whoever leads a conversation about art has a hand in deciding which observations others get to follow up on. The educator can say it is a lovely memory and move on. She can also ask what in the picture brought that particular memory back to him. His experience then gives the others a reason to look more closely at the photograph.

The woman still sees the light across the oilcloth. Before moving on to the next picture, she leans slightly to one side, as if trying to see the table from the chair that has been pulled out.