Trashing the Academy (part 2)

In “Trashing the Academy,” Jeffrey Sconce argues that the subculture devoted to paracinema possesses a similar level of sophistication and cultural capital to “elite cineastes.” He writes,

The discourses characteristically employed by paracinematic culture in its valorization of ‘low-brow’ artefacts indicate that this audience, like the film elite (academics, aesthetes, critics), is particularly rich with ‘cultural capital’ and thus possesses a level of textual/critical sophistication similar to the cineastes they construct as their nemesis. In terms of education and social position, in other words, the various factions of the paracinematic audience and the elite cineastes they commonly attack would appear to share what Bourdieu terms a ‘cultural pedigree’.

Jeffrey Sconce, “Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” in Screen 36:4, Winter 1995, 375.

In other words, paracinema inverts the values of elite aesthetic norms. In order to invert those values, though, one must have familiarity with them. Access to sophisticated cinematic discourse is, in some sense, a class privilege (at least it was at the time this article was written, before widespread access to the internet). Paracinema, then, comes from a subculture of people with cultural capital, with access to critical discourses within the academy. Within this shared culture, though, the paracinematic subculture chooses to elevate “trash,” calling into question the very legitimacy of the institutions that discipline elite taste.