Summary: Bourdieu 1993 – The Field of Cultural Production

Cultural products and producers are located within “a space of positions and position-takings” (30) that constitute a set of objective relations.’

Relationality: cultural production and its products are situated and constituted in terms of a number of processes and social realities.

• • we can’t understand the work of art purely in reference to itself. Rather, it is necessary to situate the work in terms of other points of reference in meaning and practice.
    • we can’t understand the history of philosophy as a grand summit conference among the great philosophers (32); instead, it is necessary to situate Descartes within his specific intellectual and practical context, and likewise Leibniz.

Background information is not merely semiotic; it is institutional and material as well.

• • It includes “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” (32).
    • The literary product is created by the author; but also by the field of knowledge and institutions into which it is offered.

Another duality that Bourdieu rejects is that of internal versus external readings of a work of literature or art.

• • We can approach the work of art from both perspectives — the qualities of the work, and the social embeddedness that its production and reception reveal.

A key aspect of Bourdieu’s conception of a field of cultural production is the material facts of power and capital.

Capital here refers to the variety of resources, tangible and intangible, through which a writer or artist can further his/her artistic aspirations and achieve “success” in the field (“book sales, number of theatrical performances, etc. or honours, appointments, etc.” (38)).

• • power in the cultural field is “heteronomous” — it is both internal to the institutions of the culture field and external, through the influence of the surrounding field of power within which the culture field is located.

A sociological whole as a set of “doings” within “structures and powers.” — a “field of forces” but also a “field of struggles”.

What a “field” encompasses:

• • a zone of social activity in which there are “creators” who are intent on creating a certain kind of cultural product.
  • The product is defined, in part, by the expectations and values of the audience — not simply the creator.
    • The audience is multiple, from specialist connoisseurs to the mass public.
• The product is supported and filtered by a range of overlapping social institutions
  • • galleries, academies, journals, reviews, newspapers, universities, patrons, sources of funding, and the market for works of “culture.”

• The creator does not define the field any more than the critic, the audience, or the marketplace.