From Imre Szeman’s review of Bourdieu on Television, translated from the French by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. New York, 1998: The New Press, as published in Topia, The Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.
“It is clear that Bourdieu believes that, when it comes to television, it has become increasingly dificult to accomplish anything that might be seen as intellectually constructive, no matter how carefully one approaches it. Television becomes, in Bourdieu’s analysis of the journalistic field, a field that dominates other fields. Not only does he argue that television has altered the function of the entire journalistic field, forcing the print media to approximate it more and more in form and content, he maintains that television has profoundly challenged the autonomy of all other fields. ‘The most important development, and a difficult one to foresee,’ he writes, ‘was the extraordinary extension of the power of television over the whole of cultural production, including scientific and artistic production.’ Television now holds a virtual monopoly on what today constitutes public space, and, as such, it controls cultural producers’ access to the public.
You can download a pdf of the review here.
You can read the entire text of Bourdieu’s book here.
Tags: Pre-Digital Culture, Television
