The Field of Cultural Production by Jabeen Hassan

The Field of Cultural Production with the sub-title Essays on Art and Literature, published in 1993 brings together Pierre Bourdieu's most important writings on art, literature, and aesthetics. 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 late twentieth century: aesthetic value and judgement, the social contexts of cultural practice, the role of intellectuals and artists, and the structures of literary and artistic authority.

The Field of Cultural Production comprises of three significant parts .Bourdieu method of analysis is based on ‘radical contextualization, examination of the set of social conditions and cultural practices of the production, circulation and consumption of symbolic goods’. He develops a highly original approach to the study of literary and artistic works on three levels of analysis i.e. socio-historic, discursive and interpretive analyses. One of Baurdieu’s central concerns is the role of social structures when unequal power relations are accepted as legitimate, embedded in cultural practices, and taken for granted in the society at large. Bourdieu’s theory of the field reveals the material and symbolic production of cultural goods and takes into account the mediators who contribute to the work’s meaning and legitimization as their ultimate function to maintain ‘the universe of belief’ within cultural field. The degree of autonomy of the field is measured by the direct connection between the work of art and the immediate social structure and its symbolic meaning. However the external determinants are also moulded into the cultural field, depending upon its level of autonomy.

First part of the book also elaborates how philosophy, the expansion of corporate capital and the emergence of information technologies were translated into and applied to the field of cultural production. It also addresses how the internet is currently being translated into the field and, in particular, how the distribution of symbolic capital is affected by the internet’s possibilities.

 The essays in this 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. 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.
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. 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.

The book emphatically describes cultural production as a dynamic and fluid field that brings diverse disciplines and modes of creative practice that interests a student, often with particular strengths in visual and performing arts, curatorial practice, community advocacy and activism, new media technologies, and literary and cultural theory.