Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 1K views

    Bourdieu, Pierre - The Field of Cultural Production PDF

    Uploaded by

    Daniel López Roche

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd

    Bourdieu, Pierre - The Field of Cultural Production PDF

    Uploaded by

    Daniel López Roche
    1K views28 pages

    Original Title

    Bourdieu, Pierre - The field of cultural production.pdf

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    PDF or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf
    1K views28 pages

    Bourdieu, Pierre - The Field of Cultural Production PDF

    Uploaded by

    Daniel López Roche

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf
    of 28
    The Field of Cultural Production eesti Essays on Art and Literature Pierre Bourdieu Edited and Introduced by Randal Johnson Columbia University Press First published in the US by Columbia University Press 1993 First published in the UK by Polity Press in Association with Blackwell Publishers 1993) This edition © Polity Press Copyright © Preface and Editor's Introduction: Randal Johnson Copyright © Chapters 1 and 3: Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. 1983, Copyright © Chapter 2: Sage Publications Lid, 1986 Copyright © Chapters 4, and 6: Piecre Bourdieu. English translation © Claud DuvVerlie, 1986 Gezytahe © Chae 7, The Usivesy of Chicago, 1988 Al ihe reserved Copyright © Chapters 8 and 10: Blackwell Publishers, 1968, 1989 Copyright © Copyright 9: Pierce Bourdieu, 1987. English translation © Polity Press, 1993 ISBN 0-231-08286- ISBN 0-231-08287-8 (pbk) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bourdieu, Piette ‘The field of cultaral production : essays on art and literature / Pierre Bourdieu ; edited and introduced by Randal Johnson. ._cm.—(European perspectives) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-231~08286-X ; $40.00.—1SBN 0-231-08287-8 (pbk,): $16.50 1. Ants and society—France. 2. Arts audiences—France. 3. Aesthetics, French, 4, Arts—Economic aspects—France, Johnson, Randal, 1948— I, Tile, II, Series. NX180.56868 1993, 700'.1"030944—d:20 92-3843 ar. Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper. 1 The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed © Poésie, 6 ma mére mourante Comme tes fils Caimaient d'un grand amour Dans ce Paris, en Van ral huie cent teen: Pour eux les docks, 'Autrichien, la rente Les mots de bourse étaient du pur hebrew, ‘Théodore de Banville, Ballade de ses regrets pour l'an 1830 PRELIMINARIES Few areas more clearly demonstrate the heuristic efficacy of relational thinking than that of art and literature. Constructing an object such as the literary field! requires and enables us to make a radical break with the substantialist mode of thought (as Ernst Cassirer calls it) which tends to foreground the individual, or the visible interactions between indi- viduals, at the expense of the structural relations invisible, or visible only through their effects — between social positions that are both occupied and manipulated by social agents which may be isolated individuals, groups or institutions.? There are in fact very few other areas in which the glorification of ‘great individuals’, unique creators irreducible to any condition or conditioning, is more common or uncontroversial — as one can see, for example, in the fact that most analysts uncritcally accept the division of the corpus that is imposed on thea by the names of authors (‘the work of Racine’) or the titles of works (Phédre or Bérénice). To take as one’s subject of study the literary ot artistic field of a given period and society (the field of Florentine painting in the quattrocento or the field of French literature in the Second Empire) isto set the history of art and literature a task which it never completely performs, because it fails to take iton explicitly, even when it does break out of the routine of 30 The Field of Cultural Production monographs which, however interminable, are necessarily inadequate (Since the essential explanation of each work lies outside each of them, in the objective relations which constitute this field). The task is that of constructing the space of positions and the space of the position-takings {prises de position] in which they are expressed. The science of the literary field is a form of analysis situs which establishes that each position ~ c.g. the one which corresponds to a gente such as the novel or, within this, to a sub-category such as. the ‘society novel” [roman mondain] ot the “populat’ novel — is subjectively defined by the system of distinctive properties by which it can be situated relative to other positions; that every position, even the dominant one, depends for its very existence, and for the determinations it imposes on its occupants, ‘on the other positions constituting the field and thatthe structure of the field, i.e. of the space of positions, is nothing other than the structure of stribution of the capital of specific properties which governs success in the field and the winning of the external or specific profits (such as literary prestige) which are at stake in the field. The space of literary or artistic position-takings, ie. the structured set of the manifestations of the social agents involved in the field = literary of artistic works, of course, but also political acts or pronouncements, manifestos or polemics, etc. ~is inseparable from the space of literary or artistic positions defined by possession of a determinate quantity of specific capital (recognition) and, at the same time, by occupation of a determinate position in the structure of the distribution of this specific capital. The literary or artistic field is a field of forces, but itis also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces. The network of objective relations between positions subtends and orients the strategies which the occupants of the different positions implement in theit struggles to defend or improve theit positions (ie. their position-takings), strategies which depend for their force and form ‘on the position each agent occupies in the power relations {rapports de force). Every position-taking is defined in relation to the space of possibles which is objectively realized as a problematic in the form of the actual or potential position-takings corresponding to the different positions; and it receives its distinctive value from its negative relationship with the coexistent position-takings ta which it is abjectively related and which determine it by delimiting i. Ie follows from this, for example, that a position-taking changes, even when the position remains identical, whenever there is change in the universe of options that are simulta neously offered for producers and consumers to choose from. The meaning of a work (artistic, literary, philosophical, etc.) changes The Field of Cultural Production 31 automatically with each change in the field within which itis situated for the spectator or reader. ‘This effect is most immediate in the case of so-called classic works, which change constantly as the universe of coexistent works chan This is seen clearly when the simple repetition of a work from the past in a radically tansformed field of compossibles produces an entirely automatic effect of parody (in the theatre, for example, this effect Fequies the performers to signal a slight distance from a text impossible to defend as it stands; it can also arise in the presentation of a work corresponding to one extremity of the field before an audience cor responding structurally to the other extremity — e.g. when an avant garde play is performed to a bourgeois audience, or the contrary, a5 ‘more often happens). Itis significant that breaks with the most orthodox works of the past, ie. with the belief they impose on the newcomers, often take the form of parody (intentional, this time), which presupposes and confirms emancipation. In this case, the newcomers “get beyond” ('dépassent'| the dominant mode of thought and expression not by explicitly derouncing it but by repeating and reproducing it in 4 sociologically non-congruent context, which has the effect of rendering it incongruous or even absurd, simply by making it perceptible as the arbitrary convention it is. This form of heretical break is particularly favoured by ex-believers, who use pastiche or parody as the indispens- able means of objectifying, and thereby appropriating, the form of thought and expression by which they were formerly possessed. ‘This explains why writers’ efforts to control the reception of their own works are always partially doomed to failure (one thinks of Marx's ‘I am ot a Marxist’ if only because the very effect of their work may transform the conditions ofits reception and because they would not have hhad to write many things they did write and write them as they did — eg. tesorting to rhetorical stcategies intended to ‘twist the stick in the othe direction’ ~ifthey had been granted from the outset what they are granted retrospectively. One of the major difficulties of the social history of philosophy, art or litcratuse iy that it has to reconstruct these spaces of original possibles which, because they were part of the self-evident givens of the situation, remained unremarked and are therefore unlikely to be mentioned in contemporary accounts, chronicles or memoirs. It is difficult to conceive ‘of the vast amount of information which is linked to membership of field and which all contemporaries immediately invest in their reading of 32 The Field of Cultural Production works: information about institutions — e.g. academies, journals, ma- gazines, galleries, publishers, etc. — and about persons, their relation- shipo, liaisons and quarrcls, information about the ideas and problems which are ‘in the air’ and circulate orally in gossip and rumour. (Some intellectual occupations presuppose a particular mastery of this informa- tion.) Ignorance of everything which goes to make up the ‘mood of the age’ produces a derealization of works: stripped of everything which attached them to the most concrete debates of theie time (I am thinking in particular of the connotations of words), they are impoverished and twansformed in the direction of intellectualism or an empty humanism. This is particularly true in the history of ideas, and especially of philosophy. Here the ordinary effects of derealization and intellectuali- zation are intensified by the representation of philosophical activity as a summit conference between ‘great philosophers’; in fact, what circulates between contemporary philosophers, or those of different epochs, are not only canonical texts, but a whole philosophical doxa carried along by intellectual rumour ~ labels of schools, truncated quotations, func- tioning as slogans in celebration or polemics - by academic routine and perhaps above all by school manuals (an unmentionable reference), which perhaps do more than anything else to constitute the ‘common sense’ of an intellectual generation. Reading, and a fortiori the reading of books, is only one means among others, even among professional readers, of acquiring the knowledge that is mobilized in reading. Te goes without saying shat, in both cases, change in the space of literary of artistic possibles isthe result of change in the power relation which constitutes the space of positions. When a new literary or artistic group makes its presence felt in the ficld of literary or artistic produc- tion, the whole problem is transformed, since its coming into being, i.e. into difference, modifies and displaces the universe of possible options; the previously dominant productions may, for example, be pushed into the status either of outmoded [déclassé} or of classic works. This theory differs fundamentally from all ‘systemic’ analyses of works of art based on transposition of the phonological model, since it refuses to consider the field of position-takings in itself and for itself, i.e. independently of the field of positions which it manifests. This is understandable when it is seen that it applies relational thinking not only to symbolic systems, whether language (like Saussure) or myth (like Levi-Strauss), or any set of symbolic objects, e.g. clothing, literary works, etc. (like all so-called ‘structuralist’ analyses), but also to the social relations of which these symbolic systems are a more or less transformed expression. Pursuing a logic that is entirely characteristic of symbolic structuralism, but realizing that no cultural product exists by itself, ie. outside the relations of interdependence which link it to other The Field of Cultural Production 33 products, Michel Foucault gives the name ‘field of strategic possibilities’ to the regulated system of differences and dispersions within which each individual work defines itself." But — and in Ui respect he is very close to semiologists such as Trier and the use they have made of the idea of the ‘semantic field’ —he refuses to look outside the ‘field of discourse’ for the principle which would cast light on each of the discourses within it: “Ifthe Physiocrats’ analysis belongs to the same discourses as that of the Urilitarians, this is not because they lived in the same petiod, not because they confronted one another within the same society, not because theit interests interlocked within the same economy, but because their two options sprang from one and the same distribution of the points of choice, one and the same strategic field.” In short, Foucault shifts on to the plane of possible position-takings the strategies which are generated and implemented on the sociological plane of positions; he thus refuses to relate works in any way to their social conditions of production, ie. to positions occupied within the field of cultural production, More precisely, he explicitly rejects as a ‘doxological illusion’ the endeavour to find in the ‘field of polemics’ and in ‘divergences of interests and mental habits’ between individuals the principle of what occurs in the ‘field of strategic possibilities’, which he sees as determined solely by the ‘strategic possibilities of the conceptual games’. Although there is no question of denying the specific determination exercised by the possibili- ties inscribed na given state of the space of position-takings — since one of the functions of the notion of the relatively autonomous field with its ‘own history is precisely to account for this — itis not possible, even in the case of the scientific field and the most advanced sciences, to make the cultural order {épist2me] a sort of autonomous, transcendent sphere, capable of developing in accordance with its own laws. ‘The same criticism applies to the Russian formalists, even in the interpretation put forward by Itamar Even-Zohar in his theory of the ‘literary polysrstem’, which seems closer to the reality of the text, if not to the logic of things, than the interpretation which structuralist readings (especially by Todorov) have imposed in France.‘ Refusing to consider anytaing other than the system of works, ie. the ‘network of relationships between texts’, or ‘intertextuality’, and the — very abstractly defined — relationships between this network and the other systems functioning in the ‘systcm-of-systems’ which constitutes the society (we arz close to Talcott Parsons}, these theoreticians of cultural semiology or culturology are forced to seck in the literary system itself the principle cf its dynamics. When they make the process of ‘banaliza- tion’ and ‘detanalization’ the fundamental law of poetic change and, ‘more generally, ofall cultural change, arguing that a ‘deautomatization’ rust necessary result from the ‘automatization’ induced by repetitive 34> The Field of Cultural Production use of the literary means of expression, they forget that the dialectic of orthodoxy which, in Weber's terms, favours a process of ‘routinization’, and of heresy, which ‘deroutinizes’, does not take place in the ethereal realm of ideas, and in the confrontation between ‘canonized’ and ‘non-canonized’ texts. More concretely, they forget that the existence, form and direction of change depend not only on the ‘state of the system’, ie, the ‘repertoire’ of possibilities which it offers, but also on the balance of forces between social agents who have entirely real interests in the different possibilities available to them as stakes and who deploy every sort of strategy to make one set ot the other prevail. When we speak of a field of position-takings, we are insisting that what can be constituted as a system for the sake of analysis is not the product of a coherence-seeking intention or an objective consensus (even if it presup poses unconscious agreement on common principles) but the product and prize of a permanent conflict; or, to put it another way, that the {gencrative, unifying principle of this ‘system’ isthe struggle, with all the contradictions it engenders (so that participation in the struggle - which may be-indicated objectively by, for example, the attacks that are suffered ~ can be used as the criterion establishing, that a work belongs to the field of position-takings and its author to the field of positions)” In defining the literary and artistic field as, inseparably, a field of positions and a field of position-takings we also escape from the usual dilemma of internal (‘tautegorical’) reading of the work (taken in isolation or within the system of works to which it belongs) and external (or ‘allegorical) analysis, i.e. analysis of the social conditions of production of the producers and consumers which is based on the — generally tacit ~ hypothesis of the spontaneous correspondence or deliberate matching of production to demand or commissions. And by the same token we escape from the correlative dilemma of the charisma- ‘ic image of artistic activity as pure, disinterested creation by an isolated artist, and the reductionist vision which claims to explain the act of production and its product in terms of their conscious or unconscious ‘external functions, by refercing them, for example, to the interests of the dominant class or, more subtly, co the ethical or aesthetic values of one of another of its fractions, from which the patrons or audiences are drawn, Here one might usefully point to the contribution of Becker who, to his

    You might also like