A Dialogue on the Ideas of "World" and "Field"

Author(s): Howard S. Becker and Alain Pessin

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Source: Sociological Forum, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Jun., 2006), pp. 275-286
Published by: Springer
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 Forum,Vol.21,No.2, June2006(C2006)
Sociological
DOI: 10.1007/s11206-006-9018-2

SpecialInterview

A Dialogue on the Ideas of "World"and "Field"'

HowardS. Becker2and Alain Pessin2

Publishedonline:22 August2006

THE INTERVIEW

Alain Pessin:HowardBecker (1982), the idea of "world,"which you

have exploredfullyin Art Worlds,has arousedgreat interestamongsociol-
ogists of art,in Franceas elsewherein the world.It appearsin manyworks,
but one neverthelesshas the feeling that the uses it is put to are not always
very clearand do not do it justice.It is often minimized,reducedin its range
and significanceto the single positivevirtueof cooperation.It is sometimes
purely and simply denied in its specificitywhen it is finally turned into a
more optimisticvariantof what Pierre Bourdieu has called "field."Thus,
many authors-professionals as well as graduatestudents-think that the
conceptsof field and worldsimplyreferto two interchangeableapproaches
that are equallyuseful in the same researchproject,one emphasizingcon-
flict,the otherthe complementarityof actorsandactions.In thisview, sprin-
kling a little Becker on Bourdieuwouldproducegood sociology,if only be-
cause it would make the world seem a little less desperateplace. It seems
to me that this would be too simple minded,an insufficientlyrigoroususe
of the idea of world.That'swhy I thinkit is time to clarifythis idea, and to
see, with you, how it differsfrom and is opposed to the idea of field. Let's
begin with this latteridea. Whatdoes the idea of a field evoke for you?
Howard S. Becker:I've just finishedreadingPierre Bourdieu'sauto-
biography(Bourdieu,2004), publishedafter his death, and so I've had a
chance to see how he uses the idea in practice. The book starts with a
1Thisarticlefirstappearedin Sociologiede l'artin French(HowardS. BeckeretAlainPessin,
"Dialoguesurles notionsde Mondeet de Champ,"Sociologiede l'art(NouvelleS6rie,Opus
8), pp. 165-180.The Englishtranslationhere is by HowardS. Becker.
2884LombardStreet,SanFrancisco,California94133.
275

0884-8971/06/0600-0275/0 © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media,

276 Beckerand Pessin

descriptionof the champ universitaireas it existed when he entered it in

the late 1950s.He describesit as dominatedby Sartreand his followers.He
says that philosophywas the importantdiscipline,that sociologyand social
sciencewere not taken seriously,except to be seen as dangeroustendencies
to be suppressed.Sociology, in particular,was seen by Sartreand his fol-
lowers as too American,too positivist,too much opposed to the dominant
myth of the solitaryintellectualwho achievedthe great thingshe achieved
by, as a friendof mine used to say, "thoughtand thoughtalone."
He puts this descriptionin the languageof field. I'll try to summarize
the imagery he uses. First of all, the idea seems very metaphorical,the
metaphorcoming perhapsfrom physics.There is a defined and confined
space, which is the field, in which there is a limited amount of room, so
that whateverhappensin this field is a zero-sumgame.If I have something,
you can't have it. Naturally,then, people struggleand fight over the lim-
ited space. The people who control the limited space try to keep it all for
themselvesand their allies and preventnewcomersfrom gettingany of it.
Space here is a metaphorfor anythingthat people want that is in lim-
ited supply.For Bourdieu,this is often esteem or recognition,but it can also
be more materialstuff like money or access to publicationoutlets, things
like that, "real"things,you mightsay.
The field is organizedas "forces"of variouskinds, and one big force
is power, which seems to involve the control of resources:in the case of
the champuniversitaire,these would be thingslike, as I said above,postes
(permanentpositions) in faculties and researchcenters,money to support
research,accessto publicationoutlets,and,in a generalway,esteem, honor,
recognition,and so on.
The people with power make judgmentsabout newcomers,deciding
whether they can be admittedto the circle of the powerful,perhapsin a
subordinaterole at first, or whether they must be rejected. He says that
these determinationsare made on the basis of the workpeople do but also
on more personalcriteria:their behavior,the way they dress,theiraccents,
their political ideas, their friends,their lovers. (He doesn't quite say that
the latter are illegitimatecriteria,althoughperhaps he does somewhere,
but he certainly means that you should understandhim this way.) Al-
thoughthe idea is meantto be completelygeneral,the examples(naturally,
since it is autobiographical)come from the Frenchuniversitysystemof the
1950s.
Alain Pessin:The idea of field should be generalizableto all areas of
social life, includingthe one that interestsus directly,artisticactivity.
Having proposed, with the idea of world, a very different approach,
what point, would you say, separatesyou most clearlyfromBourdieu'sap-
proach?
A Dialogueon the Ideas of "World"and "Field" 277

HowardS. Becker:The idea of field seems to me much more a

metaphorthana simpledescriptive term.Bourdieudescribedthe socialar-
rangements in which art is made-what he callsa field-as if it werea field
of forcesin physicsratherthana lot of peopledoingsomethingtogether.
Theprincipal entitiesin a fieldareforces,spaces,relations,andactors(char-
acterizedbytheirrelativepower)whodevelopstrategiesusingthevariable
amountsof powertheyhaveavailable.
The peoplewhoactin a fieldarenot fleshandbloodpeople,withall
thecomplexity thatimplies,butrathercaricatures, in thestyleof theHomo
economicusof the economists,endowedwiththe minimalcapacitiesthey
haveto haveto behaveasthetheorysuggeststheywill.Theirrelationsseem
to be exclusivelyrelationsof domination, basedin competition andconflict.
WhenI try to imaginesucha field,I see a diagram:a squareenclosinga
spacein whicharrowsconnectunits,creatinginvisiblestructures. Or,worse
yet, I imaginea bigplasticboxwithallkindsof raysshootingaroundinside
it, likesomethingyouwouldsee in a sciencefictionmovie.
Therepetitionof thephysicalmetaphoris verystrikingin TheRulesof
Art.Forexample,in the sectionat thebeginningof thebookentitled"The
Questionof Inheritance," he says,
In thuslayingout the twopolesof the fieldof power,a truemilieuin the New-
toniansense,wheresocialforces,attractionsor repulsions,
areexercisedandfind
their phenomenalmanifestationin the form of psychologicalmotivationssuch as
love or ambition,Flaubertinstitutesthe conditionsof a kind of sociologicalexperi-
mentation: fiveadolescents-including thehero,Fre6dric-provisionally
assembled
by theirsituationas students,willbe launchedintothisspacelikeparticlesintoa
andtheirtrajectories
force-field, willbe determinedby the relationbetweenthe
forcesof the fieldandtheirowninertia.Thisinertiais inscribedon the one hand
in the dispositionsthey owe to theiroriginsand to theirtrajectories,andwhichim-
ply a tendencyto perseverein a mannerof being and thus a probabletrajectory,
an on the other in the capitalthey have inherited,and whichcontributesto defin-
ing the possibilitiesand the impossibilitieswhichthe field assignsthem. (Bourdieu
1996:9-10)

AlainPessin:Whatevokessuchimagesis in somewaythe "compres-

sion"of thesocial.Thevirulenceof theoppositionsis inevitablebecauseof
the fundamental scarcityof the spaceand,as a result,the scarcityof posi-
tionsanyonecanoccupy.Theideaof worldputsus in an extendable,open
space,to which,moreover,it'sdifficultto assignlimits,insofaras thespatial
metaphoris relevantto it at all.
HowardS. Becker:Theideaof world,as I thinkof it, is verydifferent.
Of course,it is stilla metaphor.Butthemetaphorof world-whichdoesnot
seemto be at alltrueof themetaphorof field-containspeople,allsortsof
people,who are in the middleof doingsomethingthatrequiresthemto
payattentionto eachother,to consciously takeaccountof the existenceof
278 Beckerand Pessin

others and to shape what they do in the light of what others do. In such a
world, people do not respond automaticallyto mysteriousexternalforces
surroundingthem. Instead, they develop their lines of activitygradually,
seeing how othersrespondto what they do and adjustingwhatthey do next
in a way that mesheswithwhat othershave done andwill probablydo next.
Above all, the metaphoris not spatial.The analysiscenters on some
kind of collectiveactivity,somethingthat people are doing together.Who-
ever contributesin any way to that activity and its results is part of that
world. The line drawnto separatethe world from whateveris not part of
it is an analyticconvenience,not somethingthat exists in nature,not some-
thing that can be found by scientificinvestigation.
So the worldis not a closed unit. Sometimes,of course,there reallyis a
bounded area of activity,such as the universityworld,in whichsome set of
organizationsand people monopolizesthe activityin question.Some forms
of collective action have walls aroundthem, not just the total institutions
Goffman describedbut also all the companieswhere you have to have a
badge to get beyond the receptionarea and, in the cases Bourdieufocuses
on, those places where physicalaccess isn't limited but access to positions
and activitiesis.
In these cases, you might say, the field, limited as it is by rules and
practicesthat keep outsidersout, makes it impossibleto be part of some
collective activityunlessyou are chosen by the people who alreadyare part
of it. You can'tdo sociologyor intellectualworkif you are denied accessto
the places where people are doing that sort of work together.So you can't
be a sociologist unless you can have a job in a sociology departmentor
researchcenter and can publishyour work in the recognizedplaces where
sociologyis published.
To say it that way raises obvious problems.Even in such cases, the
monopoly is almost never complete and certainlyis never permanent.So,
as Bourdieu describesthe world that was the setting for the beginningof
his career,doing sociologywas not confinedto the places he seems to care
about most. It was not only at the Sorbonne or the College de France
that sociologicalwork got done. He never mentions,for example,Georges
Friedmann,who was a friendof my mentor,EverettHughes,andwho stud-
ied factories,the industrialworld.
I suppose a Bourdieusienmight say that, well, of course, you could
do somethingthat would look like sociology and might even be sociology,
from some point of view (maybe, as in the case of Friedmann,from the
point of view of a visitingAmericanindustrialsociologist),but, let's face it,
it wouldn'treallybe sociologybecause the people who own the trademark
wouldn't recognize you as doing the real thing. "Congratulations,Fried-
mann, looks like interestingstuff; too bad no one knows or cares about
A Dialogueon the Ideasof "World"and "Field" 279

you."The equivocalterm here is "no one," because of course people knew

about Friedmann,but the people who counted, in Bourdieu'sview, didn't
accepthim.
At this point it is, as we like to say, an empiricalquestion:is it true that
someone can controlaccessto everythingimportantin that way? Can your
heterodoxideas be preventedfrom reachingsome publicif the "important
people" ignore them? That depends. I think that probablyit is not really
very common, althoughit is common for people to feel that this is what's
happeningto them and theirideas.
At this point I think it might be useful to consider the differences
between the institutionalizedacademicand intellectuallife of the United
States and France, and even to engage in some speculation about the
sourcesof those differences.I have for years been telling people in France
thatto understandAmericansociologythey mustfirstunderstandthatthere
are somethinglike 20,000 sociologistsin the United States and something
like 2,000 departmentsof sociology (and many sociologistswork in other
fields-education, socialwork,nursing,etc.-thus makingthe numbereven
larger).Thisis at least ten timesthe numberof people and departmentsthat
exist in France,probablymore like twentytimes.
One consequenceof this is that it is relativelyeasy to supporta wide
variety of sociological activities.No idea is too crazy or unacceptableto
find a home somewhere.You name it, and there is, somewhere,a depart-
ment or a part of a departmentdevoted to propagatingthat idea or point
of view. You can alwaysfind some other people who think your idea, un-
acceptableas it is to "the leaders of the field,"whoever they are, is really
good and are ready to marchunderyour flag. If you can find two or three
hundredof them (not so easy, but certainlynot impossiblewhen there are
20,000from whom to recruit),you can organizea section of the American
SociologicalAssociation. If you can't get that number,you can start your
own organization(e.g., the InternationalVisual Sociology Association),
publish your own journal, elect your own president, and give your own
prizes.
It's in that sort of setting that the idea of world seems like a "natural"
way thinkabout organizedactivity.
to
Alain Pessin: One could summarizeall this in one of your favorite
ideas: "You could alwaysdo somethingelse." But this idea has to have a
generalapplication;it's not only in the United Statesthat you can do some-
thing else. Such a formula,when you applyit to any situationof social life,
opens the way to a sociology of the possible;it standsin oppositionto the
idea of limited possibilitiesof action and the blocked aspect of social sys-
tems. When you aren'twanted in one place, you can alwaysgo someplace
else and do whatyou want to do there.
280 Beckerand Pessin

Howard S. Becker: Someone is monopolizingthe field you want to

work in? Move somewhereelse and start your own field. You don't even
have to compete with the other people. You can criticizethem to your fol-
lowers, or ignore them, but they are not powerfulenough and do not have
enoughof a monopolyto preventyou from doing anything.
Rememberthat even in totalitarianregimesthere were almost always
dissidentintellectualmovementsdoing thingsforbiddenby the people who
dominated the legitimate field for that kind of work. When the Brazil-
ian militaryjuntasforbadeacademicsociology,people organizedresearch
institutes-with outside help, of course-and began to practice"urbanan-
thropology,"whichwas not forbidden.(Of course,there are extremecases
where it is impossibleto escape the power of the leaders of a field, but I
think that, empirically,that isn't frequent, and certainlynot at all in the
case of artisticactivitiesin most contemporarysocieties.)
So the idea of a worldof people who collaborateto producethis or that
result, a world in which people can find others to collaboratewith even if
the more powerfulpeople in their disciplinedon't approveof or recognize
what they do, a world in which the power to define what is importantor
acceptableis not held by only one set of actors-in that sort of situation,
the idea of worldmakessense andis analyticallyuseful,becauseit takesinto
accountwhat is there to be discovered,what events there are to explain.
In contrastwith the idea of field, the idea of world seems to me more
empiricallygrounded.It talks about things that we can observe-people
doing things rather than "forces,""trajectories,"or "inertia,"which are
not observablein social life, if you understandthese terms in the techni-
cal sense given to them in physics. We cannot observe these things per-
fectly, of course, but well enough that we can argue about them, and the
proceduresof empiricalscience can give us provisionalanswersof the kind
science gives.
Alain Pessin:A "world"is thus an ensemble of people who do some-
thing together.The action of each is not determinedby somethinglike the
"globalstructure"of the world in questionbut by the specificmotivations
of each of the participants,any of whom might "do somethingdifferent,"
create new responsesto new situations.In these conditions,what they do
togetherresultsfromarrangementsaboutwhichthe least one can say is that
they are never entirelypredictable.
HowardS. Becker:A "world"as I understandit-and if my language
elsewheredoesn't convey this, then I've failed to be clear-consists of real
people who are tryingto get things done, largely by getting other people
to do things that will assist them in their project.Because everyone has a
project, and the outcome of negotiationsbetween them is whateverthey
A Dialogueon the Ideasof "World"and "Field" 281

finallyall agree to, all those involved in such an activitymust take into ac-
counthow otherswill respondto theirown actions.David Mamet,the play-
wright,said somewhereI can't now findthat, in a scene in a play, everyone
in the scene has somethingthey want. If they didn't want somethingthey
wouldn'tbe there, they'd be off someplacewhere they could pursuesome-
thing they did want. The scene consists of each one tryingto get what he
or she wants,and the resultingcollective activityis somethingthat perhaps
no one wanted but is the best everyone could get out of this situationand
thereforewhat they all, in effect, agreedto.
This means that while people are free to try to findother possibilities,
those possibilitiesare limitedby whatthey can force or persuadeotherpeo-
ple to do.
Thisapproachperhapsmakessociallife seem more open to continuous
changeand spontaneousactionthanit reallyis. Sociallife exhibits,afterall,
substantialregularity.People do not do whatevercomes into theirheads at
any moment.On the contrary,most of the time they do thingsas they have
done them before. In a scheme that emphasizesopenness and possibility,
that regularityrequiresexplanation.
I find that explanationmainlyin the idea of "convention."People of-
ten, but not always,knowhow thingshave been done in the past,how things
are usuallydone, and they know that othersknow all these thingstoo. So, if
I do thingsas I know everyoneknowsthey are usuallydone and is prepared
to do them, I can feel confidentthat my actionswill fit in with theirs, and
we will be able to accomplishwhat we are tryingto do with a minimumof
difficultyand misunderstanding. This is not to say that there is not, or never
has been, conflict,but ratherthat in most cases the conflicthas been settled,
one way or another,andparticipantsin the activityhave agreedto do it this
way ratherthan one of the other ways it mighthave been done.
That's very abstract,so I'll give an example, taken from my favorite
domainof examples,music.Musiciansand composerssometimesdisagree
on how many notes to include between the two notes of an octave. God
did not decree that there should be the twelve notes of the Westernchro-
matic scale. Musiciansin other traditionshave often made other choices,
and great musicaltraditionsare founded on them. But Westernmusicians,
over a very long time, did acceptthe 12-tonechromaticscale as the basis of
their music. Now the instrumentswe play have that scale built into them,
the notationwe use to writemusic down for replaying,and everythingelse
connected with Western music takes for granted, on the basis of shared
conventionalunderstandings,that everyone will be playingmusic written
in that form on instrumentsbuilt to play those notes. So it is alwayseasier
to play music based on that conventionthan music created in some other
system.The cost in time and energyis muchgreaterwhen you don't accept
282 Beckerand Pessin

these conventions.So-here, I'm afraid,is a physicalmetaphor!-a kind of

inertiadisposespeople to do thingsas they have been done in the past, and
that accountsfor a greatdeal of the regularityof social life.
Among the conventionalunderstandingsthat produce these regular-
ities, we will of course often find elements of coercion and force, open or
disguised,thatwillproduceinequalitiesandwhatwe mayfeel are injustices.
People often agree to thingsthat are unfair,for lack of any better alterna-
tive.
Alain Pessin:The ideas of career and process,which are essential to
understandingthe functioningof a world,bringus backto the fact thatper-
sonal trajectories,as they confrontcollective situations,go throughstages
and that, at each step, the actors have to make choices. Thus nothing is
definitivelypromisedto anyone. One can't think successfullyin terms of
process when using the idea of field. Everythingseems alreadysettled in
advance.The struggleis predefinedas the normalframeworkof activity.
And the weightof the habitusmakesthe behaviorof those affectedby
it essentiallypredictable.
Howard S. Becker:Events and results are not determinedthat way.
The history of attemptsby social scientiststo predictwhat will happen in
this or that case shouldbe sufficientto make us give up this dream.This is
not just a problemof not havingenoughdataor lackingsufficientcomputing
power. It may be-but rememberit is only a hypothesisof chaos theory,
not somethingdemonstrated-that a butterflybeating its wings in South
Americawill producea hurricanesomewhereelse in the world.But nothing
like that has ever been demonstratedin social life, and I don't think it is a
resultwe shouldaim for.
Imaginethat we knew enough to predictsome result, on the basis of
habitus or somethingmuch clearer and more specific,a "variable"of the
kind quantitativesociologistslike to workwith,for example,that Mr.Jones
will have an automobileaccidenttomorrow.He will be drunk,his brakes
will be in bad shape, and it will be raining,all things that make an acci-
dent likely. But it will also be necessaryfor Mr. Smith(or Mr. Somebody)
to "cooperate"to produce the accident.That is, Smith will have to be in
the rightplace for the drunkenJones to hit him, and the possibilityof pre-
dictingthose two events is correspondinglyless likely. When you multiply
probabilities,they decrease.And the accidentwill involve not only Jones
and Smith, but also hundredsof other people. So the practicalpossibil-
ity of predictingany event, consideringthe multiple specific events that
are necessaryand the diminishingmultiplicativeprobabilities,approaches
zero. That includespredictionsabout what people will do based on habi-
tus and similar individual qualities. Such things aren't meaningless,but
A Dialogueon the Ideasof "World"and "Field" 283

they are just one among hundredsof things relevant to what people and
organizationsdo.
You havepointedto somethingelse importantin yourquestion.Things
do not happen, events do not occur, people don't choose, all at once.
Rather,these thingsoccurin steps,in stages,and that meansthat every step
offers the possibilityof going in more than one direction-there is more
than one possibilityat every juncture.That means that the possible out-
comes are alwaysnumerousand varied,not easily capturedin a formula.
Alain Pessin:It's time now to put to rest once and for all the misunder-
standingattachedto the idea of cooperation.We sometimeshearit saidthat
you are the sociologistwho has forgottenconflict.But tryingto do some-
thingtogetherin no way impliesan absolutelypeacefulconceptionof social
relations.
HowardS. Becker:I supposethatsomeonewho wasn'ttryingveryhard
to understandthis point of view could characterizeit as simplyfocusingon
cooperation.But that wouldn't be accurate.It could be true only if you
understandcooperationin a very extendedway, as encompassinganything
thatpeople do togetherin whichthey take into accountandrespondto what
the othersinvolvedare doing.Collectiveaction-two or more (usuallya lot
more) people doing somethingtogether-is not the same as cooperating
in the more conventional,minimalunderstandingof that word, which has
overtones of peacefulness,getting along with one another,and good will.
On the contrary,the people engaged in collective action might be fighting
or plottingagainstone anotheror doing any of the other thingsthat figure
so prominentlyin Bourdieu'sdescriptionsof social fields.
But they might also be workingtogetherto do something(rehearsing
for a concertthey are going to give that night),or they mightbe linkedindi-
rectly,one doingsomethingnecessaryfor whatthe other does, even though
they mightnot know each other (as the instrument-repair manfixesthe bro-
ken saxophone necessaryfor the musician'sevening performance).They
mighthavejoined forcesfor this one occasion,as composerswho otherwise
compete with each otherfor scarcecommissionsandposts will cooperateto
put on a concertof contemporarymusic(see Gilmore,1987).Or they might
routinelywork together on the particularthing that bringsthem together,
as the playersin an orchestrawith a long season do.
The natureof these relationsbetween people is not given a priori,not
somethingyou can establishby definition.It's somethingyou discoverby
observingthem in action,seeing what they do. If they are in conflict,you'll
see that. If they are working together on a project, you'll see that. And
if they do both-fight and work together on a project,you will see that
too.
284 Beckerand Pessin

Alain Pessin:So one can thus easilyintegrateconflictinto the idea of a

world, as long as you integrateit as a situationand not as an priorioverde-
termination.From this perspective,situationsare absolutelynot reducible
to some dynamicthat overpowersthem. The idea of field is characterized,
on the otherhand,not only by the omnipresenceof conflict,but by the exis-
tence of the conflictof conflicts,the conflictof social classes,whichoverde-
terminesall other social relations.Conflictis, in this conception,a generat-
ing principleof social life. It seems that you don't share this point of view,
beginningwith the very idea of a generatingprincipleof social life.
HowardS. Becker:That'sright.I don't thinkthere is any singlegener-
ating principle.It is more likely that manyprincipleswork togetherin one
way or anotherto producethe messinessof ordinarylife. But it's not just
a matter of my taste. It is also, I'm sure, true that this way of looking at
things is a more fruitfulguide to researchbecause it is more open to possi-
bilitiesyou hadn'tthoughtof, whichcarefulattentionto the detailsof social
life can suggest to you. It's better not to decide before you begin what the
"importantthings"are.
Alain Pessin: Readers of these two points of view are sometimes
tempted to say that it is a photographicproblem.Bourdieu uses a wide-
angle lens while Becker focuses on micro-relations;one has an overarching
globalview;the other does case studies.And then people go on to say that,
of course,case studiesare inevitablypartial,that they cannotget at what is
really determiningin social life. The answersyou have alreadygiven show
that it is the overarchingview that is reductive,becauseit systematicallyig-
nores certainaspectsand certainactorswho are neverthelessessentialand
just as determiningfor the resultsof certainsocial arrangements.
HowardS. Becker:The languageof a "world"points us towardan in-
clusivenotion of which actorsbelong in an analysisof art works,makes us
recognizethat everyonewho contributesanythingto whatthe workeventu-
ally is participatesin some way in its making.That'stautological:everyone
who participatesin makinga workparticipatesin makingit. The advantage
of that tautologyis that it showsus how to incorporateinto our conception
of art-makingthe people who are conventionallyleft out of such an analy-
sis:the technicians,the money people, all the people I have called "support
personnel."Their participationin makingthe work shows itself througha
little thought experiment.Remove any of them from the action (in your
mind-no one would let you do it in real life) and see what happens. If
the caterersdon't provide the meals for the people in the movie crew-
well, they have to eat, don't they? If they can't eat right there, on the set
or the location,they'll go someplaceelse and take longer, and the produc-
tion's costs will go up. That means that more money must be raisedor that
A Dialogueon the Ideas of "World"and "Field" 285

somethingelse won't be paid for-either one havingseriousconsequences

for the finalform of the film.
The basic questionof an analysiscenteredon the idea of worldis this:
Who is doing what with whom that affects the resultingwork of art? The
basic question of an analysiscentered on the idea of field seems to me to
be: Who dominateswhom, using what strategiesand resources,with what
results? Such questions can be and often are (repeatedlyin Art Worlds)
raised in an analysisbased on the idea of world, as a subset of the larger
set of questionsthat mightbe asked. But that much largerset of questions
cannoteasilybe raisedby an analysiscenteredon Bourdieu'snotionof field.
Most of them, it seems to me, are set aside a priorias trivialin comparison
with the "bigquestions"of dominanceand forces.
If this is all true, then the conventionalnotion that you can mix Bour-
dieu and Becker in whateverproportionsyou like-according to your taste
for or toleranceof conflict,let's say-is not accurate.In fact,they askdiffer-
ent kinds of questionsand look for differentkinds of answersand are not
reducibleone to the other.
Alain Pessin:They startout withtwo differentintentions,whichis clear
from the fact that the one must extractitself from commonknowledgeand
oppose itself to common sense to construct,in theory, the truth about the
social,while yoursmustimmerseitself in lived practices,observingand tak-
ing seriouslythe proceduresby whichsocial actorsconstructwhat you call
"sharedunderstandings," whichare the only truthsthatthe socialworldcan
produce, those which create symboliclinksbetween real people.
Howard S. Becker:This is an importantdifference.Many social the-
ories start with the premise that reality is hidden from ordinarymortals
and that it takes a special competence,perhapseven a magicalgift, to be
able to see throughthese obstacles and discoverThe Truth.I have never
believed that. To quote my mentorHughes again,he often said that sociol-
ogists did not know anythingthat nobody else knew. Whateversociologists
knew aboutsociallife, they had learnedfromsomeone who was partof and
fully engagedin that area of life. But since, as Simmelhad made clearin his
essay on secrecy (Simmel,1950), knowledgeis not equallydistributed,ev-
eryone doesn'tknow everything-not becausepeople are blindedto reality
by illusions,but because thingshave been kept from them by institutional
arrangements(whichmay or maynot have been put in place to achievethat
end). Sociologistsfindout whatthis one knowsand what that one knows so
that, in the end, they can assemble the partialknowledge of participants
into a more comprehensiveunderstanding.The idea of "false conscious-
ness"is a classicexampleof the theory of social knowledgeopposed to my
own practice.
286 BeckerandPessin

Alain Pessin: A sociology of situationsas opposed to a sociology of

structures,processversushabitus,careerversusdisposition,openness ver-
sus closure,choice versusdetermination-the exercise of analysiswe have
gone through,it seems to me, shows very clearlythat the idea of a worldis
in no way a "soft version" of the theory of fields. One could, moreover,
add that it proceeds from observation,and is very suspiciousof theory.
These are not two differentlynuancedversionsof an approachthat refer
essentiallyto the same thing. They are two ways of thinkingthat are op-
posed in theirintentionsand, necessarily,in theirresults:the philosophico-
sociologicalapproachthatsearchesfor the essence of the social,whichleads
to the theoryof fields,and the sociologico-ethnographic approachthat tries
to make explicit the circumstancesin which social situationscreate links
between actors,whichis the idea of a world.
Howard S. Becker:You have capturedhere the essential differences
between the approaches:the one open to multiplepossibilities,discovered
in the course of immersionin social life; the other focused on demonstrat-
ing, on the basis of a priori considerations,the truth of an alreadyestab-
lished abstractphilosophicalposition.I have nothingto add.

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Becker,HowardS. Gilmore,Samuel
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les: University of California Press. The organization of the concert
Bourdieu,Pierre world." Symbolic Interaction 10:209-
2004 "Esquisse pour une auto-analyse. 228.
Paris: Raisons d'agir editions. Simmel,Georg
Bourdieu,Pierre 1950 "'The Secret'and the secret society."
1996 "The Rules of Art: Genesis and Struc- In Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), The Sociology
ture of the Literary Field. Stanford, of Georg Simmel: 307-378. New York:
CA: Stanford University Press. Macmillan.