The Rules of Art by PIERRE BOURDIEU

Author:PIERRE BOURDIEU [BOURDIEU, PIERRE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Exclusive attention to functions (which the internalist tradition, and in particular structuralism, were undoubtedly wrong to neglect) tends to ignore the question of the internal logic of cultural objects, their structure as language, to which the structuralist tradition gives exclusive attention. More profoundly, it leads to an omission of the agents and institutions which produce these objects – priests, jurists, writers or artists – and for whom they also fulfil functions which are defined, essentially, within the universe of producers. Max Weber has the merit of illuminating, in the particular case of religion, the role of specialists and their own interests; however, he always remains enclosed in the Marxist logic of research into functions which (even when precisely formulated) do not teach us very much about the structure of the religious message itself. But, above all, Weber does not perceive that the universes of specialists function like relatively autonomous microcosms, structured spaces (hence spaces amenable to structural analysis, but of another type) of objective relations between positions – that of the prophet and that of the priest or that of the consecrated artist and that of the avant-garde artist, for example. These relations are the true principle of the position-takings of different producers, of the competition which pits them against each other, of the alliances they form, of the works they produce or defend.

The efficacy of external factors, economic crises, technical transformations, political revolutions, or quite simply social demand on the part of a particular category of patrons, of which traditional social history seeks the direct manifestation in the works, can only be exercised by the intermediary of the transformations of the structure of the field which these factors may determine.

One may, by way of an illuminating analogy, evoke the notion of ‘the Republic of Letters’ and recognize in the description offered by Bayle several of the fundamental properties of the literary field (the war of all against all, the closing in of the field upon itself, etc.): ‘Liberty is what reigns in the Republic of Letters. This Republic is an extremely free state. In it the only empire is that of truth and reason; and under their auspices, war is naively waged against just about anybody. Friends must be on their guard against friends, fathers against children, fathers-in-law against sons-in-law: it is a century of iron [. . .]. In it everyone is both sovereign and accountable to everyone else.’50 But, as the half-positive, half-normative tone of this literary evocation of the literary milieu shows, this is a notion of spontaneous sociology and in no way a constructed concept and it has never provided a foundation for a rigorous analysis of the functioning of the literary world or for the methodical interpretation of the production and circulation of works (as those who rediscover it today would have us believe). In addition, this image (useful only because it spots a true structural homology, as ordinary intuition often does) can become dangerous if it leads to ignoring everything, beyond the analogies

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