The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed O Poésie, ô ma mere mourante Comme tes fils t'aimaient d'un grand amour Dans ce Paris, en ľan mil huit cent trente: Pour eux les docks, l'Autrichien, la rente Les mots de bourse étaient du pur hébreu. Theodore de Banville, Ballade de ses regrets pour ľan 1830 PRELIMINARIES \ Few areas more clearly demonstrate the heuristic efficacy o{r$lgtkmal_ I thinking than that of art and literature. Constructing an object such as , "tfieTiterary field1 requires and enables us to make a radical break with I the substantialist mode of thought (as Ernst Cassirer calls it) which tends $ to foreground the individual, or the visible interactions between indi-v viduals, at the expense of the structural relations - invisible, or visible only through their effects - between social positions that are both H occupied and manipulated by social agents which may be isolated %■ individuals, groups or institutions.2 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 uncritically accept the division of the corpus that is imposed on I them by the names of authors ('the work of Racine') or the titles of I works (Phedre or Berenice). To take as one's subject of study the literary or 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) is to set the history of 1 art and literature a task which it never completely performs, because it 1 fails to take it on 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 - e.g. the one which corresponds to a genre such as the novel or, within this, to a sub-category such as the 'society novel' [roman mondain] or the 'popular' novel — is subjectively defined by the system of distinctive properties by which it can be situated relative to other positions; that e^m^posiuon. even the dominant one, depends for its "very existence, and for the determinations it imposes on its occupants, ontneDther~positions constituting the field; and that the structure of the field, i.e. of the space of positions, is nothing other than the structure of the distribution of the rapital o£^sj3e^ufic_ propeTties 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, i.e. the structured set of the manifestations of the social agents involved in the field — literary or 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 it is 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 tJieirjstruggles to_ defena or jmproye their positions (jrp. 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 to which it is objectively related and which determine it by delimiting it. It 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 meaning of a work (artistic, literary, philosophical, etc.) changes The Field of Cultural Produ automatically with eaclicjTan^-injheJield-wiihin which it is situated for the spectatojj)r_reader. This effect is most immediate in the case of so-called classic works, which change constantly as the universe of coexistent wprks~changes. This is seen clearly when the simple repetition of a work from the past in a radically transformed field of compossibles produces an entirely automatic effect of parody (in the theatre, for example, this effect requires 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 corresponding structurally to the other extremity - e.g. when an avant-garde play is performed to a bourgeois audience, or the contrary, as more often happens). It is significant that breaks with the most orthodox works of the past, i.e. 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' [ldepassenf] the dominant mode of thought and expression not by explicitly denouncing it but by repeating and reproducing it in a 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 h^e^c^break_ is particularly favoured by ex-believers, who use pastiche or parody as the indispensable 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 not a Marxist'); if only because the very effect of their work may transform the conditions of its reception and because they would not have had to write many things they did write and write them as they did - e.g. resorting to rhetorical strategies intended to 'twist the stick in the other direction' - if they had been granted from the outset what they are granted retrospectively. One of the major difficulties of the social history of philosophy, art or literature is 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..unlikeJy to be mentionedTin contemporary accounts, chronicles or memoirs. It is difficult to conceive of the vast amount of inTormaTioh_wlircfrislinked to membership of a 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, 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. (Some intellectual occupations presuppose a particular mastery of this information.) 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 ofthjpir jim£ (I am thinking in particular of the connotations of words), they are impoverished and transformed 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, functioning 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, js_qnly _oriejne^ns amojng pthejrs, even among professional readers, of acquiring the knowledge that is mobilized in reading. It goes without saying that, in both cases,rch~ange]in the space of literary or artistic possibles is the result of cha_nge_in_the jgower relation which constitutes the space of positions. When a new literary or artistic group makes its presence felt in the field of literary or artistic production, 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 [declasse] 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 wluch 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, i.e. 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 difjferences-and dispersions within which each individual work-defines itself.3 But - and in this 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: 'If the Physiocrats' analysis belongs to the same discourses as that of the Utilitarians, this is not because they lived in the same period, not because they confronted one another within the same society, not because their interests interlocked within the samé economy, but because their two options sprang from one and the same distribution of the points of choice, one and the same strategic field.'4 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, i.e. 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'.5 Although there is no question of denying the specific determination exercised by the possibilities inscribed in a 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 - itjs not possible, even in the case of the scientific field and the most advanced sciences, to make the cultural qrderjepjísí^ 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 polysystem', which seems closer to the reality of the texts, if not to the logic of things, than the interpretation which structuralist readings (especially by Todorov) have imposed in France.6 Refusing to consider anything other than the system of works, i.e. the 'network of rdatjonships between texts', or 'intertextuality', and thtT^very abstractly defined - relationships between this network and the other systems functioning in the 'system-of-systems' which constitutes the society (we are close to Talcott Parsons), these theoreticians of cultural semiology or culturology are forced to seek in the literary system itself the principle of its dynamics/When they make the process of canalization' and 'debanalization' ^he^n^arn^ntajjayv. of poetic cha7ige~and7 Tnore generally, oí_aUjaú^x3\^l^S^.^?,u^nE that a 'deautomatization' must necessarily result from the 'automatization' induced by repetitive 4396 34 The Field of Cultural Production The Field of Cultural Production 35 use of the literary means of expression, they forget that the dialectic of orthodoxy which,ln Weber's terms, favours aprocess of ^routinization', and of heresy, whjch_'derc^idnizes^: does not take place in the ethereal reaTm~of ideas, and in the confrontation between..~'canonizedl_and 'non^cl^onized' texts. More concretely, they forget that the existence, form and direction of change depend not only on the 'state of the system', i.e. the 'repertoire' of possibilities which it offers, bufalso on 'tJSFjiStance ^ jgtces_between sociaj agents (who have entirely real interests in the different possibilities availableTo them as stakes and(who deploy every sort of strategy to make one set or the other prevail!)When we speak of a field of position-takings, we are insisting that wha't 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 tjtajjroduct \ and_p_rjze_of_a permanent conflict; or, to put it another way, that the generative, unifying prhidple^flhis 'system' is the 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).7 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 charismatic 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 referring them, for example, to the interests of the dominant class or, more subtly, to the ethical or aesthetic values of one or 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 credit, constructs artistic production as a collective action, breaking with the naive vision of the individual creator. For Becker, 'works of art can be understood by viewing thern as the result of the co-ordinated activities of all the people whose co-operation is necessary in order that the work should occur as it does'.8 Consequently the inquiry must extend to all those who contribute to this result, i.e. 'the people who conceive the idea of the work (e.g. composers or playwrights); people who execute it (musicians or actors); people who provide the necessary equipment and material (e.g. musical instrument makers); and people who make up the audience for the work (playgoers, critics, and so on)'.9 Without elaborating all the differences between this vision of the 'art world' and the theory of the literary and artistic field, suffice it to point out that the artistic field is not reducible to a population, i.e. a sum of individual agents, linked by simple relations of interaction - although the agents and the volume of the population of producers must obviously be taken into account (e.g. an increase in the number of agents engaged in the field has specific effects). But when we have to re-emphasize that the principle of position-takings lies in the structure and functioning of the field of positions, this is not done so as to return to any form of economism. There is a specific economy of the literary and artistic field, based on a particular form of (beliejfj And the major difficulty lies in the need to make a radical break with this belief and with the deceptive certainties of the language of celebration, without thereby forgetting that they are part of the very reality we are seeking to understand, and that, as such, they must have a place in the model intended to explain it. Like the science of religion, the science of art and literature is threatened by two opposite errors, which, being complementary, are particularly likely to occur since, in reacting diametrically against one of them, one necessarily falls into the other. The work of art is an object which exists as such only by virtue of the (collective) belief which knows and acknowledges it as a work of art. Consequently, in order to escape from the usual choice between celebratory effusions and the reductive analysis which, failing to take account of the fact of belief in the work of art and of the social conditions which produce that belief, destroys the work of art as such, a rigorous science of art must, pace both the unbelievers and iconoclasts and also the believers, assert the possibility and necessity of understanding the work in its reality as a fetish; it has to take into account everything which helps to constitute the work as such, not least the discourses of direct or disguised celebration which are among the social conditions of production of the work of art qua object of belief. r- The production of discourse (critical, historical, etc.) ab.qut._the work of L art is one of the-XODdirions...of production of the work. Every critical affirmation contains, on the one hand, a recognition of the value of the work which occasions it, which is thus designated as a worthy object of legitimate discourse (a recognition sometimes extorted by the logic of the 36 The Field of Cultural Production field, as when, for example, the polemic of the dominant confers participant status on the challengers), and on the other hand an affirmation of its own legitimacy. All critics declare not only their judgement of the work but also their claim to the right to talk about it and judge it. In short, they take part in a struggle for the monopoly of legitimate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the production of the value of the work of art. (And one's only hope of producing scientific knowledge -rather than weapons to advance a particular class of specific interests — is to make explicit to oneself one's position in the sub-field of the producers of discourse about art and the contribution of this field to the very existence of the object of study.) The Field of Cultural Produ JThe science of the social representation of art^and of the appropriate ref^timrtolvoTkTorart (in particular, through the social history of the process of autonomization of the intellectual and artistic field) is one of the prerequisites for the constitution of a rigorous science of art, because J3diefjn^heyji^ which is one of the major obstacles to the constitution of a science of artistic production, is part ofth^Jujlj^ality ojjjie work_fl£_a£t. There is in fact every reason to suppose that the constitution of the aesthetic gaze as a 'pure' gaze, capable of considering the work of art in and for itself, i.e. as a 'finality without an end', is linked to_the institution of the work of art as an object of contemplation, with the creation of private and then^ubTic~gallenes aTidlhusellmsTand the parallel development of a corps of professionals appointed to conserve the work of art, both materially and symbolically. Similarly, the representation of artistic production as a 'creation' devoid of any determination or any social function, though asserted from a very early date, achieves its fullest expression in the theories of 'art for art's sake'; and, correlatively, in the representation of the legitimate relation to the work of art as an act of 're-action' claiming to replicate the original creation and to focus solely on the work in and for itself, without any reference to anything outside it. The actual state of the science of works of art cannot be understood unless it is borne in mind that, whereas external analyses are always liable to appear crudely reductive, an internal reading, which establishes the charismatic, creator-to-creator relationship with the work that is demanded by the social norms of reception, is guaranteed social approval and reward. One of the effects of this charismatic conception of the relation to the work of art can be seen in the cult of the virtuoso which appeared in the late nineteenth century and which leads audiences to expect works to be performed and conducted from memory — which has the effect of limiting the repertoire and excluding avant-garde works, which are liable to be played only once.10 \TJTe_e^iujatiQjCLaL^ role in the generalized imposition of the legirifipflt^ rPn^e of CTICTOTptipn- Qpe reason for this is rFaTtrTe"ideology of 're-creation' and 'creative reading' supplies teachers - lectores assigned to commentary on the canonical texts - with a legitimate substitute for the ambition to act as auctores. This is seen most clearly in the case of philosophy, where the emergence of a body of professional teachers was accompanied by the development of a would-be autonomous science of the history of philosophy, and the propensity to read works in and for themselves (philosophy teachers thus tend to identify philosophy with the history of philosophy, i.e. with a pure commentary on past works, which are thus invested with a role exactly opposite to that of suppliers of problems and instruments of thought which they would fulfil for original thinking). Given that works of art exist as symbolic objects only_if they are known andjjecogmzjedL^^ sLatt. and" receivecTby spectators capable of knowing and recognizing them as such, the sociology of art and literature has to take as its object not only the rrm_eri.a]_pr^uctiQri_but also the symhohc_.pxoductipn. of the work, i.e. the production of the value of the work or, which amounts to the same thing, of belief in the value of the work. It therefore has to consider as contributing to production not only the direct producers of the work in its materiality (artist, writer, etc.) but also the (producers^ of~fhe~ meaning and value of the work; - critjcSj^u^H^shjrs^gallery directors anri the whole set of agents whose combined efforts produce consumers capable of knowing and recognizing the work of art as such, in particular teachers (but also families, etc.). So it has to take into account not only, as the sotiajhistory of art usually does, the social conditions of the production of artists, art critics, dealers, patrons, etc., as^revealed by indices such as sotiaj_ojrigin, education or qualifications, but also the social conditions of the production of a set of objects socially constituted as works of art, i.e.,the.conditions of production of the field of social ^agents (e.g. museums, galleries, academies, etc.) which help to define — and produce the value of works of art. In short, it is a question of understanding works of art as a manifestation of the field as a whole, in which all the powers of the field, and all the determinisms inherent in its structure and functioning, are concentrated. (See Figure 1.) THE FIELD OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND THE FIELD OF POWER In figure 1, the literary and artistic field (3) is contained within the field of power (2), while possessing a relative autonomy with respect to it, especially as regards its economic and political principles of hierarchiza- 4 38 The Field of Cultural Production Figure 1 paper c^M'-e tion. It occupies a dominated position (at the negative pole) in this field, which is itself situated at thj^ominanrpole of the field of class relations (1). It is thus the site of a\doubie hierarchy: the h^ele^olwm^uT^nriaple of hierarchization, which would reign unchallenged if, losing_all auttmomy, the literary and artistic field were to disappear as such (so that writers and artists became subject to the ordinary laws prevailing in the field of power, and more generally in the economic field), js success, as measured by indices such as book sales, number of theatrical performances, etc. or honours, appointments, etc. The autonomous principle of hierarchization, which would reign unchallenged if the field of production were to achieve total autonomy with respect to the lawspf, rthjjrmrket, is degree specific consecration (literary or artistic prestige), i.e. the degree of recognition a^corded"^ylhose who recognize no other criterion of legitimacy than recognition by those whom they recognize. In other words, the specificity of the literary and artistic field is defined The Field of Cultural Production 39 by the fact thatVhe more autonomous it is, i.e. the more completely it fulfils its own logic as a field, thg_more it tends to suspend or reverse the dominant principle of hiera£chjzadoh5 but also that, whatever its degree of independence, ft continues to be affected by the laws, of.the field which encompasses it, those of economicand pojitkajjprofit. The more autonomous the field becomes, the more favourable the symbolic power balance is to the most autonomous producers; and the more clear-cut is the division between the_fiMdLof_xei:jtricte.d_pro.ducji.on, in which the producers produce for other producers, and the field of large-scale production [la grande production], which is symbolically excluded and ' discredited (this symbolically dominant definition is the one that the historians of art and literature unconsciously adopt when they exclude from their object of study writers and artists who produced for the market and have often fallen into oblivion). Because it is a good measure of the degree of autonomy, and therefore of presumed adherence to the disinterested values which constitute the specific law of the field,j,dje,^, jv degree of public successes no doubt the main.differentiating factor. But lack ofsuccess is not in itself a sign and guarantee of election, and poetes maudits, like 'successful playwrights', must take account of a secondary^ differentiating factor whereby some poetes maudits may also be 'failed writers' (even if exclusive reference to the first criterion can help them to ft. ■ > • avoid realizing it), while some box-office successes may be recognizea\_ dH-Wt at least in some sectors of the field, as genuine art. Thus, at least in the most perfectly autonomous sector of the field of cultural production, where the only audience aimed at is other producers (as with Symbolist poetry), the economy of jpractices is based, as in a generalized game of 'loser wins', on a systematicTnversion of the fundamental principles of all ordinary" economies: that of business (it excludes the pursuit of profit and does not guarantee any sort of correspondence between investments and monetary gains), that of power (it condemns honours and temporal greatness), and even that of institutionalized 'cultural authority (the absence of any academic training or consecration may be considered a virtue). One would have to analyse in these terms the relations between writers or artists and publishers or gallery directors. The latter are equivocal figures, through whom the logic of the economy is brought Jo die_h.ea^t^fjhe__ subTield of r^oducuoji^r^f^ they need to possess, simul- taneously, economic dispositions which, in some sectors of the field, are totally alien to the producers and also properties close to those of the producers whose work they valorize and exploit. The logic of the structural homologies between the field of publishers or gallery directors and the field of the corresponding artists or writers does indeed mean that 1/ 911291 40 The Field of Cultural Production the former present properties close to those of the latter, and this favours the relationship of trust and belief which is the basis of an exploitation presupposing a high degree of misrecognition on each side. These 'merchants in the temple' make their living by tricking the artist or writer into taking the consequences of his or her statutory professions of disinterestedness. This explains the inability of all forms of economism, which seek to grasp this anti-economy in economic terms, to understand this upside-down economic world. The literary and artistic world is so ordered that those who enter it have an interest in disinterestedness. And indeed, like prophecy, especially the prophecy of misfortune, which, according to Weber, demonstrates its authenticity by the fact that it brings in no income, a heretical break with the prevailing artistic traditions proves its claim to authenticity by its disinterestedness.11 As we shall see, this does not mean that there is not an economic logic to this charismatic economy based on the social miracle of an act devoid of any determination other than the specifically aesthetic intention. There are economic conditions for the indifference to economy which induces a pursuit of the riskiest positions in the intellectual and artistic avant-garde, and also for the capacity to remain there over a long period without any economic compensation. The Struggle for the Dominant Principle of Hierarchization The literary or artistic field is at all times the site of a struggle between the two principles of hierarchization: the heteronomous principle, favourable to those who dominate the field economically and politically (e.g. 'bourgeois art') and the autonomous principle (e.g. 'art for art's sake'), which those of its advocates who are least endowed with specific capital tend to identify with degree of independence from the economy, seeing temporal failure as a sign of election and success as a sign of compromise.12 The state of the power relations in this struggle depends on the overall degree of autonomy possessed by the field, that is, the extent to which it manages to impose its own norms and sanctions on the whole set of producers, including those who are closest to the dominant pole of the field of power and therefore most responsive to external demands (i.e. the most heteronomous); this degree of autonomy varies considerably from one period and one national tradition to another, and affects the whole structure of the field. Everything seems to indicate that it depends on the value which the specific capital of writers and artists represents for the dominant fractions, on the one hand in the The Field of Cultural Production 41 struggle to conserve the established otder and, perhaps especially, in the struggle between the fractions aspiring to domination within the field of power (bourgeoisie and aristocracy, old bourgeoisie and new bourgeoisie, etc.), and on the other hand in the production and reproduction of economic capital (with the aid of experts and cadres).13 All the evidence suggests that, at a given level of overall autonomy, intellectuals are, other things being equal, proportionately more responsive to the seduction of the powers that be, the less well endowed they are with 0' specific capital.14 The struggle in the field of cultural production over the imposition of the legitimate mode of cultural production is inseparable from the struggle within the dominant class (with the opposition between 'artists' and 'bourgeois') to impose the dominant principle of domination (that is to say - ultimately - the definition of human accomplishment). In this struggle, the artists and writers who are richest in specific capital and most concerned for their autonomy are considerably weakened by the fact that some of their competitors identify their interests with the dominant principles of hierarchization and seek to impose them even within the field, with the support of the temporal powers. The most heteronomous cultural producers (i.e. those with least symbolic capital) can offer the least reistance to external demands, of whatever sort. To k defend their own position, they have to produce weapons, which the dominant agents (within the field of power) can immediately turn against the cultural producers most attached to their autonomy. In endeavouring to discredit every attempt to impose an autonomous principle of hierarchization, and thus serving their own interests, they serve the interests of the dominant fractions of the dominant class, who ; obviously have an interest in there being only one hierarchy. In the struggle to impose the legitimate definition of art and literature, the most autonomous producers naturally tend to exclude 'bourgeois' writers and artists, whom they see as 'enemy agents'. This means, incidentally, that sampling problems cannot be resolved by one of those arbitrary decisions of positivist ignorance which are dignified by the term 'operational definition': these amount to blindly arbitrating on ; debates which are inscribed in reality itself, such as the question as to whether such and such a group ('bourgeois' theatre, the 'popular' novel, etc.) or such and such an individual claiming the title of writer or artist (or philosopher, or intellectual, etc.) belongs to the population of writers or artists or, more precisely, as to who is legitimately entitled to designate legitimate writers or artists. The preliminary reflections on the definitions of the object and the boundaries of the population, which studies of writers, artists and, especially, intellectuals, often indulge in so as to give themselves an air of 42 The Field of Cultural Production scientificity, ignore the fact, which is more than scientifically attested, that the definition of the writer (or artist, etc.) is an issue at stake in struggles in every literary (or artistic, etc.) field.is In other words, the field of cultural production is the site of struggles in which what is at stake is the power to impose the dominant definition of the writer and therefore to delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the struggle to define the writer. The established definition of the writer may be radically transformed by an enlargement of the set of people who have a legitimate voice in literary matters. It follows from this that every survey aimed at establishing the hierarchy of writers predetermines the hierarchy by determining the population deemed worthy of helping to establish it. In short, the fundamental stake in literary struggles is the monopoly of literary legitimacy, i.e., inter alia, the monopoly of the power to say with authority who are authorized to call themselves writers; or, to put it another way, it is the monopoly of the power to consecrate producers or products (we are dealing with a world of belief and the consecrated writer is the one who has the power to consecrate and to win assent when he or she consecrates an author or a work — with a preface, a favourable review, a prize, etc.). While it is true that every literary field is the site of a struggle over the definition of the writer (a universal proposition), the fact remains that scientific analysts, if they are not to make the mistake of universalizing the particular case, need to know that they will only ever encounter historical definitions of the writer, corresponding to a particular state of the struggle to impose the legitimate definition of the writer. There is no other criterion of membership of a field than the objective fact of producing effects within it. One of the difficulties of orthodox defence against heretical transformation of the field by a redefinition of the tacit or explicit terms of entry is the fact that polemics imply a form of recognition; adversaries whom one would prefer to destroy by ignoring them cannot be combated without consecrating them. The 'Theatre libre' effectively entered the sub-field of drama once it came under attack from the accredited advocates of bourgeois theatre, who thus helped to produce the recognition they sought to prevent. The 'nouveaux philosophies' came into existence as active elements in the philosophical field -and no longer just that of journalism - as soon as consecrated philosophers felt called upon to take issue with them. The boundary of the field is a stake of struggles, and the social scientist's task is not to draw a dividing line between the agents involved in it by imposing a so-called operational definition, which is most likely to be imposed on him by his own prejudices or presuppositions, but to describe a state (long-lasting or temporary) of these struggles and therefore of the frontier delimiting the territory held by the competing The Field of Cultural Production 43 agents. One could thus examine the characteristics of this boundary, which may or may not be institutionalized, that is to say, protected by conditions of entry that are tacitly and practically required (such as a certain cultural capital) or explicitly codified and legally guaranteed (e.g. all the forms of entrance examination aimed at ensuring a numerus clausus). It would be found that one of the most significant properties of the field of cultural production, explaining its extreme dispersion and the conflicts between rival principles of legitimacy, is the extreme permeability of its frontiers and, consequently, the extreme diversity of the 'posts' it offers, which defy any unilinear hierarchization. It is clear from comparison that the field of cultural production demands neither as much inherited economic capital as the economic field nor as much educational capital as the university sub-field or even sectors of the field of power such as the top civil service - or even the field of the 'liberal professions'.16 However, precisely because it represents one of the indeterminate sites in the social structure, which offer ill-defined posts, waiting to be made rather than ready made, and therefore extremely elastic and undemanding, and career paths which are themselves full of uncertainty and extremely dispersed (unlike bureaucratic careers, such as those offered by the university system), it attracts agents who differ greatly in their properties and dispositions but the most favoured of whom are sufficiently secure to be able to disdain a university career and to take on the risks of an occupation which is not a 'job' (since it is almost always combined with a private income or a 'bread-and-butter' occupation). The 'profession' of writer or artist is one of the least professionalized there is, despite all the efforts of 'writers' associations', 'Pen Clubs', etc. This is shown clearly by [inter alia) the problems which arise in classifying these agents, who are able to exercise what they regard as their main occupation only on condition that they have a secondary occupation which provides their main income (problems very similar to those encountered in classifying students). The most disputed frontier of all is the one which separates the field of cultural production and the field of power. It may be more or less clearly marked in different periods, positions occupied in each field may be more or less totally incompatible, moves from one universe to the other more or less frequent and the overall distance between the corresponding populations more or less great (e.g. in terms of social origin, educational background, etc.). 44 The Field of Cultural Production The Field of Cultural Production 45 The Effect of the Homologies The field of cultural production produces its most important effects j through the play of the homologies between the fundamental opposition ( which" gives the field its structure and the oppositions sttucturing the \ field of power and the field of class relations.17 These homologies may give rise to ideological effects which are produced automatically whenever oppositions at different levels are superimposed or merged. They are also the basis of partial alliances: the struggles within the field of power are never entirely independent of the struggle between the dominated classes and the dominant class, and the logic of the homologies between the two spaces means that the struggles going on within the inner field are always overdetermined and always tend to aim at two birds with one stone. The cultural producers, who occupy the econo-i micajlyjiom^ | of cultural production,_te_nd tofeel solidarity with the oc^p^ntsof_the \ economically and cuhurafiy dominated positions within "thelleld of class \ relations. Such alliances, basecTonHEom^iogies ofposition combined with profound differences in condition, are not exempt from misunderstandings and even bad faith. The structural affinity between the literary avant-garde and the political vanguard is the basis of rapprochements, between intellectual anarchism and the Symbolist movement for example, in which convergences are flaunted (e.g. Mallarme referring to a book as an 'attentat' - an act of terrorist violence) but distances prudently maintained. The fact remains that the cultural producers are able to use the power conferred on them, especially in periods of crisis, by their capacity to put forward a critical definition of the social world, to mobilize the potential strength of the dominated classes and subvert the order prevailing in the field of power. The effects of homology are not all and always automatically granted. Thus whereas the dominant fractions, in their relationship with the dominated fractions, are on the side of nature, common sense, practice, instinct, the upright and the male, and also order, reason, etc., they can no longer bring certain aspects of this representation into play in their relationship with the dominated classes, to whom they are opposed as culture to nature, reason to instinct. They need to draw on what they are offered by the dominated fractions, in order to justify their class domination, to themselves as well. The cult of art and the artist (rather than of the intellectual) is one of the necessary components of the bourgeois 'art of living', to which it brings a 'supplement d'ame', its spiritualistic point of honour. Even in the case of the seemingly most heteronomous forms of cultural production, such as journalism, adjustment to demand is not the product of a conscious arrangement between producers and consumers. It results from the correspondence between the space of the producers, and therefore of the products offered, and the space of the consumers, which is brought about, on the basis of the homology between the two spaces, only through the competition between the /producers and through the strategies imposed by the correspondence \ between the space of possible position-takings and the space of positions. In other words, by obeying the logic of the objective competition between mutually exclusive positions within the field, the various categories of producers tend to supply products adjusted to the expectations of the various positions in the field of power, but without any conscious striving for such adjustment. If the various positions in the field of cultural production can be so S easily characterized in terms of the audience which corresponds to them, this is because the encounter between a work and its audience (which may be an absence of immediate audience) is, strictly speaking, a coincidence which is not explained either by conscious, even cynical adjustment (though there are exceptions) or by the constraints of commission and demand. Rather, it results from the homology between positions occupied in the space of production, with the correlative a position-takings, and positions in the space of consumption; that is, in this case, in the field of power, with the opposition between the ... dominant and the dominated fractions, or in the field of class relations, with the opposition between the dominant and the dominated classes. In the case of the relation between the field of cultural production and the field of power, we are dealing with an almost perfect homology between two chiastic structures. Just as, in the dominant class, economic capital v increases as one moves from the dominated to the dominant fractions, whereas cultural capital varies in the opposite way, so too in the field of cultural production economic profits increase as one moves from the 'autonomous' pole to the 'heteronomous' pole, whereas specific profits increase in the opposite direction. Similarly, the secondary opposition ; which divides the most heteronomous sector into 'bourgeois art' and 'industrial' art clearly corresponds to the opposition between the dominant and the dominated classes.18 THE STRUCTURE OF THE FIELD Heteronomy arises from demand, which may take the form of personal commission (formulated by a 'patron' in Haskell's sense of a protector 11 46 The Field of Cultural Production The Field of Cultural Production 47 or client) or of the sanction of an autonomous market, which may be anticipated or ignored. Within this logic, the relationship to the audience and, more exactly, economic or political interest in the sense of interest in success and in the related economic or political profit, constitute one of the bases for evaluating the producers and their products. Thus, strict application of the autonomous principle of hierarchization means that producers and products will be distinguished according to their degree of success with the audience, which, it tends to be assumed, is evidence of their interest in the economic and political profits secured by success. The duality of the principles of hierarchization means that there are few fields (other than the field of power itself) in which the antagonism between the occupants of the polar positions is more total (within the limits of the interests linked to membership of the field of power). Perfectly illustrating the distinction between relations of interaction and the structural relations which constitute a field, the polar individuals may never meet, may even ignore each other systematically, to the extent of refusing each other membership of the same class, and yet their practice remains determined by the negative relation which unites them. It could be said that the agents involved in the literary or artistic field may, in extreme cases, have nothing in common except the fact of taking part in a struggle to impose the legitimate definition of literary or artistic production.19 The hierarchy by degree of real or supposed dependence on audience, success or the economy itself overlaps with another one, which reflects the degree of specific consecration of the audience, i.e. its 'cultural' quality and its supposed distance from the centre of the specific values. Thus, within the sub-field of production-for-producers, which recognizes only the specific principle of legitimacy, those who are assured of the recognition of a certain fraction of the other producers, a presumed index of posthumous recognition, are opposed to those who, again from the standpoint of the specific criteria, are relegated to an inferior position and who, in accordance with the model of heresy, contest the legitimation principle dominant within the autonomous sub-field, either in the name of a new legitimation principle or in the name of a return to an old one. Likewise, at the other pole of the field, that of the market and of economic profit, authors who manage to secure 'high-society' successes and bourgeois consecration are opposed to those who are condemned to so-called 'popular' success - the authors of rural novels, music-hall artists, chansonniers, etc. The Duality of Literary Hierarchies and Genres In the second half of the nineteenth century, the period in which the literary field attained its maximum autonomy, these two hierarchies seem to correspond, in the first place, to the specifically cultural hierarchy of the genres - poetry, the novel and drama - and secondarily to the hierarchy of ways of using them which, as is seen clearly in the case of the theatre and especially the novel, varies with the position of . the audiences reached in the specifically cultural hierarchy. The literary field is itself defined by its position in the hierarchy of the arts, which varies from one period and one country to another. Here one can only allude to the effect of the hierarchy of the arts and in particular to the dominance which poetry, an intellectual art, exerted until the sixteenth century over painting, a manual art,20 so that, for example, the hierarchy of pictorial genres tended to depend on their distance - as regards the subject and the more or less erudite manner of treating it - from the most elaborate model of poetic discourse. It is well known that throughout the I nineteenth century, and perhaps until Duchamp, the stereotype which 1 relegated the painter to a purely manual genre ('stupid as a painter') persisted, despite the increasing exchange of symbolic services (partly, no ■ doubt, because the painters were generally less rich in cultural capital than | the writers; we know, for example, that Monet, the son of a Le Havre I grocer, and Renoir, the son of a Limoges tailor, were much intimidated in I the meetings at the Cafe Guerbois on account of their lack of education). I In the case of the field of painting, autonomy had to be won from the I literary field too, with the emergence of specific criticism and above all the I will to break free from the writers and their discourse by producing an intrinsically polysemic work beyond all discourse, and a discourse about the work which declares the essential inadequacy of all discourse. The ■ history of the relations between Odilon Redon and the writers - especially Huysmans - shows in an exemplary way how the painters had to fight for | autonomy from the litterateur who enhances the illustrator by advancing I himself, and to assert the irreducibility of the pictorial work (which the I professional critic is more ready to recognize).21 The same logic can be I used to analyse the relations between the composers and the poets: the i concern to use without being used, to possess without being possessed, led some composers (Debussy, for example) to choose to set mediocre texts which would not eclipse them. From the economic point of view, the hierarchy is simple and relatively stable, despite cyclical fluctuations telated to the fact, for example, that the more economically profitable the various genres, the more strongly and directly they are affected by recession.22 At the top of the hierarchy is drama, which, as all observers note, secures big profits -provided by an essentially bourgeois, Parisian, and therefore relatively restricted, audience - for a very few producers (because of the small number of theatres). At the bottom is poetry, which, with a few, very rare exceptions (such as a few successes in verse drama), secures 48 The Field of Cultural Production virtually zero profit for a small number of producers. Between the two is the novel, which can secure big profits (in the case of some naturalist novels), and sometimes very big profits (some 'popular' novels), for a relatively large number of producers, from an audience which may extend far beyond the audience made up of the writers themselves, as in the case of poetry, and beyond the bourgeois audience, as in the case of theatre, into the petite bourgeoisie or even, especially through municipal libraries, into the 'labour aristocracy'. From the point of view of the symbolic hierarchies, things are less simple since, as can be seen from Figure 2, the hierarchies according to distance from profits are intersected by hierarchies internal to each of the genres (i.e. according to the degree to which the authors and works conform to the specific demands of the genre), which correspond to the social hierarchy of the audiences. This is seen particularly clearly in the case of the novel, where the hierarchy of specialities corresponds to the hierarchy of the audiences reached and also, fairly strictly, to the hierarchy of the social universes represented. The complex structure of this space can be explained by means of a simple model taking into account, on the one hand, the properties of the different arts and the different genres considered as economic enterprises (price of the product, size of the audience and length of the economic cycle) and, on the other hand, the negative relationship which, as the field increasingly imposes its own logic, is established between symbolic profit and economic profit, whereby discredit increases as the audience grows and its specific competence declines, together with the value of the recognition implied in the act of consumption. The different kinds of cultural enterprise vary, from an economic standpoint, in terms of the unit price of the product (a painting, a play, a concert, a book, etc.) and the cumulative number of purchasers; but they also vary according to the length of the production cycle, particularly as regards the speed with which profits are obtained (and, secondarily, the length of time during which they are secured). It can be seen that, although the opposition between the short cycle of products which sell rapidly and the long cycle of products which sell belatedly or slowly is found in each of the arts, they differ radically in terms of the mode of profit acquisition and therefore, because of the connection that is made between the size of the audience and its social quality, in terms of the objective and subjective relationship between the producer and the market. There is every difference between painters who, even when they set themselves in the avant-garde, can expect to sell to a small number of connoisseurs (nowadays including museums) works whose value derives •■a « o -g III + a C K s 5 8 £ O C v 3 -a c o -a to K .8 "3 *> «C c >, § II is * St 60