Abstract
While film studies is showing growing interest in production studies, the sociology of art and cultural production is turning its attention to the role of artworks.1 As sociologists have begun to emphasize the organizational implications of material products, film studies have started to highlight the social dimensions of the way production is organized. In this chapter, I aim to pursue and combine these lines of thought to suggest that the social analyses of cultural production could be taken further by including objects as potential actors, thereby developing what may be called a socio-material perspective. This perspective is well developed within science and technology studies (STS). My proposal for a socio-material perspective on cultural production therefore implies drawing on insights from developments within this field. Others have made similar transfers of ideas, by comparing the laboratory and the studio for instance.2 By considering artworks as objects, the socio-material perspective questions the traditional distinction between the sociology of art and art studies. I will therefore begin this chapter by outlining this distinction and by suggesting that it should be transgressed. I will then present three examples of the socio-material analyses of cultural products to show how this perspective can be used in cultural production analyses. These examples are taken from the work of cultural sociologists who have carried out music, architecture, and film production analyses from a socio-material perspective. Finally, I will briefly discuss some of the potential criticisms and limitations linked to this perspective.
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John T. Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2008);
Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John T. Caldwell, eds, Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (New York: Routledge, 2009);
Georgina Born, “The Social and the Aesthetic: For a Post-Bourdieuian Theory of Cultural Production,” Cultural Sociology 4, no. 2 (2010): 171–208;
Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
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Antoine Hennion and Line Grenier, “Sociology of Art: New Stakes in a Post-critical Time,” in International Handbook of Sociology, eds Stella R. Quah and Arnaud Sales (London: Sage, 2000), 341–356.
Svetlana Alpers, “The Studio, the Laboratory, and the Vexations of Art,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, eds Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (London: Routledge, 1998), 401–417;
Antoine Hennion, “An Intermediary between Production and Consumption: The Producer of Popular Music,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 14, no. 4(1989): 400–424; Jérôme Hansen, “Mapping the Studio (Fat Chance Matmos): Sonic Culture, Visual Arts and the Mediations of the Artist’s Workplace,” Culture Machine, 9 (2007), accessed April 8, 2013, www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/83/59.
Richard A. Peterson, “Cultural Studies through the Production Perspective: Progress and Prospects,” in The Sociology of Culture: Emerging Theoretical Perspectives, ed. Diana Crane (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), 184–185.
Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982);
Pierre Bourdieu, ed., “But Who Created the ‘Creators’?,” in Sociology in Question (London: Sage, 1993), 139–148.
Eduardo de la Fuente, “The ‘New Sociology of Art’: Putting Art Back into Social Science Approaches to the Arts,” Cultural Sociology 1, no. 3 (2007): 409–425;
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Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick, eds, Myth, Meaning, and Performance: Toward a New Cultural Sociology of the Arts, (Boulder, CO, and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2006).
Born, “The Social and the Aesthetic”; de la Fuente, “The ‘New Sociology of Art”’; Antoine Hennion, “Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology,” Cultural Sociology 1, no. 1 (2007): 97–114;
Nick Prior, “Critique and Renewal in the Sociology of Music: Bourdieu and Beyond,” Cultural Sociology 5, no. 1(2011): 121–138;
Sara Malou Strandvad, “Attached by the Product: A Socio-material Direction in the Sociology of Art,” Cultural Sociology 6, no. 2 (2012): 163–176.
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979); Paul Willis, Profane Culture (London: Routledge, 1978).
Albena Yaneva, “Scaling Up and Down: Extraction Trials in Architectural Design,” Social Studies of Science 35, no. 6 (2005): 867–894.
Max Weber quoted in Paul DiMaggio and Paul M. Hirsch, “Production Organizations in the Arts,” in The Production of Culture, ed. R. Peterson (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1976), 73.
Vera L. Zolberg, Constructing a Sociology of the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 12.
Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
Robert Witkin, Art and Social Structure (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995);
Robert Witkin, “Constructing a Sociology for an Icon of Aesthetic Modernity,” Sociological Theory 15, no. 2 (1997): 101–125.
Anne Bowler, “Methodological Dilemmas in the Sociology of Art,” in The Sociology of Culture: Emerging Theoretical Perspectives, ed. Diana Crane (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), 258.
Antoine Hennion and Cécile Méadel, “Programming Music: Radio as Mediator,” Media, Culture and Society 8 (1986): 281–303;
Antoine Hennion and Cécile Méadel, “The Artisans of Desire: The Mediation of Advertising between Product and Consumer,” Sociological Theory 7, no. 2 (1989): 191–209;
Hennion, “Baroque and Rock”; Antoine Hennion, “Music Lovers: Taste as Performance,” Theory, Culture and Society 18, no. 5 (2001): 1–22;
Antoine Hennion and Joël-Marie Fauquet, “Authority as Performance: The Love of Bach in Nineteenth-century France,” Poetics 29 (2001): 75–88; Hennion, “Those Things That Hold Us Together.”
Antoine Hennion, “The History of Art-Lessons in Mediation,” Réseaux: The French Journal of Communication 3, no. 2 (1995): 233–262.
Emilie Gomart and Antoine Hennion. “A Sociology of Attachment: Music Amateurs, Drug Users,” in Actor Network Theory and After, eds John Law and John Hassard (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 220–247.
Ibid. See also Howard S. Becker, “Art as Collective Action,” American Sociological Review 39, no. 6 (1974): 767–776;
Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Hennion, “The Production of Success”; Hennion, “Baroque and Rock.”
Howard S. Becker, Robert R. Faulkner, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Art from Start to Finish: Jazz, Painting, Writing, and Other Improvisations (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006); Hansen, “Mapping the Studio”;
Harvey Molotch, Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Computers, and Many Other Things Come to Be As They Are (New York: Routledge, 2003);
Oli Mould, “Lights, Camera, but Where’s the Action? Actor-Network Theory and the Production of Robert Connolly’s Three Dollars,” in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, eds Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 203–213;
Nick Prior, “Putting a Glitch in the Field: Bourdieu, Actor Network Theory and Contemporary Music,” Cultural Sociology 2, no. 3 (2008): 301–319.
Georgina Born, “On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity,” Twentieth-century Music 2, no. 1 (2005): 7–36;
Born, “The Social and the Aesthetic: Methodological Principles in the Study of Cultural Production,” in Meaning and Method: The Cultural Approach to Sociology, eds Isaac Reed and Jeffrey Alexander (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), 77–116;
Born, “The Social and the Aesthetic: For a Post-Bourdieuian Theory of Cultural Production”; Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998);
Alfred Gell, The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999);
Gomart and Hennion, “A Sociology of Attachment”; James Leach, “Differentiation and Encompassment: A Critique of Alfred Gell’s Theory of the Abduction of Creativity,” in Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, eds Amira Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (London: Routledge, 2007), 167–188.
Christopher Gad and Casper Bruun Jensen, “On the Consequences of Post-ANT,” Science, Technology & Human Value 35, no. 1 (2010): 55–80.
See Tia DeNora, “Music as Agency in Beethoven’s Vienna,” in Myth, Meaning, and Performance: Toward a New Cultural Sociology of the Arts, eds Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick (Boulder, CO, and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 103–120.
Yaneva, “Scaling Up and Down”; Albena Yaneva, “How Buildings ‘Surprise’: The Renovation of the Alte Aula in Vienna,” Science Studies 21, no. 1(2008): 8–28;
Albena Yaneva, The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009);
Albena Yaneva, Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2009).
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Diane Crane, The Production of Culture: Media and the Urban Arts (Newbury Park, CA, London, and New Delhi: Sage, 1994);
Richard A. Peterson, ed., The Production of Culture (Beverly Hills, CA, and London: Sage, 1976);
Richard A. Peterson and Narasimhan Anand, “The Production of Culture Perspective,” Annual Review of Sociology 30 (2004): 311–334.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).
Sara Malou Strandvad, “Materializing Ideas: A Socio-material Perspective on the Organizing of Cultural Production,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 14, no. 3(2011): 283–297.
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979).
Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol, “The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology,” Social Studies of Science 30, no. 2 (2000): 225–263.
Harry Collins and Steve Yearley, “Epistemological Chicken,” in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 301–326;
Harry Collins and Steve Yearley, “Journey into Space,” in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992), 369–389;
Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, “Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School— A Reply to Collins and Yearley,” in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 343–368.
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© 2013 Petr Szczepanik and Patrick Vonderau
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Strandvad, S.M. (2013). Analyzing Production from a Socio-material Perspective. In: Szczepanik, P., Vonderau, P. (eds) Behind the Screen. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282187_3
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