Winning the culture game: Prizes, awards, and the rules of art

New Literary History

Volumn 33, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 109-135

  English, James F ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 10844245985     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2002.0005     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. Though the enormous growth in cultural prizes is evident enough, it is difficult to document the trend at all precisely - in part because, since the early 1970s, the growth has been too rapid to allow a reliable tabulation, and in part because both culture and prize are such blurry, uncertain categories. (Should one include bake-offs and beauty contests? Awards in advertising, fashion, style? Elementary-school art prizes?) The standard reference work, Awards, Honors & Prizes (ed. Valerie J. Webster [Detroit, 2000]), now in its 16th edition, has gone from a manageable three-hundred-page index of about eighteen hundred prizes in 1969 (approximately a third of them "cultural" prizes in the narrow sense of the term, that is, concerned explicitly with the production of "art") to a massive two-volume, multi-thousand-page, small-print affair today, adding new prizes in recent years at the rate of about one every six hours, though certainly leaving out many more than it registers. The digital news database of Lexis/Nexis absorbs so many stories about prizes that in the mid-1990s the service opened a separate flie library devoted entirely to coverage of the major arts and entertainment awards, most of which awards now have multiple World Wide Web sites focused on them as well. The International Congress of Distinguished Awards, which was founded in 1991 in a futile effort to control and regulate this chaotic scene by separating the "distinguished" prizes from the wannabes, counts more than a hundred prizes carrying six- and seven-figure cash awards, and its Chairman, Larry Tise, told rne in 1995 that he would estimate the total number of prizes devoted to literature and the arts at well over one hundred thousand.
2. David Lehman, "May the Best Author Win - Fat Chance," Newsweek, 107 (21 April 1986), 82.
3. Qtd. in Karen MacGragor, "Traumas, Triumphs," Times Higher Educational Supplement, 3 November 1989, 14.
4. AN author, "Success and the Other-Author," Times (London), 14 July 1986, 12.
5. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 30th edition (Pittsburgh, 1994);
6. quoted in this context, for example, by Christopher Hitchens, "These Glittering Prizes," Vanity Fair, 56 (January7 1993), 20.
7. By 1866, when Carroll wrote Alice, the American term "caucus," meaning a gathering or meeting for purposes of political deliberation, had just begun to circulate in Britain as a term of opprobrium to designate an inner circle or cabal (within the opposing party) that aimed to manipulate or fix a political election by shutting out nonmembers of the inner group. Carroll's choice of this term to associate with the universal distribution of prizes is apt, since even their seemingly radical democratization ("all must have prizes") has not prevented prizes from being attacked as essentially rigged political affairs, controlled by corrupt elites.
8. Greg Dawson, "Last Thing TV Needs is Another Award Show," Orlando Sentinel Tribune, 11 June 1992, E1.
9. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1977), p. 187.
10. John Guillory, "Bourdieu's Refusal," Modern Language Quarterly, 58 (1997), 367-99.
11. Loïc J. D. Wacquant is Bourdieu's most important American disciple, co-author with Bourdieu of An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, 1992).
12. See in particular Wacquant's "Bourdieu in America: Notes on the Transatlantic Importation of Social Theory," in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (Chicago, 1993), pp. 235-62.
13. A concise statement of this critique is Amy Koritz and Douglas Koritz's, "Symbolic Economics: Adventures in the Metaphorical Marketplace," in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (New York, 1999), pp. 408-17.
14. In particular, the theory of relationship between field and habitus (or embodied, incorporated cultural capital), which Bourdieu has always treated as a sort of "corporeal complicity" between "the socialized agent and the social field," a disposition of the body to maintain its position within a structure of domination, might lend itself to more complex and optimistic reformulations in the hands of feminist, minority, or postcolonial critics, just as Foucault's work on the relationship between the subject and disciplinary regimes has done. One such reformulation was proposed by Toril Moi in "Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology of Culture" (New Literary History, 22 [1991], 1017-49)
15. which appeared about the same time that Bourdieu's emphasis on the (gendered) body began to register as a radical departure within the discipline of sociology - as discussed, for example, by Chris Shilling ("Educating the Body: Physical Capital and the Production of Social Inequalities," Sociology, 25 [1991], 653-72).
16. Few, however, have followed Moi's lead. Attempts to articulate the theory of habitus and field with postcolonial theory have been even rarer, and generally more critical than appropriative of Bourdieu's work. See, for example, David Polumbo-Liu's introduction, "Unhabituated Habituses," in Streams of Cultural Capital: Transnational Cultural Studies, ed. Polumbo-Liu and Hans Ulrich Gurnbrecht (Stanford, 1997), pp. 1-22.
17. The quotations above regarding corporeal complicity are taken from "How Can 'Free-Floating Intellectuals' Be Set Free," a 1980 interview with Didier Eribon reprinted in Bourdieu, Sociology in Question, tr. Richard Nice (London, 1993), pp. 41-48, esp. 46.
18. On the "illusio," see Bourdieu, "Belief and the Body," The Logic of Practice (Stanford, 1990), pp. 66-79, esp. 67;
19. and "Da Capo: Illusion and Illusio," The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, tr. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, 1996), pp. 331-36;
20. Rules of Art hereafter cited in text as RA.
21. All quotations in this paragraph are taken from the section called "The Lengthening of the Circuits of Legitimation" in part five of Bourdieu, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, tr. Lauretta C. Clough (Stanford, 1996), pp. 385, 387.
22. Bourdieu and Hans Haacke, Free Exchange (Stanford, 1994), p. 84; hereafter cited in text as FE.
23. Joan Shelley Rubin, "The Making of Middlebrow Culture" (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992);
24. Janice Radway, A Feeling For Books: The Book-of-the Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997). There are many important parallels between the book club and the American book-prize industry7, both of which emerge in the years following the first world war and are immediately subjected to clamorous criticism from the gatekeepers of high culture (and especially from those gatekeepers whose own positions on the cultural field are not altogether firmly established). But while the mail-order book club is clearly well past its heyday, the literary prize, for reasons I am attempting to clarify, has continued its curious ascendancy.
25. The best account of the carping about corrupt or inept judging, favoritism, and so forth, that typically followed the announcement of prizewinners at the Attican "Great Dionysia" festival remains that of the nineteenth-century historian A. E. Haigh, The Attic Theatre: A Description of the Stage and Theatre of the Athenians, and of the Dramatic Performances at Athens, third edition (Oxford, 1907). It is clear that the Athenian Council, which administered these festivals, understood from the outset that the legitimacy of the judges and of their judgments would be subject to challenge and that corruption scandals would be integral to awards. As Haigh details, they established elaborate protocols governing the selection of judges and the recording of votes. Council members were not themselves eligible to serve as judges. Rather, representatives from each of the ten Attican tribes brought forward to the Council a slate of nominees (conforming to certain general rules of eligibility) from their particular tribe. The name of each nominee was put on a slip of paper, which was then put into an urn corresponding to the nominating tribe. The ten urns were kept under lock and key until the eve of the festival, at which point, in a ceremony attended by all the nominees, one name was drawn from each urn. These ten men, the "preliminary judges," were then required to judge all the plays and submit their ranked lists to the Council at the conclusion of the festival. Even this was the not the end of the process, however. Once again an urn was brought out. The ten judges' sheets were placed in the urn, and just live withdrawn at random, these five becoming public documents and serving as the basis for awarding the prize, while the other five were destroyed unseen. This elaborate, yet always ineffective, series of contrivances, designed to convey the most perfect appearance of autonomy and impartiality, in fact called attention to the unavoidable threat of scandal and ensured its permanent lodging within the institutional apparatus of the prize. Our own cultural prizes engage in similarly duplicitous rituals of selection and secrecy which guarantee not that the awards are legitimately decided but that the scandal of illegitimacy will always be lurking in the auditorium or banquet hall of their presentation: the somber-looking representatives from Pinkerton or Pricewaterhouse, for example, standing in the wings with their specially sealed envelopes.
26. For the financial details of Booker's sponsorship of the prize, which grew out of their so-called "Artists' Services" division, see John Sutherland, "The Bumpy Ride to the Booker, 1981," Times Higher Education Supplement, 30 October 1981, 11
27. and Richard Todd, Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today (London, 1996), pp. 62-64; hereafter cited in text as CF.
28. The relationship between a cultural prize's monetary and symbolic values is by no means perfectly inverse, but neither is it direct. (Witness the flop of the Turner Tomorrow Award, a $500,000 prize for "visionary fiction" launched by Ted Turner in 1995 and almost universally ignored.) If there is some symbolic advantage to being the prize with the highest cash value on a given field, the Booker forfeited this advantage in the 1980s. The NCR, founded in 1988, has always been worth a bit more than the Booker, as has the Orange Prize for Fiction by Women, founded in 1996-and the IMPAC Dublin literary prize, founded in 1995, carries a cash award of £100,000. It is true that none of these is in direct competition with the Booker, since the former is a non-fiction prize and the latter two are open to non-British novelists. But even among the British-only fiction prizes, the Trask, the Whitbread, and the Sunday Express have all offered more cash than the Booker in recent years.
29. In fact, Maschler has said quite explicitly that he modeled the Booker on the Concourt; see Maschler's recollections of the prize's genesis, "How It All Began" in Booker 30: A Celebration of Thirty Years of the Booker Prize for Fiction, 1969-1999, ed. Booker PLC (London, 1998), pp. 15-16. There is no space here to trace out the special logic of imitation and differentiation at work in the history of cultural prizes and the seemingly insupportable redundancies it has produced. I will simply note that, just as the most successful of the Goncourt's domestic imitators has been the feminist Prix Femina, so the most successful domestic imitator of the Goncourt's most successful foreign imitator (that is, the most successful of the so-called "Baby Bookers" within Britain) has been the Orange Prize for Fiction by Women: a kind of double-imitation of an imitation.
30. Documents pertaining to the administration of the prize in these years are housed in the uncatalogued Booker archive of the Book Trust in London. I am grateful to Sandra Vince and Russell Pritchard of the Book Trust, as well as to Martin Goff, for granting me access to this archive and assisting me in my research.
31. The full text of Berger's speech was printed in the Guardian, 24 November 1972, 12.
32. Minutes of the Organizing Committee meeting, 8 January 1974, Booker archive, Book Trust.
33. These counts are based on the clipping files in the Booker archive.
34. Bryan Appleyard, "Glittering Prizes and a Game Called Celebrity Sadism," Sunday Times, 21 October 1990.
35. Christopher Hope, a South African writer shortlisted in 1992, vividly described the ethos of the award banquet from the vantage of the also-ran: "the TV cameras get into your earhole and watch you push food around your plate while you get slagged off" (quoted by Géraldine Brooks, "No Civility, Please, We're English," Gentleman's Quarterly [February 1993], 58).
36. Patricia Miller, "Booker Triumph 'Like Avalanche Smothering You,'" Sunday Times, 24 October 1982.
37. The classic denunciation of these tendencies is Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York, 1964), pp. 45-76, 118-80.
38. A more ambitious and less tendentious study of contemporary celebrity7 culture and its place in the long history of fame is Leo Brandy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (New York, 1986).
39. A recent study of the specifically literary dimension of celebrity culture is Joe Moran, Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America (London, 1999); hereafter cited as SA.
40. I do not mean to suggest that the individual scandals are of no interest in themselves or that they perform no significant cultural work apart from that of supporting through pseudo-critique the institution of the cultural prize. On the contrary, through the annual convulsions around the Booker, critics have pursued the most urgent struggles animating the scene of British literature. Some of these disputes have been convincingly read by Graham Huggan, for example, as expressions of a tension between two competing systems of postcolonial value in contemporary Britain: the symbolic system of "postcolonialism" within which long-marginalized literatures are finally achieving significant consecration, and the commercial system of "postcoloniality" within which this very consecration functions as a device to assure that such literatures are kept available for further imperial appropriation. (See Huggan, "Prizing 'Otherness': A Short History' of the Booker," Studies in the Novel, 29 [Fall 1997], 412-33;
41. and "The Postcolonial Exotic: Rushdie's 'Booker of Bookers,'" Transition, 64 [1994], 22-29.) My own aim, though, is to consider the effects of these sorts of controversies in aggregate, in relation to the broader cultural logic that assures their continued production irrespective of any specific content.
42. Philip Howard, "Curling Up With all the Bookers," Times (London), 19 October 1982, 12.
43. E. J. Graddock, "Why the Booker Prize is Bad News for Books,'" Times (London), 7 October 1985, 15.
44. Susannah Herbert, "The Night Booker Became a Dirty Word," Daily Telegraph, 13 October 1994. Herbert is here quoting Bing Taylor, general marketing manager of W. H. Smith's book department - but as the headline suggests, she takes essentially the same view as he.
45. "Who Needs the Booker? The Sorry State of a Literary Prize," The Economist (21 October 1989), 101.
46. Anthony Thwaite, "Booker 1986," Encounter (February 1987), 32: "In spite of the jibes about 'hype' and 'ballyhoo,' etc., that go with the Booker Prize ... [it is] internationally recognized as the world's top fiction prize."
47. Roland Barthes, "The Writer on Holiday," Mythologies, tr. Annette Layers (New York, 1973), p. 30.
48. Mark Lawson, "Never Mind the Plot, Enjoy the Argument," Independent, 6 September 1994, 12.
49. This was the Tory minister Alan Clark, who chaired the (scandalously) fractious jury for the 1995 NCR prize. "They didn't put me in for my taste and discernment in this field," Clark observed in a post-ceremony interview. "I was put on the committee in the hope that there might be a row, in inverted commas, and that I might be controversial and this would attract publicity to the whole affair," See Julia Llewellyn Smith, "They Invited Me Hoping For Controversy," Times (London), 6 May 1995, Features Section.
50. Brooks, "No Civility, Please," 62.
51. Rachel Kerr, publicity director for Cape, later issued a statement denying any scandalous intention on the part of McEwan or his entourage, saying that they had simply gotten mixed up about the order of events and had gone off to a post-Booker gathering at the house of Tom Maschler. This explanation was received skeptically. See the "Times Diary," Times (London), 15 October 1992.
52. Bourdieu, "Price Formation and the Anticipation of Profits," Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, tr. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 67-72.
53. The phrase "homogeneous empty time" is of course Walter Benjamin's, from the thirteenth of the "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, tr. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1969), p. 261.
54. Appeals to Time as an arbiter magically disconnected from history and society are everywhere in the commentary on literature and arts prizes. A typical example is Phillip Howard, "And Thundering in to the Final Page . . . ," Times (London), 19 October 1982, 12: "The only objective judge of literature is Time. . . . Let us not pretend that [winning a prize] means anything about [a book's] literary value in the long eye of history." From the obvious, and often triumphantly catalogued, gaps between the rosters of past prize-winners and the contemporary canon, critics erroneously infer that prizes have nothing to do with the patterns of canonicity that emerge later on; that other hierarchies of value, such as those that obtain in higher-educational curricula, have tended to be more accurate predictors of later symbolic success than prizes are; and, above all, that the long-term process of literary valuation operates independently of the interests and flows of social, economic, and political capital.
55. For Bourdieu, this persistence of belief in disbelief is scarcely imaginable, appearing only as a special complication or nuance in the habitus of the most refined and reflexive authors: his example is Mallarmé. But in fact this seems to be an increasingly general circumstance of the illusio, and if such terms as naivete and cynicism were ever adequate to describe the relationships between cultural agents and the cultural field, they certainly are not so today.
56. Even in America the charge of Bookerization is a familiar one; see, for example, David Lehman's account of the Bookerization of the National Book Awards, "May the Best Author Win - Fat Chance" (cited above). According to Lehman, Barbara Prete, who was in charge of these prizes back in the mid-1980s when they were struggling along under the name American Book Awards, made a number of trips to London to study the way Martin Goff and the Book Trust administered the Booker Prize. One result of these visits was Prete's decision to begin announcing a shordist of nominees some weeks prior to the announcement of a winner. If this adoption of a Booker practice was intended to produce Booker-style publicity, as Lehman suggests, it succeeded. In 1986, the first year of the new system (and the last year the awards were called the American Book Awards), one nominee, Peter Taylor, angrily withdrew when the name of the winner (E. L. Doctorow, for World's Fair) was leaked prematurely. Though Taylor would presumably have accepted the prize if he had won, he said it was too demeaning to be put publicly in the position of an also-ran. The next year saw the even larger scandal, mentioned below, involving open lobbying for Toni Morrison's Beloved; Morrison's partisans challenged the NBA jury for overlooking her masterpiece in favor of Paco's Story, a war novel by a little-known white male author named Larry Heinemann, Rather than defending their selection, the National Book Foundation conceded problems in the way the NBA was judged, and promptly overhauled the jury format, increasing the number of judges from three to five. See "NBA Names Judges for 1988, Increases Fiction Jury to Five," Publishers Weekly, 234 (August 12 1988), 320.
57. A good, brief account of the affair can be found in Annie Gohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life (New York, 1985), pp. 444-49.
58. Bourdieu, "The Market of Symbolic Goods," tr. R. Sawyer, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art, and Literature (New York, 1983), p. 130.
59. Since this essay's original appearance in 1971, Bourdieu's analysis of the logic of relation between the field of restricted production and the field of general production has undergone some refinements, particularly as regards the differing temporalities ("modes of ageing") of the two fields. For the most recent version, see "The Market for Symbolic Goods," Rules of Art, pp.141-73.
60. Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards, 4th ed. (New York, 1993), p. 447.
61. Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein's Nephew: A Friendship, tr. Ewald Osers (London, 1986), p. 78.
62. Peter Marks, "Adding Drama to Musical, Andrews Spurns a Tony," New York Times, 9 May 1996, A1, B6.
63. A section of the letter appears on the San Narcisco Community College Thomas Pynchon Homepage at http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/bio/facts.html (July 2000).
64. The cases of Salinger and Pynchon, and, more generally, the capacity of the literary star system to translate absence or refusal into stardom, recognizing silence as a sign or even a device of celebrity, are discussed by Moran, Star Authors, pp. 54, 64-66.
65. "Pulitzer Jurors Dismayed on Pynchon," New York Times, 8 May 1974.
66. Lynn Cochrane, "Fans to Watch £1m Go Up In Smoke for Glaswegian Football Fans," The Scotsman, 4 November 1995;
67. Robert Sandall, "Money to Burn," Sunday Times, 5 November 1995.
68. The whole sequence of events is documented in K Foundation Burn, a Million Quid, ed. Chris Brook (London, 1998), pp. 5-30.
69. "Damien Hirst is Unanimous Winner of the Turner Prize," Daily Telegraph, 29 November 1995.
70. "Prize Idiots: The Turner Prize Award," Daily Mirror, 30 November 1995.
71. Founded in 1982, The New Criterion has been consistently supported by six-figure donations from the John M. Olin Foundation, along with contributions from some of the other major right-wing corporate foundations. Indeed, Kramer, who has been the journal's editor since its inception, initially had his editorial office in the Olin Corporation headquarters. Haacke and Bourdieu discuss Kramer's cultural role in Free Exchange, pp. 52-54.
72. "Morrison, duCille, Baquet, Pulitzer Prizewinners," Jet, 74 (18 April 1988), 14.
73. These extravagant terms were integral to the lobbying effort for Morrison's 1988 Pulitzer, which was launched soon after she was passed over for both the NBA and the NBCCA. A paid advertisement appearing as an open letter in the New York Times Book Review, signed by June Jordan, Houston Baker, and forty-six other black writers and academics, referred to the Pulitzer and the NBA as the "keystones to the canon of American literature" ("Black Writers in Praise of Toni Morrison," The Nexv York Times Book Review, 24 January 1988, 36).
74. Jordan, who had first met with Morrison to discuss the possibility of undertaking this sort of preemptive media campaign, was quoted as saying that Morrison was wounded by her failure to win the NBA and "was having doubts about her work," since "the awards are the only kind of validation that makes sense in the literary world" (Elizabeth Kastor, "'Beloved' and the Protest," Washington Post, 21 January 1988, B1).
75. There is little doubt that the journals of the cultural right were attempting to prevent Morrison from winning the Pulitzer for Beloved. The New Criterion ran a Morrison-bashing piece perfectly timed to coincide with the decision-making of the NBCC and Pulitzer judges: Martha Bayles, "Special Effects, Special Pleading" (January 1988), 34-40;
76. and so did Commentary: Carol Iannone, "Toni Morrison's Career" (December 1987), 59-63.
77. Indeed, Iannone, who would go on to be George Bush's alarmingly underqualified nominee for the top post at the National Council on Humanities, devoted a good share of her literary journalism to attacks on Morrison, Alice Walker, and other prize-winning minority authors. In 1991, when she was positioning herself for the NCH nomination, she published a full-scale denunciation of book prizes called "Literature by Quota" (Commentary, 91 [March 1991]), in which Morrison's Pulitzer served as a prime example of judges' willingness to assuage their white guilt by "sacrificing the demands of excellence to the 'democratic dictatorship of mediocrity'" (53).
78. Examples include George Christian, who said the lobbying had made Morrison "a figure of fun" ("Literature Needs a Triple Crown," Houston Chronicle, 7 February 1988, 20) and Chistopher Hitchens, ("Those Glittering Prizes"), who characterized Morrison as a writer who, for the sake of a book prize, would "jump through hoops that ought to embarrass even a hardened Oscar seeker."
79. Even to those who share some of Guillory's misgivings about the prevalence in the American academy of "a social theory that speaks of change only as an effect of socially transformative agendas" ("Bourdieu's Refusal," 369), Bourdieu's own political agenda, which largely consists of defending the integrity and relative impenetrability of one's particular intellectual field, can seem rather timid. My point is not that we need to discount the potentialities of conscious political agency to the extent that Bourdieu appears to do, but that as conscious political agents we are in need of the kind of strategic knowledge that at this conjuncture a (modified) reflexive sociology seems best capable of producing.
80. On the "double discourse" of economic and aesthetic value, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), pp. 30-35
81. and John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, 1993), pp. 269-340.
82. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Stephen Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), pp. 51, 58; hereafter cited in text.
83. For his lucid account of the politics of space and location in de Certeau, I am indebted to Daniel Punday, "Derrida in the World: Space and Post-Deconstructive Textual Analysis," Postmodern Culture, 11 (September 2000), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v011/11.lpunday.html