Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) from “The Field of Cultural Production, Or: The Economic World Reversed,” The Field of Cultural Production (1983)

Abstract

Few areas more clearly demonstrate the heuristic efficacy of relational thinking than that of art and literature. Constructing an object such as the literary field¹ requires and enables us to make a radical break with the substantialist mode of thought (as Ernst Cassirer calls it) which tends to foreground the individual, or the visible interactions between individuals, at the expense of the structural relations—invisible, or visible only through their effects—between social positions that are both occupied and manipulated by social agents, which may be isolated individuals, groups or institutions.² There are in fact very few other areas in which the glorification of “great men,” unique creators irreducible to any condition or conditioning, is more common or uncontroversial—as one can see, for example, in the fact that most analysts uncritically accept the division of the corpus that is imposed on them by the names of authors (“the work of Racine”) or the titles of works (Phèdre or Bésrénice).

O Poéssie, ô ma mère mourante, Comme tes fils t’aimaient d’un grand amour Dans ce Paris, en l’an mil huit cent trente: Pour eux les docks, l’Autrichien, la rente, Les mots de bourse éstaient du pur hésbreu. Th. de Banville, “Ballade de ses regrets pour l’an 1830”