The Field of Cultural Production Essays on Art and Literature

paradigm: Emile Zola, 1902

How can sociology treat "culture" equally an object of study and as an influence on other sociological processes? This is, of grade, ii dissever questions. First, internally, is it possible to treat philosophy or literature as an embedded sociological process (a point raised by Jean-Louis Fabiani in his treatment of French philosophy (link))?  Tin we use the appliance to pull apart the sociology of the fashion manufacture?

And second, externally, can nosotros give a rigorous and meaningful interpretation of "bringing culture back in" -- conceptualizing the means that thought, experience, and the institutions and mental realities of culture impact other big social processes -- eastward.m. the rise of fascism (link)?

The problem hither is to detect ways of getting inside "culture" and decomposing it equally a set of social, material, and semiotic practices. Nosotros demand an account of some of the civilisation mechanisms through which voices develop, acquire validation, and are retransmitted. And we need concrete accounts of how this civilization activity influences other socially of import processes. Culture cannot exist thought of as a monolith if we are to explicate its evolution and trace out its historical influences; rather, we need something similar an business relationship of the microfoundations of civilisation.

Ane of the fertile voices on this question is that of Pierre Bourdieu.  His core contribution is the idea of cultural life and production beingness situated in a "field." So what does Bourdieu hateful past a field? Is this concept genuinely useful when nosotros aim at providing a sociology of a literary tradition or a torso of ideas like "cultural despair"?

Ane place where Bourdieu provides extensive analysis and application of this construct is in a collection published in 1993, The Field of Cultural Production, and especially in the title chapter, originally published in 1983. Here Bourdieu is primarily interested in literature and art, but it seems that the approach tin be applied fruitfully to a wide range of cultural phenomena, including American conservativism and early twentieth century German colonialism.  (George Steinmetz makes all-encompassing use of this concept of the field in his analysis of the causes of specific features of German colonial regimes; The Devil'south Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German language Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa.)

The heart of Bourdieu's approach is "relationality" -- the idea that cultural production and its products are situated and constituted in terms of a number of processes and social realities. Cultural products and producers are located inside "a space of positions and position-takings" (30) that constitute a fix of objective relations.

The infinite of literary or creative position-takings, i.e. the structured prepare of the manifestations of the social agents involved in' the field -- literary or artistic works, of class, just 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 aforementioned time, by occupation of a determinate position in the structure of the distribution of this specific upper-case letter. The literary or artistic field is a field of forces, but information technology is also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces. (30)

This description highlights some other characteristic feature of Bourdieu's arroyo to social life -- an intimate intermixture of objective and subjective factors, or of structure and agency.  (This intermixture is also fundamental to Bourdieu'south theory of practice in Outline of a Theory of Exercise.)  Bourdieu typically wants to help us understand a sociological whole equally a gear up of "doings" within "structures and powers." This is captured in the concluding judgement of the passage: a "field of forces" but also a "field of struggles". The field of the French novel in the 1890s established a fix of objective circumstances to which the novelist was forced to adapt; but it too created opportunities for strategy and struggle for aspiring novelists. And in fact, Emile Zola, pictured above, did much to redefine aspects of that field, both in ideas and in material institutions.

Fundamental to Bourdieu'southward view is that we can't empathise the work of art or literature (or philosophy or science, by implication) purely in reference to itself. Rather, it is necessary to situate the work in terms of other points of reference in meaning and practise. Then he writes that we can't understand the history of philosophy every bit a yard acme conference amidst the neat philosophers (32); instead, it is necessary to situate Descartes within his specific intellectual and practical context, and as well Leibniz. And the meaning of the piece of work changes as its points of reference shift. "Information technology 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 simultaneously offered for producers and consumers to choose from.  The significant of a work (artistic, literary, philosophical, etc.) changes automatically with each alter in the field within which it is situated for the spectator or reader" (30).

This fact of relationality and embeddedness raises serious bug of interpretation for later readers:

Ane of the major difficulties of the social history of philosophy, art or literature is that information technology has to reconstruct these spaces of original possibles which, because they were part of the cocky-evident givens of the situation, remained unremarked and are therefore unlikely to exist mentioned in contemporary accounts, chronicles or memoirs. (31)

Hither is how Bourdieu describes the intellectual field within which philosophy proceeds in a time and place:

In fact, what circulates between contemporary philosophers, or those of different epochs, are not just canonical texts, but a whole philosophical doxa carried along past intellectual rumour -- labels of schools, truncated quotations, operation as slogans in celebration or polemics -- by bookish routine and perhaps above all past school manuals (an unmentionable reference), which mayhap exercise more than anything else to constitute the 'mutual sense' of an intellectual generation. (32)

This background information is not merely semiotic; it is institutional and fabric equally well.  It includes "information nearly institutions -- eastward.g. academies, journals, magazines, galleries, publishers, etc. -- and about persons, their relationships, liaisons and quarrels, information about the ideas and problems which are 'in the air' and circulate orally in gossip and rumour" (32).  Then the literary production is created by the writer; merely as well past the field of noesis and institutions into which information technology is offered.

Another duality that Bourdieu rejects is that of internal versus external readings of a work of literature or art.  We tin can approach the work of art from both perspectives -- the qualities of the piece of work, and the social embeddedness that its production and reception reveal.

In defining the literary and artistic field as, inseparably, a field of positions and a field of position-takings we besides escape from the usual dilemma of internal ('tautegorical') reading of the work (taken in isolation or within the system of works to which information technology belongs) and external (or 'emblematic') analysis, i.e. analysis of the social conditions of production of the producers and consumers which is based on the -- mostly tacit -- hypothesis of the spontaneous correspondence or deliberate matching of production to demand or commissions. (34)

A primal attribute of Bourdieu's conception of a field of cultural production is the material facts of ability and capital. Uppercase here refers to the variety of resources, tangible and intangible, through which a writer or creative person tin further his/her creative aspirations and achieve "success" in the field ("book sales, number of theatrical performances, etc. or honours, appointments, etc." (38)). And power in the cultural field is "heteronomous" -- information technology is both internal to the institutions of the civilisation field and external, through the influence of the surrounding field of power inside which the culture field is located. Here is an intriguing diagram that Bourdieu introduces to stand for the complex location of art activity inside the broader field of social power and the market.

These comments give u.s.a. a better thought of what a "field" encompasses.  It is a zone of social activity in which there are "creators" who are intent on creating a certain kind of cultural production.  The product is defined, in part, by the expectations and values of the audience -- not simply the creator.  The audition is multiple, from specialist connoisseurs to the mass public.  And the production is supported and filtered by a range of overlapping social institutions -- galleries, academies, journals, reviews, newspapers, universities, patrons, sources of funding, and the market place for works of "culture."  It is also of import to notice that we could have begun this inventory of components at any betoken; the creator does not ascertain the field any more than the critic, the audition, or the marketplace.

I see some similarities between Bourdieu's formulation of a field and the broad ideas of image and research tradition in the history and sociology of science. Both ideas cover a range of different kinds of things -- laboratories, journals, audiences, critics, and writers and scientists. Here Lakatos and Kuhn are relevant, but so are Bruno Latour and Wiebe Bijker. In each case at that place is some notion of rules of cess -- explicit or tacit. And in each case we are given latitude enough to consider the social "determinants" of the cultural product at one stop -- economy, institutions of grooming and criticism -- and some notion of the relative autonomy of the text or object at the other (truth and warrant, beauty and bear on).

The bespeak mentioned above about the validity and compatibility of both internal and external analysis of a piece of work of art is equally important in the folklore of science: to place some of the social weather condition surrounding the process of scientific research does non mean that we cannot make it at judgments of truth and warrant for the products of scientific research. (This bespeak has come up up previously in a discussion of Robert Merton's folklore of science (link).)

This is a very incomplete analysis of Bourdieu's concept of the field; but it should give an idea of the leverage that Bourdieu provides in framing a scheme of assay for culture and ideas equally physical sociological factors and objects of report.  Certainly Bourdieu'south writings on these subjects -- especially in The Field of Cultural Production -- repay close reading past sociologists interested in broadening their frameworks for thinking about culture.  (Jeremy Lane's Pierre Bourdieu: A Disquisitional Introduction is a good introduction to Bourdieu'south folklore, though information technology doesn't give much attention to this particular topic.)

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Source: https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2011/02/bourdieus-field.html

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