Clarissa's Blog

The modern novel is, first and foremost, about the art of making a novel. But as the French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu would say, in order to understand and love that about it, you need to possess a form of cultural refinement that most people cannot access.

Bourdieu wrote in the 1980s, so I have something more recent to add to his ideas. Bourdieu said that contemporary art is divorced from the object of representation and married to the form. Meaning that it doesn’t care that much about being truthful or realistic. Creating an original, beautiful form is much more important. Being able to enjoy a painting that doesn’t reflect any real object, a poem that does not rhyme or tell a story, and the novel which cannot be summarized as being “about” something is a mark of a higher social class. This is post-truth art for a post-scarcity society.

Remember how in the movie Devil Wears Prada, a chic, fashion-industry woman explains to a young, frumpy, low-class intern how the outfit that the low-class intern wears is a bad imitation of last year’s fashion trends? What Pierre Bourdieu would call “popular classes” have invented their own form of post-truth art. They watch Candace Owens videos and pro-Clancy TikToks because that is their form of post-truth art. They too live in the post-scarcity world, so it stands to reason that they want a knock-off of post-truth art. Candace Owens performs the same role in their lives that Rafael Chirbes does in mine.