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I aim here to satisfy two types of expectations: on the one hand, what
could be called academic expectations, by trying to present the
theoretical instruments which, it seems to me, can serve in a very
general way to analyze social phenomena and, in particular, phenomena of cultural production such as literature, art, journalism, etc.;
and, on the other hand, political or civic interests - I often say that
sociology can be a kind of symbolic combat sport that offers a means
of defense against the various forms of symbolic violence that can be
exerted against citizens, in particular, and very often nowadays, through
the field of the media. But first I would like to run very quickly
through a certain number of definitions, around the concept o f field.
I set out the intellectual genealogy of field in my book The Rules
o f A rf and in an article in the Revue franaise de sociologie which
analyzed the religious field.^ On some other fields - the scientific field,
the political field, the legal field, etc. - there are also several articles
in Actes de la recherche en Sciences sociales. In The Political Ontology o f Martin Heidegger^ there is an analysis of the German philosophical field within which and in relation to which Heideggers
thinking was constituted. Finally, in The Rules o f Art there is a
detailed study of the functioning of the literary field.
I have chosen to present to you an object which is, it seems to me,
a very important one both scientifically and politically, namely the
relationship between the political field, the social Science field, and
the field of journalism. These three social universes are relatively
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cosm. The word microcosm goes some way to suggest that the political universe, with its institutions (the parties), its rules of functioning, its agents selected in accordance with certain (electoral)
procedures, etc., is an autonomous world, a microcosm set within
the social macrocosm. The political microcosm is a kind o f small uni
verse caught up in the laws of functioning of the larger universe, but
nonetheless endowed with a relative autonomy within that universe
and obeying its own laws, its own nomos - in a word, autonomous.
One has to take note of this relative autonomy in order to under
stand the practices and works that are generated within these universes. Thus, traditionally, most studies devoted to law, literature, art,
Science, philosophy, or any cultural productions, are distributed
between two major forms of approach. One of them, which can be
called internalist, posits that in order to understand law, literature,
etc., it is necessary and sufficient to read texts without necessarily
referring to the context, that the text is autonomous and selfsufficient, that there is therefore no need to relate it to externai factors
(economic or geographical ones, for example); the other approach,
by contrast, a much rarer, and dominated, approach, undertakes to
relate texts to their social context. In a general way, this externalist
reading is considered sacrilegious and is looked on with great suspicion by the caste of commentators, the lectores, the priests of commentary, who have the monopoly o f legitimate access to the sacred
text. Against the internalist vision, which is very powerful in philos
ophy (philosophy and law are the two disciplines that have managed
to retain the monopoly of their history to the present day), I always
invoke a very fine text by Spinoza, who, in the Tractatus theologicopoliticus, discussing the classic problems o f exegesis that have given
rise to hermeneutic traditions - Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur,
and others - asks a series of questions: how can you understand the
sacred texts, those of the prophets, of the Bible, if you do not know
who wrote them, when they wrote them, how they wrote them, in
which language, who defined the canon - that is to say, the corpus
of sacred canonical texts, the texts that deserve to be regarded as
sacred.^'* Spinoza raises all these questions about the sacred texts of
the religious tradition, and, curiously, the philosophers who claim
allegiance to Spinoza, or some of them at least, still consider it sac
rilegious to ask these questions of Spinoza in reference to philosophical texts as well: W ho wrote them? - that is, what were they
doing, how were they trained, where did they study, whose pupils
were they, who were they writing against, in other words, what was
the field in which they were embedded? The concept of field had the
initial function of offering a route out of this forced choice, of refus-
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ing the choice between an intemal reading o f the text which consists
in considering the text in itself and for itself, and an externai reading
which crudely relates the text to the society in general. Between the
two there is a social universe that is always forgotten, that of the producers of the works, the universe of philosophers, the universe of
artists, the universe of writers, and not only writers but also literary
institutions, journals for example, the universities where writers are
educated, and so on. To speak of the field is to name this microcosm,
which is also a social universe, but a social universe freed from a
certain number of the constraints that characterize the encompassing
social universe, a universe that is somewhat apart, endowed with its
own laws, its own nomos, its own law of functioning, without being
completely independent of the externai laws.
One of the questions that has to be asked about a field is that of
its degree of autonomy. For example, among the three fields that I
have mentioned, the joumalistic field is characterized, in comparison
with the field of sociology {a fortiori in comparison with the field of
mathematics), by a high degree o f heteronomy. It is a very weakly
autonomous field, but this autonomy, weak though it is, means that
one cannot understand what happens there simply on the basis of
knowledge of the surrounding world: to understand what happens in
journalism, it is not sufficient to know who finances the publications,
who the advertisers are, who pays for the advertising, where the sub
sidies come from, and so on. Part of what is produced in the world
of journalism cannot be understood unless one conceptualizes this
microcosm as such and endeavors to understand the effects that the
people engaged in this microcosm exert on one another.
Much the same goes for the political field in the narrow sense.
M arx says somewhere that the political universe, identified with the
parliamentary world, is a kind of theater, offering a theatrical representation of the social world, the social struggle, one which is not
entirely serious, but derealized, because the real stakes, the real struggles, are elsewhere. In doing so, he points out one of the important
properties of the political field, the fact that this field, however little
autonomy it may have, does have a certain autonomy, a degree of
independence, so that, in order to understand what goes on there it
is not sufficient to describe the agents as being in the Service of the
Steel producers, or the beetroot growers, as people once used to say,
or the big employers, etc. To say that politicians - parliamentarians
or ministers - are inscribed in a field is to say that the stakes for which
they strive, the motivations that drive them, have their principie in
the microcosm and not directly in the m acrocosm . In other words,
to understand the political positions that a representative takes, it is
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nor sufficient to consider the ordinary variables, such as class membership and social position in the overall social space. It is not even
sufficient to know relations of dependence vis--vis this or that exter
nai power, such as the fact that he or she is the former employee of
a bank - a fact that does not escape mention in electoral battles - or
to characterize the social agent by his or her externai determinants,
which may derive from social origin, occupation, or economic or
social connections, direct or indirect. One also has to take into
account the position occupied in the political game, the fact that the
agent is located on the side of the more autonomous pole of the field
or, on the contrary, on the side of the more heteronomous pole, the
fact that he or she is a member of a party situated on the more
autonomous or the less autonomous side, and, within that party, has
a more or less autonomous status.
In fact, the amount that can be explained by the logic of the field
varies according to the autonomy of the field. The political field,
although apparently subject to a constant pressure of demand, to
constant control by its clientele (through the electoral mechanism), is
nowadays very strongly independent of that demand and more and
more inclined to close in on itself, on its own stakes (for example,
those of competition for power among the parties and within each
party). It is a kind of vague intuition of this closing-in on interests
specific to the mandate-holders that is expressed in diffuse antiparliamentarianism or in the more or less overtly declared hostility to
politicians, denunciations of corruption, and so on. Some sociolo
gists, known as neo-Machiavellians, such as Robert Michels, a
German theorist of social democracy, or Gaetano M osca, an Italian
theorist, have identified the logic - they call it the iron law of oligarchy, in particular that of political oligarchies - which favors this
separation and this closure by leading even the parties that ostensibly speak for the most disadvantaged strata to end up authorizing
authoritarian forms of representation, with a small minority of representatives eventually monopolizing the social energy delegated to
them by their electors. There is a logic whereby the power democratically acquired by the representatives of a party is in some sense
concentrated in the hands of the leaders, who little by little cut them
selves off from their base and eventually act as a kind of oligarchy,
thriving on the power of the dispossessed mandators. The iron law
of political oligarchies is the equivalent of the tendency of the cleri
cal corps to take upon itself, as Weber says, the legitimate monopoly of the handling of the goods of salvation. This tendency towards
the concentration of political means, which is the equivalent of the
concentration of access to the means of salvation, takes the form of
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I said rather rapidly that the three fields in question had the same
stake: to impose the legitimate vision of the social world. Willy-nilly,
whether they realize it or not, sociologists intervene in this game. If,
for example, I intervene in a regionalist struggle - one of the rex
types of struggles, in Benvenistes terms, in other words about defining a frontier: does Occitania exist or not.^ - instead of taking it as
an object, if I take up a position in the struggle for the existence or
nonexistence of the Occitan region, I may think I am stating a sci
entific verdict, but, in fact, whether I want to or not, I am intervening in a political d e b a t e . A n d part o f the heteronomy of the
sociologists and other social scientists arises from the temptation to
intervene as effective umpires in the political struggle (Let me
explain: there arent three classes, as M arx says, there are four; let
me explain: Occitania is a pseudo-region, because there are four conditions for the existence of a region, and Occitania only fulfills three
of them; let me explain, in the suburbs, you dont find Islamicists,
but assimilated beurs,^^ and so on). Sociologists then take on the
role that journalists expect o f them. A sociologist who responds to a
survey on the existence or not of Occitania will be awarded a certificate of scientificity if he tells the joumalist, and beyond him the
reader of the paper, what he expects to hear and read (Hes a real
sociologist because he really says what I think is really true ). And
sociologists find it very difficult to resist this role of ratification.
The field of the social Sciences does not aim to intervene in the strug
gle for the imposition of the dominant vision of the social world. It
nonetheless does so, in as much as its findings immediately become
instruments in the struggle. On the one hand, like all fields, the field of
the social Sciences is organized according to the degree of autonomy of
the institutions and agents that are engaged in it, so that the epistemological break that has been so much discussed since Bachelard is
fundamentally a break with social demands, with social expectations
that contain problematics. For example, if a social Science researcher
signs a research contract, this is a very serious and delicate operation.
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the nonsociologists - you also need a lot of capital. Its only when
you have this capital, which enables you to cross the barrier to entry,
that you can attain autonomy with respect to crass social demands.
Its because one has read M ax Weber - and so many other authors
that one resists crass social demands of the kind: Are you in favor
of television for a wide audience or an elitist cultural television? that one is able to say: The problem is ill-posed, I wont answer that
question. To defend the price of entry is not to defend elitism but
to defend the social conditions of production of things that are only
accessible in certain conditions. This price of entry may also be a
barrier, protecting privileges, but not necessarily. There is a problem
of getting in, but there is also a problem of coming out: these fields,
these microcosms, are something you have to get into, but also something you have to come out of. What did Zola do? The Dreyfus affair
is the story of a man who, being within the autonomous literary field,
which had at last achieved autonomy (a process that had taken
several centuries), carne out of it to say: in the name of the values of
purity, freedom, truth, and so on, which are those of the literary field,
I enter the political field while remaining a writer (he did not become
a politician).
The real question is that of autonomy, in other words the question
of the right to enter and the duty to emerge. One can thus raise in a
quite new way a problem in which all political reflection on the intel
lectual world has been enclosed: how can one simultaneously defend
the conditions necessary for the production of certain kinds of spe
cific, specialized works, without abdicating all democratic concern?
Notes
Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules o f Art: Genesis and structure o f the literary
field, tr. S. Emanuel (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1995, and
Polity, Cambridge, 1996).
Pierre Bourdieu, Gense et structure du champ religieux, Revue
franaise de sociologie, 12 (July-September 1971), pp. 2 9 4 -3 3 4 , translated as Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field, Comparative
Social Research, 13 (1991), pp. 1 -4 4 .
Pierre Bourdieu, The Political O ntology o f Martin Heidegger (Polity,
Cambridge, 1991, and Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1991).
B. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, in The C hief Works o f
Benedict de Spinoza, tr. R. H. M . Elwes (George Bell and Sons, London,
1905), vol. I, p. 103.
In English in the original - TRANS.
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BOURDIEU AND
THE JOURNALISTIC
FIELD
EDITED BY RODNEY BENSON
AND ERIK NEVEU
Polity