The Field of Cultural Production

by Pierre Bourdieu, Randal Johnson (Editor)

During the last two decades, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has become a dominant force in cultural activity ranging from taste in music and art to choices in food and lifestyles.

The Field of Cultural Production brings together Bourdieu's major essays on art and literature and provides the first introduction to Bourdieu's writings and theory of a cultural field that situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption.

Bourdieu develops a highly original approach to the study of literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary art and cultural criticism in the last twentieth century: aesthetic value and canonicity, intertextuality, the institutional frameworks of cultural practice, the social role of intellectuals and artists, and structures of literary and artistic authority.

Bourdieu elaborates a theory of the cultural field which situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: not only the writers and artists, but also the publishers, critics, dealers, galleries, and academies. He analyzes the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power.

The essays in his volume examine such diverse topics as Flaubert's point of view, Manet's aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power.

The Field of Cultural Production will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art, and cultural studies.

Genres: Sociology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Art, Cultural Studies, Cultural

332 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.

Bourdieu rejected the idea of the intellectual "prophet", or the "total intellectual", as embodied by Sartre. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency).

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book on a perfect day a year or so ago with a friend who talked me into getting it at the second-hand book dealers they have at Federation Square on Saturday mornings. I wasn’t going to get it, because I have so many books and I had no idea when (or even if) I would ever get around to reading it. And now I can’t finish it. Not because it isn’t good – it is very, very good. But I haven’t ever read Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education and you need to have read that before reading his lectures which make up a big part of the middle of the book.

The editor’s introduction to this one is a must read – one of the best introductions to Bourdieu I’ve seen so far. The person who read this book before me only read that part of the book – you can tell from the state of the rest of the paperback and also the extensive underlinings and so on in this intro, but no where else. I’ve read all of the first part – but haven’t gone much further than that.

To have any hope of understanding Bourdieu you have to really understand four main ideas. These are: field, habitus, his various forms of capital and his notion of symbolic violence. You could possibly argue that there are others – such as misrecognition, but I’m lumping that under symbolic violence.

So, let’s start with defining those as if they could be separated out – which, naturally enough, they can’t.

We seem to like sporting metaphors – Bourdieu particularly seems to like them – so you can think of field as a sporting field. In sports players take up respective positions on fields that require them to have particular roles. A goalkeeper and a striker (and we are at the very edge of my knowledge of soccer already) have very different (virtually opposite) roles. But one implies the other – a field is where these roles both make sense and become necessary. And this doesn’t only apply to sport – but we have academic, economic, legal, medical, educational, political fields, and so on. If you like, these fields are where the games of life are played out.

Habitus is also best described by a sporting metaphor – Bourdieu called it a ‘feel for the game’. If you are like me – somewhat crap at sports – you may have had this experience. You’ve been watching professionals playing something and then you have decided to have a go yourself. The first thing you learn is that all of the things the professional made look incredibly simple are actually insanely difficult. When they made it look like the ball was tied to their feet with a piece of string, we make it look like the ball and our feet are not just strangers, but actually enemies. Habitus, as the name implies, are the habits we acquire over our lifetime that allow us to play certain games without needing to think. Habitus is also a series of dispositions we acquire throughout life, like preferring tea to coffee, or Japanese to Chinese food. These look a bit like ‘individual tastes’ – except Bourdieu was able to show in his book Distinction (something I will read someday) that our tastes are in fact not random and subjective, but in great part a response to where we fit within various social fields. You know, a real estate agent and a professor might both earn about the same amount of money per year – but if you were told that one has a season ticket to the opera and the other owns a jet ski and had to guess which was which … now, it isn’t unimaginable that a professor might own a jet ski, but if I was a betting man…

What is interesting here is that habitus is a verb, rather than a noun. You aren’t a habitus, in the way you might be a lawyer or a doctor or a plumber – a habitus is what you do and it is what you do automatically. A habitus is also relational, it is what you do in relation to what other people do (in the sense that your habitus sets you apart from other people). Habitus is also what makes you not be able to understand other people, because your habitus appears to you to be both natural and inevitable. So, when other people don’t share your habitus it is hard not to think they are somehow less than human.

Habitus is very strongly related to Bourdieu’s ideas of social and cultural capital. Capital is also a metaphor here – one borrowed from economics. He is certainly not saying, as some Marxists might, that everything is fundamentally economic in nature. In fact, he is saying almost the exact opposite. What is interesting about capital is that it accumulates and it is defined in exchange. I really do need to stress the relational nature of all of these ideas – even field, which more than anything seems like a thing. That is the key to understanding Bourdieu, I think. There are relationships between fields and there are relationships within fields and it is the relationships that matter – that make sense. Bourdieu is a philosopher of difference, I think. He is often presented as someone who over-stresses the continuities – who stresses how fields resist change. But in some ways he is also stressing the opposite of this. When people arrive in a field from which they have been previously excluded they bring with them a habitus that is in contradiction to the habitus that has been used to maintain that field up until their arrival. A large part of the point of a habitus that develops in a particular field is to keep outsiders out. Often this means these strangers either develop the habitus of the field or they are forced to move on. But sometimes this is not the case. Sometimes, like 1968 in the universities in Paris, enough people from outside the field and lacking the standard habitus arrive and they force change in the field that is unpredictable.

Social capital, cultural capital and financial capital are often related, but they are certainly not identical. People have differing levels of each depending on a range of factors. As someone explained the distinction to me once: social capital is having friends that can tell you about a job you should think about applying for – cultural capital is knowing to wear a suit and what to say in the interview that gets you the job. Like habitus, these skills are generally outside of our conscious awareness, they seem natural, rather than acquired. Clearly, there is a relationship between field and habitus – but as Bourdieu points out here, “There is nothing mechanical about the relationship between the field and the habitus” (page 65).

Symbolic violence is interesting, mostly because you need to know something else to understand it, I think. The key idea is that to keep someone in their place – particularly when that place denies them access to things other people in society take pretty much for granted – requires some sort of violence. In some societies in the past, take the US with slavery, for example, that violence was literal. A large section of the society was denied access to the rights and privileges that were assumed for other sections of society. To ensure this the literal violence of the state was required, all the way up to hangings. Today this same effect can be achieved with a much more limited access to literal violence. That sections of the Australian population are denied access to quality education, for example, is not enforced by men with guns in the streets, but rather by a system of symbolic representations that make this situation appear ‘natural’. We do this by reference to ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ – but the effect is the same as when differential privilege was decided by force. People are still denied access to rights and privileges although mostly through misrecognition of particular symbols.

So, what’s all this got to do with culture and the cultural field? Part of what Bourdieu is interested in here is the fact that the cultural field can be quite different from the economic field. This is particularly true of high culture. He takes the social and cultural locations of various writers as a case in point. Except, as we’ve already seen, writers aren’t really what we are looking at. You see, we like to think of the cultural field as being made up of outstanding individuals living lives that are authentic to their visions and consistent with their vocation (their calling). But books and artworks never spring out of nothing or from no where, certainly not from an author on a mountaintop – despite Nietzsche’s most famous book. There are publishers and editors and bookshops and critics and reviewers – all and each of which play a role in creating a classic or best seller. You don’t just pop some words on paper and have a best seller suddenly appear, even though you might get your name and only your name and no one else's on the cover.

This field is interesting too because, as in a football field, there are various but limited positions available. And each requires the person that would take that position on the field to have certain skills and abilities – or habitus, really – and certain cultural and social capital.

Part of what is done here is to compare poets from the 19th century with novelists and playwrights from the same time. What is found is that poets tend to have come from wealthy backgrounds or at least, did not require poetry as their day job. This meant that they did not require money from their writing in order to eat. As you move down the social scale and writing becomes more and more a means of feeding oneself, writing also becomes increasingly popular - it needs to appeal to a wider audience. He discusses various French poets who became novelists and points out that no novelist was considered a better artist than the lowest poets. The poets did not make money from their poetry over the short-term, and this was seen as a badge of honour. In this way it is the opposite of the economic field – here economic failure is a kind of success. The last thing you want is to be read by the masses, at least over the short term – as that would mean you have been brought down to their level.

But the field is in constant flux. The old school are reactionary, they want their books and artworks to be constantly fresh and on the cutting edge. But as they become entrenched a new generation comes who need to knock them out of their place. To do this they must occupy alternative places on the field of cultural production. Amusingly, Bourdieu even says that they might revert to the interests of their grandfathers so as to overthrow their fathers.

There is an interesting discussion of Duchamp – you know, taking ready-made objects (a men’s urinal as the typical example) signing it and thereby turning it into an artwork. Or of signing people and turning them into living artworks. Here your location within the field must exist prior to this particular game being played. If I were to sign a can of beans it would still just be a can of beans with my signature on it, I suspect, rather than a work of art.

The same is true of critics – as Bourdieu says at one point, “in accordance with the law that one only ever preaches to the converted, a critic can only ‘influence’ his readers in so far as they extend to him this power because they are structurally attuned to him in their view of the social world, their tastes and their whole habitus.” (page 96)

The fact that the high end of the art market seems to operate in a way opposite to the economic field – a kind of less-is-more field – is tied to the educational field too. Education develops the tastes and preferences we will have – and therefore gives us access to certain aesthetic tastes that would be simply not available to us otherwise. A lot of art requires a depth of understanding that simply doesn’t come from a quick glance. You don’t get to read The Waste Land once, for instance, and really get all that much out of it. You need to have spent time reading lots of other poetry to have any idea about what is being done in that poem and all that takes time and effort - lots of both. You need to know some Shakespeare, some Dante and endless other poets. And not just so you can tell when he quotes these poets, you know, ‘but at my back’ or ‘You! Hypocrite lecteur!’ but also when he imitates their voice or slams one poetic idea up against another across the centuries. All of this is hard work and requires hard work to understand it – this isn’t a habitus that can be ‘bought’ overnight, it requires years of effort and so appears to the holder of it to have been born of merit. That is why it works so well as a way to show distinction – it is hard to be faked. Years ago there was a book called, how to be ridiculously well read in one evening - there is no real way you can achieve that.

But even with this educated taste the field is still one of competition – or as Bourdieu says, one of symbolic violence, in this case over who gets to decide real cultural value. That is, the power to consecrate items as worthy. And this is a competition between the old and new guards.

I’m going to finish now – but Bourdieu ends part one with a really interesting discussion of the whole question of citation. As you know, it is important in academic papers to quote where you got your ideas from. You know, above with the Eliot stuff I quoted I should have mentioned Andrew Marvell and Charles Baudelaire. But citations can do as much to hide where you get ideas from as illuminate it. This is why Eliot dedicates his poem to Pound, 'the better craftsman'. It isn’t that he quoted any lines of Pounds that ended up in the poem, but rather that the poem itself would not have existed without Pound. The examples Bourdieu gives is Aristotle and Plato or Marx and Hegel. It isn’t that these people need to cite the previous person for particular ideas they got from them – their whole way of thinking is structured in response to the previous philosopher. Where would Aristotle cite Plato? His thinking would be inconceivable without Plato, his debt isn’t to be counted in single ideas, but in how he actually went about thinking.

If I knew more about French Literature, or felt I had time to read Flaubert's novel, this would have been a much more rewarding read – and I would have finished reading it too – as it is, I still think it was worthwhile. Like I said before, though, the 20 odd page editor’s introduction is well worth reading, even if you read nothing else in this one.

[szymborskalyte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truth be told, all you probably need out of this book is the editor’s introduction. It’s more than serviceable, rather excellent in fact, and you’ll get all the important Bourdieusian concepts™ you need — field(s), habius, flavors of capital, how they all fit together in his general theory of practice. But if you like me fancy yourself some sort of intellectual and “above” the lowly act of perusing secondary texts you will plough on defiantly, whereupon six hours later you’re sort of done but you do ponder to yourself if you got anymore out of it past the first half an hour spent on the introduction. My point, I guess, is that the marginal returns on time reading Bourdieu can be rather meagre. Why-ever do I put myself through this. I know, I know, the grand pursuit of cultural capital, and because I know to be a scholar™, to acquire that symbolic capital necessary to declare myself sociologist (and have others accept my claim therein), I must read the original Bourdieu, preferably in French.

All cultural products —whatever your literary craft of choice — are socially located. By this I mean they take place in the social world all of us live in: this is where they are produced, consumed, and consecrated (collective judgement of ‘greatness’). Whatever would be call such a social context? Let’s call it a field. A literary field. A field of cultural production, and so on. Fields of culture are subordinate to the grand field of power, but they are at least semi-autonomous (Bourdieu likes to say they correspond to, but do not reflect the field of power — which is a nice way to put it.) and have their own internal logics. From this central axiom we can derive a whole slew of syllogisms. Hell I’m too lazy to talk about them. Read the editor’s introduction. It’s all there. But trust me it’s good stuff. Great to think with. It’s the best kind of social theory I think — original and generative. I’m not sure how much more one can ever ask.

[heidi ♡︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

did i read every chapter in this? no. but having spent more time with this book than with many of my friends while writing my MA thesis i’ll be damned if it isn’t counted towards my reading challenge

[Aljoša Toplak · Rating 3.75 out of 5]

A fascinating reduction of the cultural world to "a universe of belief" (p. 164), an industrial web which must not only produce "an object in its materiality", but also create the value of this object, meaning the recognition of artistic legitimacy. In essence, Bourdieu views culture as a field for the transaction of (economic, cultural, symbolic) capital. He talks of independent social universes, fields: meaning, "the separate social universe having its own laws of functioning independent of those of politics and the economy" (p. 162). In the cultural field, producers treat cultural goods (books, plays, pictures) as either ordinary products (sources for immediate profit), or enter into the elaborate world of denying the economy, only to derive economic profit from the cultural capital in which they have originally invested and hence accumulated (see p. 102).

Honoré de Balzac's Illusions perdues is perhaps the first thing that comes to mind after such an analysis, a haunting novel of an artist discovering that all of Parisian culture is being underpinned by a petty game of economic and social transaction. But Bourdieu's point is in no way moralistic - it's not that art fails to achieve its true purpose, but that there is no purpose to art outside of the social universe in which it takes place:

The work of art considered as a symbolic good (and not as an economic asset, which it may also be), only exists as such for a person who has the means to appropriate it, or in other words, to decipher it." (p. 220)

"... the work of art only exists as such to the extent that it is perceived, or, in other words, deciphered ... (p. 227)

[Leo46 · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

The ideas in this book are phenomenal, but it is hard to shake off the awful predominant translation of an integral essay “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” which is hyper-abridged at points and a ‘free translation’ (I have no idea how they let R. Swyer do that). However, I will base this review on Bourdieu’s project in its entirety and the insight from a couple of PhD students who read the original French essay. This publishing is not a book organized by Bourdieu himself, rather it is a collection of essays added to the main essay that the title is named after.
The main premise of “The Field of Cultural Production” is his analysis of artistic and literary production (combined into cultural production, broadly) as the field that demonstrates “relational thinking” with the highest “heuristic efficacy” (29). The full title of the essay is actually “The Field of Cultural Production, or: THE ECONOMIC WORLD REVERSED” (my emphasis). Thus, Bourdieu paints a picture of this field of cultural production as the most accurate, elaborate, and constellation-esque (acknowledging all factors of the totality) illustration of the world of art and literature than any aesthetic/literary theorist I have read. His novel contribution is that the cultural field has its OWN LAWS AND RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION, producing inherently different effects from the more-or-less straightforward barter/exchange principle of capitalism for commodities (especially, considering he is writing almost around the advent of neoliberalism, which flattens out all of socio-economic life in the ‘ethic of market exchange and value’). He maps out very interesting and complex diagrams in which different types of fields are superimposed over each other and lie on different spectrums, etc. The most notable field he defines is the restricted/autonomous field. Those adjectives may sound oxymoronic but it is the fact that the field that is restricted gains autonomy by being KEPT AWAY or ISOLATED from the primary field, which of course is the field of commodity production--of capitalist economy. Thus, the restricted field is supposed to contain the artists/writers with genuine talent and ingenuity in pushing their fields precisely because they define themselves AGAINST the field of commodity production (or happen to be placed in opposition to the economy for we all know too well the existence of artists who are unconscious of their conceptual/expressive prowess). The autonomy of the restricted field, of course, then, is opposed by the heteronomy of the market--this spectrum defines the field of cultural production. Impressively, Bourdieu up to this point barely draws on his famous concept of habitus: the predispositions for certain principles to be reproduced and realized or changed within both structures and practices in society. Without going into too much of a tangent of the intricacies of this concept that is so difficult to fully define, the point of habitus is to fully address the reciprocity and contradictory existence/opposition (dialectical) between autonomy and heteronomy that IS social life, i.e., both practices and structures have a faculty of self-reproduction according to their own histories that is partially influenced (in widely varying degrees) by the mode of production of its era. Thus, he poses theatre on the side of the most commodified and purely dictated by the market, with the novel in the middle, and poetry as the most restricted as it is inherently obscure and least marketable.
Furthermore, what makes this picture even more compelling is mainly contained in the essay “Market of Symbolic Goods” in which cultural products have a symbolic value as well as exchange value with overdetermined factors for both (so, it does become a bit too complex at times). However, the very interesting notions posed are how intersectional institutions (primarily ideological state apparatuses) are affecting the symbolic value of cultural products. Different institutions (museums, education, galleries, foundations, academies, etc.) have different degrees of influence on means of consecration, legitimation, dissemination, and positions/position-takings of cultural agents and products within/on the field of cultural production. These modes of symbolic valuation are all different and overlapping for the multitude of types of symbolic goods such as mass consumer entertainment, middle-brow art, bourgeois art, the avant-garde, etc.
Generally, Bourdieu just makes a great sociological intervention into the field of art and literature, with clear influences from his prior professor Althusser, even though he rejects the base-superstructure model and denigrates philosophy/intellectualism (which I don’t mind as much, although Jameson did for some reason). Nevertheless, in a paper of mine, I will end up arguing that his model of habitus and field of cultural production can actually be integrated into the advanced base-superstructure model of Althusser (Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses) to more clearly define the faculties and pinpoint interactions within the open totality of neoliberal society.

[Hanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Briljanta idéer, orimligt komplicerade formuleringar!

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Typical Bourdieuian graphs, maps, fields, habituses, and strategies - as applied to art and literature when art and literature became their own special fields in the 19th c, Paris, capital of the world and modernity.

1) the field of cultural production is one where the rules seem to be temporarily reversed, where the "loser wins," where charisma can be garnered by the producer producing for producers, especially because he is not finding success or an audience. It is a field that is located in a larger field of power, which in turn is located in a field of economic class, wherein artists making money and a large amount of people being entertained is valued. This idea of an artist's charisma and its routinization, and an economy of status (cultural capital) is built from Weber's sociology of religion. Also some interesting stuff about how artists age, and how the best way for an artist to die and be memorialized and obsolete is to become a 'classic.'

2) Flaubert in 'Sentimental Education' was a proto-social scientist, and saw the 'field' in a particularly enlightened way, due to a bunch of ways the field shaped the idea of 'artist' in Gustave's time, as well as Gustave's attempts to win some independence for the field.

3) Looking at art and learning to look at art is highly political, and implicates the reproduction of the ruling class. Manet was like a Flaubert in how he revolutionized what the idea of painting was in his refusal of the game of professionalization inherent to the contemporaneous Academy of Painting.

[Paul Bond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucid comparison between the general and restricted fields of cultural production -- the Hollywood studio model as opposed to the righteous starving performance artist model, for example. Well-struck points regarding the quest for martyrdom as a misunderstood artist. Such "martyrs" are really seeking power by other means -- through the charismatic authority they hope their martyrdom will offer. The book also ably summarizes the institutional frameworks, the politics and posturing, that shape artistic output. Veblen- or John Kenneth Galbraith-esque.

[Humphrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to know what to say other than that the opening three essays in this collection are seminal for anyone thinking about the production and reception of cultural objects in a societal or sociological sense. This belongs on the shortlist for texts that have vitally shaped my own thought about literature.

[Emre Gürbüz · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a solid material to understand the tension between the cultural and the economic capital in the cultural field. It also presents the panorama of French literature and art evolution. Must read.

[Jonas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another text that helped shape my thinking of culture and its dynamics. French Marxism does not get much better than this. It made me excited about studying pulp and less literary material.

[Gaëlle · Rating 5 out of 5]

C'est un immanquable pour qui veut comprendre les enjeux du milieu culturel.

[Aimee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pierre Bourdieu’s perspective on truth revolves around the concept of “socially constructed reality,” that truth is not absolute but shaped by social structures, cultural norms, and the dominant discourses of society. Bourdieu argues that power dynamics shape what is considered true, as dominant groups use their influence to define and legitimize particular truths while marginalizing alternative perspectives. The value and meaning of position-taking are not fixed but contingent on the social and contextual framework of the environment in which it exists. Bourdieu argues, “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–taking 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 prise de position changes, even when it 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 automatically with each change in the field within which it is situated for the spectator or reader."

[nerys]

As an analysis of the operation of the field of cultural production (at a specific historical moment), this book is excellent. When it comes, however, to the explication of the actual products of this field, that is cultural works, its interpretations boil down to the retranslation of a text/work through the master code of Position (in trying to avoid its retranslation through Language (as in schools from Russian formalism to post-structuralism) or through History (as in the different Marxisms), therby reducing the capabilities of the aesthetic as a specific mode of cultural production with its specific logic (even though Bourdieu's division of capital to account for some of its forms' symbolic efficacy, as well as the thing he seeks to prove in these essays, is precisely to insist on the ultimate irreducability of culture to some exterior cause - a position through which, by the way, he implicitly accepts the contemporary Marxist conception of ideology, according to Jan Rehmann's interpretation of his work).

However, there is a very ancillary but very adorable moment in which Bourdieu quotes an assertion of Foucault's in which he disagrees to the reduction of the field of strategic possibilities to 'the divergence of interests or mental habits among individuals' which Bourdieu follows with, in parentheses, "I can't help but feel singled out..." which was to me hilarious.

[Ike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Binged this in two days. Kind of a critical and historical analysis of art reception during the emergence of modern capitalism. Also like a how-to guide to being a cultured art guru vs a pompous art snob.

[Tree]

Nothing new for me here. I jumped around and then gave up because I knew the topics already and there was nothing new to add to to them.

[Katya Hochleitner]

Essencial reading on the sociology of the art market/cultural production.

[Tereza Suranova · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moze tento typek tak komplikovane pisat uplne spickove myslienky ? :( akademia neakademia na toto nikto nema nervy

[Josita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy grafico para mi poca capacidad intelectual

[Peter Bond · Rating 5 out of 5]

im french now

[Fatimah Ghanim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helping me writing my paper, indeed

[Sara Avi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bourdieu discusses the dynamics of cultural production, relations, and markets in this book.

The field of cultural production doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All forms of cultural production is interrelated and exist in a large network, which Bourdieu refers to as “field”. The field consists of cultural products (literature, film, music…etc) and their producers.

Within the field, there are certain positions (roles) that are usually occupied by agents (institutions or individuals). Agents within the field of cultural production correspond to different positions, which can either be conserved or transformed.

The field of cultural production is in constant struggle, it strives for recognition and power. Moreover, seek symbolic capital, reputation, credibility, and recognition within the larger network.

The book is dense, it is not an easy read. The sentences are extremely long, about 70 words or more.

If you have a little background about the habitus, it might be easier to comprehend the book's ideas. I recommend looking into Bourdieu’s book ‘Distinctions’ for reference.

Overall, the notion of field and habitus is interesting. Bourdieu lays out this whole thing in such a beautiful way–hierarchical structure, competition and such…

[Phillip · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the first essay in this collection, "The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed." It's one of those essays that has already shifted the paradigm it takes on, and so now--post-canon wars--does not seem as revolutionary as I imagine it did in the early 1980s.

Essentially, Bourdieu argues that we should attempt to understand all artistic, literary, and cultural production as part of a vast field or network (somewhat like Latour's actor-network theory). Building on ideas from disciplines like semiotics, Bourdieu argues that it is impossible to fully reckon with any literary/artistic artifact apart from the field that makes up its cultural context. He argues further that the nature of this field is one of struggle for recognition and power. This struggle breaks down across types of artistic production (e.g., in 19th century France drama had the highest economic value while poetry had the lowest), and across generations (e.g., as one movement or school of the avante garde replaces the establishment, which had itself been the avante garde replacing a previous establishment earlier).

[Mili · Rating 5 out of 5]

En el ensayo, el autor recorre lugares, museos y exponentes de diferentes épocas para analizar los efectos de las producciones culturales en la vida cotidiana.

Bourdieu realiza una interesante distinción entre las formas de producir arte, principalmente entre el ámbito público y el privado, siempre abordando temas clave, como las prácticas culturales, el rol de los intelectuales, las autoridades en el mundo del arte y más.

Recomiendo este libro a todo aquel que quiera comprender la cultura desde la sociología.

[I moved to Fable · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bourdieu’s core argument is pretty straightforward - cultural production exists in a competitive system that is shaped by exclusivity and power dynamics. Ironically, his own writing style, with roundabout and unnecessarily complex phrasing, isn’t accessible unless you're already familiar with his concepts.

In summary, Bourdieu's valuable insights on elitism are overshadowed by his own elitism.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

three-quarters of the book is translated from French lectures, which are a bit dense, but the ideas about how culture exists in society are excellent, especially for anyone who works in a service oriented field.

[mahatmanto · Rating 4 out of 5]

pengen ajah...

[Vip Vinyaratn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another Kasem Phenpinan's recommendation on Bourdieu, espeacially on the concept of "field".

Hope it can help me on my semminar class...

[Rachel Nickens · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only read the first part, but considering how dense this is, I will count that as "reading" this book.

[Kotryna]

I don't dare to rate this book, as I haven't understood 85% of it (though I've enjoyed the rest of 15%, mostly in part III - The Pure Gaze: Essays on Art, where author discusses cliche, academic art, realism and levels of perception of art.)
The paragraph-long sentences do not help to grasp the concepts by Bourdieu, plus the book is full of terms that lack a broader definition, though they might have been defined in other writings by the author.
I wasn't educated enough for this reading, so I plan to come back to it in a year (by the end of my MA course) to check if I would understand at least additional 5%.

Not a Sunday read.