[In the following essay, McCann analyzes possible reasons for the neglect of Bourdieu in the United States, using The Field of Cultural Production as the basis for this assessment.]

Of the French intellectuals who have arrived on American shores to transform the humanities in the last several decades, perhaps no one has received a more partial and limiting reception than Pierre Bourdieu. Compared to peers like Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and Lacan, whose ideas have attracted countless exegeses and attacks and who have inspired innumerable acolytes, Bourdieu's experience in the American academy looks, despite his great prestige, almost lonely. In the humanities it is difficult to find many scholars who define their work as Bourdieuian. (The adjective, which is ready to hand for the major poststructuralists, does not even exist for Bourdieu, and he would undoubtedly oppose its invention.)

In contrast to those figures whose every work is exhaustively and patiently examined, Bourdieu is known in the American humanities mainly for one book, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, in spite of a thirty-year career that has produced over twenty books in a sociological inquiry that is both enormously diverse and remarkably coherent. (In addition to the social origins of taste, Bourdieu's topics range over the Kabyle society of Algeria, the French educational system, the artistic status of photography, the experience of museum-going, and the sociology of language, sports, intellectual life, and professional politics.) In this light, his recent book, The Field of Cultural Production, which collects essays on the dynamics of artistic creation published between 1966 and 1988, looks like a good opportunity to assess the usefulness of Bourdieu's methodology in relation to an area that is central to the concerns of American Studies.

It is not difficult to find reasons for Bourdieu's relative neglect in the United States. When one seeks to describe his work what comes to mind is not the word usually associated with recent French thought—“theory”—but the comparatively banal term methodology. In comparison to the fascinations of intricate philosophy, Bourdieu can sometimes appear unexciting and—in his frequent reliance on graphs, charts, interviews, and statistics—mundanely empirical. Another way to put this would be to point out that Bourdieu's work has lent itself to neither of the major intellectual fads in the United States that have drawn on Continental philosophy and that have defined the broad succession of academic trends in the United States over the recent decades: recondite philosophical speculation or cultural populism; put in more familiar terms, poststructuralism via Yale and cultural studies by way of Birmingham.

To understand what is particular about Bourdieu's work, it is helpful to realize that he probably would regard these two major trends in the American humanities as strictly counterpoised academic directions and as complementary failures to live up to his demanding conception of intellectual work. From the perspective of his sociology, each approach stands out as a vanguardist strategy for accruing authority within the world of intellectuals. Whatever else it was, deconstruction was a movement of vast intellectual assertion, whose every aspect announced—sometimes as rigor, sometimes as unbounded freedom—the practitioners' radical distance from the commonplace and the commonsensical. Cultural studies, by contrast, has gained its authority through a strategy of intellectual abasement. The aim now is not to stand apart from, but with, the popular. Thus, where literary critics like Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman underwrote their authority by associating themselves with the most consecrated works of philosophy and literature, Cultural studies intellectuals such as Andrew Ross typically concentrate on the products and fans of pop culture. Authority in this case comes not from intimacy with art or “language,” but from the attempt to serve as translators for the suppressed yearnings of “everyday life.” Where a critic like Hartman found a particular enemy in the vulgar form of the detective story, then, Ross declares that he cannot find the time for novels because he is occupied with glossy magazines. Moreover, each scholar legitimates these consciously radical positions by endowing them with important political functions. For critics like de Man and Hartman, pop culture and popular consciousness represent dangerous forms of mystification, and the intellectual's vital role is to undermine complacent habits of mind. For Ross and many champions of cultural studies, pop culture conceals transformative energies. The critic's job, therefore, is to challenge the forms of hegemony—including those implicit in elite art and culture—that repress or derail such impulses.

Though he is sometimes invoked in support of the latter project, Bourdieu is profoundly doubtful about both these intellectual directions and especially skeptical of their claims to political or social efficacy. His sociology prompts the suspicion that, exactly because they offer mirror reflections of each other, intellectual elitism and intellectual populism are primarily weapons in the struggles for status and authority that occur within the specialized terrain of the intellectual world, and he suggests that their aims and energies usually remain largely confined to this world and its participants.¹The Field of Cultural Production is a book about this kind of struggle as it takes place among the creators, distributors, and critics of cultural products, and it attempts to explain why this specialized conflict should be regarded as of primary importance in determining the character of our cultural life. In another sense, the book is part of Bourdieu's continuing brief for his own conception of an intellectual mission, and it attempts to avoid the errors he perceives in elitism and populism by yoking their disparate valences to the tense balance of what he calls a “reflexive sociology.”

Bourdieu's criticisms of both high-flown theory and intellectual populism stem, then, in part from his resistance to the rhetoric of freedom or release apparent in either of these alternatives. He is, in short, no postmodernist. Indeed, in many ways he looks anachronistically like the much abused heroic modernist intellectual—in his pursuit of an absolutely encompassing and universalist account of social life, in his commitment to reason or, as he often puts it, “science,” and, above all in his career-long effort to overcome the antinomies of social understanding. As he usually describes it, Bourdieu's work has been centrally occupied with transcending the fundamental split between subjectivist and objectivist accounts of social life—between, that is, an emphasis on the individual experience of the world and the freedom of the agent, on the one hand; and an emphasis on social structure and the constrained functions of the subject, on the other. The Field of Cultural Production is devoted, though, to resolving the particular version of this opposition that is typically raised by the study of works of art and literature. It aims to overcome the dilemma between “internal” or “formal” readings of cultural products (what Bourdieu calls the “tautegorical”) and external or sociological analyses (the “allegorical”). By the same token, it offers an account of artistic activity somewhere between the “charismatic” image of “pure, disinterested creation by an isolated artist” and the opposite “reductionist vision” that makes artists into class spokesmen or capitalist tools (34). Much of the interest of this book, therefore, lies in the fact that Bourdieu believes that such a tension is meaningful when so much contemporary academic writing denies that it has any force whatsoever. (Deconstruction and cultural studies, for example, have opposed each other not least insofar as they tend to adhere tenaciously to the “tautegorical” and “allegorical” poles of the division.) The other main source of interest is the complex epistemological model Bourdieu constructs to overcome the divide.

At the center of this model is Bourdieu's account of the fields of art and literature. These “intellectual worlds are microcosms that have their own structures and their own laws,” and any attempt to understand what is produced out of them must begin with an analysis of their peculiar characteristics (181). In this sense, the model is based on a loosely Weberian vision of the historical differentiation of society—what Bourdieu refers to as “the process of autonomization” (112). The artistic and literary worlds are quasi-professional milieux in this account. They are the products of long-term historical development in which the social realms of writers, artists, and their associates grew progressively larger, more differentiated, and more capable of imagining that they were self-sufficient universes, subject only to their own standards and forms of evaluation. This trend began in Europe during the Renaissance, when cultural producers of all stripes started to detach themselves from aristocratic and ecclesiastical patronage and to vend their goods on the open market. It culminated in the nineteenth century when aestheticism and the credo “art for art's sake” registered the fulfillment of a certain dynamic. From this point onward, the most powerful artists imagine that they produce their works primarily for each other, and they achieve legitimacy insofar as they appeal most narrowly to other similarly placed artists and thereby resist more public or bourgeois forms of success. By the same token, the response to works of art that this world recognizes as legitimate becomes “the pure gaze”—the form of reception that reads an artifact without political or moral reflection and sees it “in itself and for itself, as form and not as function” (256).

In this account, the basic matter essential to understanding nearly every feature of this specialized world is the realization that the field of culture establishes its indefinite or relative autonomy by way of asserting an absolute difference from the dominant social order—what Bourdieu calls “the field of power.” In this sense, the cultural field becomes “the economic world reversed” (29). That is, its own ideology inverts at every point the values that structure the larger social hierarchy “in a generalized game of ‘loser wins’” (39). The sacral beliefs become disinterest and independence, and the principal vices the pursuit of profit, power, worldly honors, or institutionalized cultural authority. At the pinnacle of its local hierarchy are those figures who represent an uncompromising pursuit of an art that is independent, transgressive, pure, and, above all, non-bourgeois. The bottom of its social scale is occupied by those “hacks” who achieve the greatest commercial success and thereby traduce the field's commitment to independence. In other words, “[t]he literary and artistic world is so ordered that those who enter it have an interest in disinterestedness” (40). They prosper by proving their allegiance to art over commerce or power. The social position of artists (or at least those artists at the top of the hierarchy) can be generally characterized, therefore, as that of “the dominated fraction of the dominant class” (198).

In its Weberian historiography and its commitment to both respecting and interrogating artistic autonomy, Bourdieu's account is a well thought-out version of a fairly familiar theory. It shares a great deal with efforts to explain the institutions of art in the work of a broad range of thinkers—Peter Bürger, Arthur Danto, Terry Eagleton, Jürgen Habermas, to name but a diverse few.² What is distinctive about Bourdieu's version of this story is the extent to which he carries through on the determination to explain the cultural field as a social world in addition to explaining how it is the product of social forces. For thinkers as different as Bürger, Danto, and Eagleton, it is necessary to comprehend the historical production of the belief in an independent art, but the autonomy of art remains for all of them a primarily ideological or discursive fact. Their investigations center, therefore, on the statements or cultural products that give the clearest and most advanced expression to the discourse. In this way, they tend to follow traditional histories of art or literature, and treat the recognized figures and products from the perspective of an overarching social or philosophical theory of history as opposed to a narrowly aesthetic one. For Bourdieu, though, this type of consideration, because it forgets the local struggles that mobilized artistic and ideological inventions and ignores the vast part of the field out of which they were produced, threatens to make the history of art into a “heaven of ideas.” Against these kinds of theory, then, he emphasizes that the field of culture is first one of agents or players who take part in the “game” or contest specific to the milieu. The object of this struggle is the acquisition of the power or “capital” specific to the field—artistic recognition—and the various forms of “institutional doxa” are legible, he asserts, insofar as they are implicated in this contest.

In Bourdieu's account, that is, the field of art is not only in continual tension with the field of power generally, but it is also necessarily subject to ceaseless internal struggles that play the greatest role in the way the field appears as a whole. These internal contests are mainly of two types, which together limn the basic structure of the milieu. The kind that is most familiar to us from traditional art or literary histories is that which occurs within what Bourdieu calls the “sub-field of restricted production”—what we might describe more familiarly as the elite precincts of art (185). In this realm, which occupies the dominant pole of the field as a whole, successive groups of artists struggle for the highest degrees of consecration by discovering new modes or formal qualities that push the ideals of autonomy to ever greater limits. The opposition tends, therefore, to take the form of “a permanent revolution of the ‘young’ against the ‘old,” in which the former are compelled to question all the principles and presuppositions of their genre in “a continuous process of purification” (187). For example, from the late-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth, poetry tends to exclude ever more of the “poetical” and novels to dismiss what gets characterized as the vulgarly “novelistic.” Such qualities, of course, are left to less legitimate producers and less respected forms—that is, to the commercial hacks at the lower levels of the field's hierarchy and to the products that appeal to popular audiences.

The relation of this latter group to the dominant “sub-field of restricted production” makes up the second major area of struggle in Bourdieu's view. In these contests, “artists in the pure and commercial sub-fields are engaged in struggles [with each other] concerning the very definition of the writer and the status of art and artist” (186-87). Just as the most powerful artists have an interest in asserting the virtue of autonomy, those figures seen as “commercial” producers, “bourgeois” artists, or as the producers of vulgarly political “propaganda,” have an interest in asserting the values of popular appeal, commercial success, or social responsibility in order to advance their own recognition. Although such people necessarily tend to accept the values of the field as a whole, believing intuitively in the virtues of art, they also seek to redeem their own relatively low status by denigrating experimentation and the avant-garde. By indicting coterie self-indulgence, they assert that the qualities central to their own work represent the genuine essence of art or literature; that is, they attempt to make the values informing their work the reigning beliefs of the field. (That's why every “hack” points out that Shakespeare was a popular entertainer and why political artists claim that all art is political.) The contest comes down to one between two competing principles of legitimation or “hierarchization”: the autonomous versus the “heteronomous,” or that which recognizes the most independent types of art as the most valuable against that which sees the greatest value in the widest recognition or the greatest social usefulness.

By the very structure of the field it would be impossible for either of these principles or their adherents to win a final victory. Their relative power ceaselessly fluctuates as individual artists attempt to advance in recognition, as they seek the success of principles that would favorably affect their chances, and as broader historical developments impinge on the structure of the milieu. The field of cultural production, then, is necessarily a “battlefield over taxonomy”—an arena in constant turmoil, where not only the winners and losers, but the stakes, boundaries, and rules of the game are in constant dispute (198). At the same time, it is a contest in which every player has a more or less consciously developed sense of the state of the game and his or her place in it. Every participant could construct some map of the field that would assign each significant player a relative place in the field's contemporary hierarchy. The historical task, then, is not merely to explain the evolution of the dominant artists and works of art, but to reconstruct the entire unstated schema of the field at its significant moments—to set out, in other words, the terms of dispute and the way they were seen by contestants by virtue of their relative positions in the field.

What makes this task significant according to Bourdieu is also what finally allows him to claim that he has overcome the antinomy between the “external” and “internal” perspectives on cultural products, and what thus amounts to the key argument of the book. Bourdieu contends that there is a homology between the “position” of the various figures in the field and what he calls their “position-takings”—their works of art, manifestoes, political statements, and the like. In other words, he claims that a direct, measurable relation exists between an artist or writer's position relative to other contestants in the field and his or her aesthetic or intellectual inventions. In fact, the latter should be understood as the strategies the artist or intellectual pursues toward success in the game. Thus, in order to understand any significant aesthetic innovation of recent history, we need to do more than just measure it against its broad historical background. Such a “short-circuit effect” would elide the most significant social forces acting on its production. Wider political or historical developments act on works of art, Bourdieu claims, mainly via the “refraction” of the whole hierarchy of the art world: “economic crises, technical transformations or political revolutions … can only have an effect through resulting transformations in the structure of the field” as a whole (182). An adequate sociology of culture for any given moment, therefore, needs to comprehend altogether a host of variables, the key ones of which include: the relation between the field of culture and the dominant social structure; the status of the field itself (the relative positions of its various major players and the relative authority of its principles of hierarchization); and the meaning that works of art and aesthetic beliefs had for the participants of this field and the way, consciously or unconsciously, such “position-takings” served them as strategies for advancement.

Could this be a useful methodology in American studies research? The Field of Cultural Production offers two major examples for the acuity of Bourdieu's approach: considerations of Flaubert and Manet, and their relations to their worlds. The examples are particularly well-chosen for Bourdieu because each of the artists worked at a key moment in the “autonomization” of his field, and each was a major figure in the dynamic formal evolution of his genre. Bourdieu's historical investigations offer ample evidence of the connection between these processes. Moreover, they discover rich social and aesthetic conflicts that give the two figures' strategies revealing and concrete significance. One might wonder, though, whether different figures from different environments would prove as succesful. Against that possibility, consider but one ready example. The richest decade of literary production in the twentieth-century United States—the 1920s—was, of course, more than the day of the lost generation. It was also the moment for the founding of Time, Readers' Digest, the New Yorker and the Book-of-the-Month-Club; the era of New Humanism; and the period when Floyd Dell was writing his Apologia for the Intelligentsia and Ernest Boyd was composing his attack on the “Aesthete: Model 1924.” From the perspective of Bourdieu's model, the decade's fierce conflicts suggest another key moment in the “autonomization” of a literary field, and it looks perfectly suited to the kinds of analysis suggested by the book. Likewise, the sharp alteration of the field in the following decade—the vast shifts in artists' status, and the sudden accession of previously reviled literary forms and subjects throughout the literary world—looks like a clear example of Bourdieu's principle of refraction. As almost any literary memoir of the period makes clear, the Depression did not just act on an individual writer's consciences or political beliefs, it drastically shifted the very principles of what art should do and thus of who was a significant, that is, powerful, artist.

To take a more farfetched example, consider commercial music. Surely the tense and productive relations among rock, pop, punk, underground, alternative, and others, that have powered a great deal of vital creative activity since the 1960s, resembles Bourdieu's “battlefield of taxonomy.” Certainly the range of conflicts and experiments in the genre take on fresh meaning when we recognize that they represent struggles for artistic legitimacy in a world where that quality is always in doubt. The disparity of these examples suggests, I think, the ways in which Bourdieu's methodology might provide an invaluable heuristic device for investigating artistic strategies and for researching cultural arenas of all sorts. That value comes not least in the fact that his method demands both a relentless series of contextualizations and the effort to take skeptically and seriously the beliefs that artists have about their work. Its great usefulness is that it can give fresh definition to the social meanings of those beliefs without requiring that we rescue them as political allegories or dismiss them as lies.

Because of the nature of this project it is always open to the charge that it overemphasizes one side or another of this task: that it overestimates the structuring force of the field and underestimates the independence and authority of individual artists; or that it overestimates aesthetic delusions and underestimates the real determining force of history or the relations of production, say. Bourdieu might respond, I believe, by claiming that the validity of these charges is always an empirical question, to be asked and answered about particular moments. But, as the example of poststructuralism and cultural studies might also suggest, his sociology warns us to recognize that we, too, are players in the field, and it asks us to be skeptical about the way our own intellectual battles and beliefs are caught up in our struggles for recognition and legitimacy. It is a valuable warning to have.

Notes

1. Bourdieu's criticism of the elitist underpinnings of poststructuralist philosophy is well-known and is most polemically stated in the criticism of Derrida in Pierre Bourdieu, “Postscript: Towards a ‘Vulgar’ Critique of ‘Pure Critiques,’” in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 494-98. This justly renowned essay probably played some role in the decline of deconstruction's fortunes in the United States. But, Bourdieu's complementary suspicion of cultural populism is far more rarely noted. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, “Did You Say ‘Popular’?” in Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 90-102 and Pierre Bourdieu, “The Uses of the ‘People,’” in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford, Calif., 1990), 150-55.

2. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, Minn., 1984); for Arthur Danto, see, for example, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York, 1992); Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). Jürgen Habermas's account of art as an autonomous sphere of action in critical relation to modernity is apparent throughout his work and probably gets its most elaborate formulation in Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1 (Boston, 1984); for a very brief statement, see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 45-50. For examples of comparable approaches, see César Graña, Bohemia Versus Bourgeois: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1964); Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, Ind., 1986); Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); for a fine recent survey of the problem as it has been conceived by a wide range of thinkers, see Anne Bowler, “Methodological Dilemmas in the Sociology of Art,” in The Sociology of Culture: Emerging Theoretical Perspectives, ed. Diana Crane (Oxford, 1994).