What does the Algerian series of photographs by Bourdieu consist of? It is composed of photographs taken by Bourdieu while he was teaching in Algeria from 1958 to 1960. Forty years later, he decided to prepare this archive, which gives a systematic record of the living conditions, production and struggles in Algeria in those turbulent times, for visual display. Bourdieu was in Algeria just after the war for independence, which started in 1954 as a process of rebellion of Algeria against France, the colonial ruler for almost 100 years. The years from 1958 to 1960, during which Bourdieu created this enormous body of photographs, constituted an intermediary period, before negotiations for gaining complete independence began (Algeria finally became independent in 1962). So Bourdieu was in Algeria at a dramatic time, when the future of the country seemed suspended and there was an Algerian government in exile operating in Cairo and Tunis (from 1958 to 1961). In 1961, a process of hard negotiations with France began, and, as has been mentioned, sovereignty was attained in 1962. In an interview with Franz Schultheis 1, Bourdieu talks in some detail about this process.
The exhibition »Pierre Bourdieu: Images of Algeria« is a precise and very considered selection of photographs that clearly has the intention of dissociating itself from any hint of a colonial/imperial/orientalistic view of this specific part of the Arab world 2. This is a very important stance, as we live in times in which the »Third World« is subjected to a process of absolute cannibalization by the capitalist culture machine. What we get day after day in the »First World« is a process I would call the free exchange and domestication of the »Third World«. In this era of deadly globalization, everybody and everything is apt to be »capitalized« by the imperial eye and obsessively displayed, no more or less than in the form of the pure LIFE that dwells (in most cases between two, three, etc., deaths) somewhere out there, away from the centre. And beware! this is not a story about the relationship between the periphery and the centre, but just a story about the centre!
It could with justification be said that the brilliant, clean »cut« distinguishing this exhibition from the above-mentioned »deadly cannibalization« was possible precisely because this cut was already present in the internal structure of Bourdieu\'s photographs. The key structural logic of an anti-imperial gaze has always existed in them. The camera eye of Bourdieu and the concepts of Camera Austria run counter to the hidden colonizing implications of the so-called »neutral« ethnographic approach to worlds and lives that is associated with the capitalist machinery. This aspect is also excellently captured in the interview with Schultheis. It moves very slowly, like time in the photographs; every word, every thought, is reflected again and again.
As Trinh T. Minh-ha has argued several times, and as was articulated in her film and theoretical work, we should not believe that there is even a drop of so-called innocence within processes of visualization of the world of the Other. Every approach like this must take into consideration the means of production of such visualizations. Such an act does not imply the abstract scientific gaze, but it does imply the absolute politicization of each and every move within the field of the Other.
Therefore - to return to this concept regarding the slowness of the perception of the Other by the Other (and Algeria and Bourdieu are Others to each other) -, it is also possible to see the exhibition as a kind of reactualization of Bourdieu’s criticism of the (too) fast consumption of his theoretical work. He noted a certain disproportion in the way his work was accepted. Pierre Bourdieu\'s term ›cultural capital‹, for example, (as emphasized by several writers) was extracted and made almost a technical term, similar to that of post-modernism (and maybe even post-socialism). It developed a remarkable influence on the entire range of cultural theory and on many critical writings.
Why am I insisting on the perception of time, on this production of time, presented so precisely and with such density in these photographs? Time is dramatically captured in these pictures: more still, it implies here a respect of (an)other time(s). What we have here is a specific exploration of the economy of the production of time, but without any economization! To this visualization, we must also add Pierre Bourdieu\'s intensive theoretical analysis of time\'s productivity in order to view, within this »new« time, a different structural moment in the functioning of the capitalist machine. Capitalism, especially in this era of globalization, is showing its internal logic more and more as a regulation of time.
This exhibition shows a patiently documentary process, almost a slow-motion image of very delicate moves in space and time; not a fast documentary sensationalism, but careful and internal step-by-step – almost frozen - movements within a world of differences, but also of similarities. This exhibition itself is not economical! Here, we are not confronted with the »fast-food« machinery of perception of a world that allows the deadly economization, the constant saving, of time for the contemporary viewer. On the contrary, the powerful concept of time displayed in these photographs is not only a result of the search for a different economy of time, but is opposed to any economization of (the viewer\'s) time.
This exhibition is a detailed path into a time estranged from the contemporary cultural and politico-cultural space. For me personally, this is the time; I was simply thrown into time, being born in 1958.
The exhibition can also be seen within Bourdieu\'s project of constructing an economy of practices that he termed »cultural capital«, which for him is a particular, different form of capital, but one not reduced to economic capital. Here again, the emphasis is on a specific logic; it is possible to detect different logics of production, conversion and capitalization, along with different logics of functioning.
In a way, the process of giving visual order to Bourdieu\'s archive is also connected with a fight against a process of specific discrimination, within institutions and other spaces well; a discrimination, Bourdieu argues, that does not simply consist in the unequal distribution of wealth, information, etc., but is above all rooted in a process of misjudgement. This misjudgement is a result of the so-called »objective, disinterested« gaze, which plays on a balanced (un-)equality of everybody and everything!
Last but not least, the exhibition does not aim just to provide a document of a particular time and space for a new order of contemporary globality. Rather, this exhibition forces us to reflect upon - and accept - the fact that different forms of production of life, labour activities and persistence within time exist that lead to insistence and alternatives within time. But we also have to acknowledge that these productions must additionally be seen as a different, completely diffracted (as Haraway would say) valorization of socio-politically and culturally different systems.
Translated by Tim Jones
»Pierre Bourdieu. Images of Algeria«, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, 23 January to 2 March 2003; Camera Austria – Eisernes Haus, Graz, 14 November 2003 to 6 February 2004. The exhibition is taking place one year after Pierre Bourdieu\'s death and is being organized by the journal »Camera Austria« as part of the project »Graz 2003, Cultural Capital of Europe«.
1 The exhibition includes a catalogue containing the outstanding interview with Bourdieu that Franz Schultheis, Professor of Sociology at Geneva University, conducted in July 2001.
2 Here, it is also important to mention the key role of the Graz journal »Camera Austria«, which, as initiator of the whole project, worked closely with Bourdieu to gain an insight into the work by careful selection and further processing of the negatives - a task that could only be completed after Bourdieu\'s death. After the Paris showing, the exhibition will be on display as part of the project Graz 2003 and, as I discovered in a conversation with Christine Frisinghelli - the driving force behind this project - extended to include a symposium.