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30 This theory is more fully set out in chapter 5 of my Making Sense of Marx
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
31 The possibilities are not literaHy innumerable; they can be enumerated,
or counted. In painting, with no finite alphabet to generate the combin-

32
ations, the possibilities are literally innumerable.
"L'Invention mathematique," in H. Poincare, Science et Methode (Paris:
Principles of a sociology of cultural
33
Flammarion, 1920), pp. 43-63, at pp. 49-50.
Ibid., p. 57.
works
34 Ibid., p. 59.
35 Ibid., p. 61.
36 Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention, p. 48. PIERRE BOURDIEU
37 For explorations of this idea, see chapter 4 of Ulysses and the Sirens; also Translated by Jenifer Wakelyn and Cameron Majidi
chapters 3 and 4 in T. C. Schelling, Choice and Consequence (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
38 For explorations of this idea, see chapter 5 of T. C. Schelling, The The fields of cultural production offer those who are engaged with
Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). them a space of possibilities (possibles) which tends to orient their
39 S. Springer and G. Deutsch, Left Brain, Right Brain (San Francisco: research by defining the universe of problems, of references, of
Freeman, 1981). intellectual landmarks (often constituted by the names of guiding
40 Poincare, "L'Invention mathematique," p. 59. figures), and of "isms", in short a whole system of coordinates which
41 In chapter Il.10 of Sour Grapes I cite Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu must be kept in mind-which is not to say in consciousness - in order
as examples of this tendency. More generally, functional 'explanation and
to play the game. This is what marks the difference between, for
psychoanalytic theory embody the tendency to find meaning everywhere.
42 Many examples occur in K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic
example, professionals and amateurs, or, to speak the language of
(Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1973). painting, "naifs," such as the customs officer Rousseau, and a
43 G. Ainslie, "Beyond microeconomics," in Elster (ed.), The Multiple Self, "painter object" who is constituted as a painter by the field. This
pp. 133-176, at p. 156. space of possibilities is what makes the producers of a given epoch at
44 Stendhal, Romans et Nouvelles (2 vols., Paris: Gallimard [Bibliotheque once situated, dated (the problematic is the historical outcome of the
de ola Pleiade]. 1952), vol. I, p. 1492. field's specific history), and relatively autonomous with respect to
45 Ibid., p. 1539.
the direct determinations of the economic and social environments.
46 J. Prevost, La Creation chez Stendhal (Paris: Mercure de France, 1971), Thus, for example, in order to understand the choices made by
p. 313.
:f 47 J. Margolis, "Art, forgery and authenticity," in Dutton (ed.), The Forger's contemporary directors, one cannot be content to relate them to the
art, pp. 153-171, at p. 165. economic and social conditions affecting the theater, or to the
48 The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos, for instance, has been engaged availability of grants or conditions at the box-office, or even to the
in so much collaborative work that mathematicians have been assigned expectations of the public; one must refer to the entire history of stage
"Erdos numbers" specifying the length of the shortest chain of co- direction since the 1880s, in the course of which there arose the
authorship that links them to Erdos (S. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathema- universe of points under discussion, of those constitutive elements of
tician [New York: Scribner, 1976], p. 135).
the theater on which any director worthy of the name must take a
49 Hegel, Phdnomeno]ogie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), pp.
298-300. Originally published in 1807. position.
This space of possibilities, which transcends individual agents,
functions as a sort of common system of reference which ensures that
even when they do not consciously refer to one another, contempo-
rary creators are objectively situated in a relation to one another in so
far as they refer to the same system of intellectual coordinates or
intellectual landmarks.
173
172
 Pierre Bourdieu
The analysts of literature are not immune to this logic, and I should
like to try to define the range of possible ways in which cultural works
can be analyzed and to explain the theoretical presuppositions of
each case. Taken to its logical conclusion, this method, which
establishes the existence of an intelligible relation between positions-
taken (choices from among possibilities) and positions in the social
field, would require that I list, in each case, the sociological elements
necessary to understanding the distribution of different specialities
among the different approaches and the reasons for making certain
choices rather than others. But I shall not do this, although it would
not be overly difficult (for example, I have outlined such a set of
relations in my analysis of the Barthes-Picard debate in my Homo
Academicus).
A familiar initial division opposes external explanations to inter-
nal interpretations. The latter is meant in the sense of Saussure's
"internal linguistics;" it can also be called formal or, to use the
language of Schelling and Cassirer, "tautegorical," as opposed to
allegorical. The internal reading in its most ordinary form is per-
formed by Jectores, professors of literature the world over. To the
extent that it is sustained by all the logic of the university institution-
the situation is even clearer in philosophy - it does not need to
constitute itself as a body of doctrines, and can remain a doxa. The
"New Criticism," which had the merit of giving explicit expression to
this view, merely put together a theory from the presuppositions of
"pure" reading, based on an absolutization of the text, and of "pure"
literature. The historically constituted presuppositions which are
inherent in "pure" production, notably in the case of poetry, also
,found expression in the field of literature, both in England, with the
'T. S. Eliot of The Sacred Wood, and in France 1 with the NRF and
especially Paul Valery. Cultural works are thought of as atemporal
significations and as pure forms which call for purely internal
readings, excluding, and condemning as "reductive" and crude, all
references to social determinations and functions.
In fact, if one wishes at all costs to give a theoretical basis for this
formalist tradition which, as such, dispenses with foundations since
it is rooted in institutional doxa, we can, it seems to me, turn in two
directions. We can invoke the neo-Kantian theory of symbolic forms
or, more generally, all the traditions which aim to discover universal
anthropological structures, such as the comparative mythology of
Mircea Eliade and Jungian or Bachelardian psychoanalysis, tradi-
tions which are blithely drawn upon and juxtaposed by academic
hermeneutics. We expect a tautegorical reading, one that relates
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Principles of a sociology of cultural works
works only with one another, to grasp the universal forms of poetic or
literary reason, the ahistorical structures which are the basis of the
poetical construction of the world. This position, perhaps because it
is untenable, is rarely given explicit expression, although, in• my
opinion, it haunts all researchers into the "essence" of the poetic, of
the symbol, of metaphor, etc.
The second possible foundation, the structuralist theory, is much
more powerful, both intellectually and socially. Socially it has taken
over the internalist doxa and conferred an aura of scientificity on the
internal reading as the formal dismantling of atemporal texts. Break-
ing with neo-Kantian universalism, structuralist hermeneutics treats
cultural works (language, myth, and, by extension, works of art) as
structures structured without a structuring subject: structures which,
like the Saussurian langue, are particular historical realizations and
must therefore be decoded as such. But this decoding must be
without any recourse to an external hermeneutic, in other words,
without any reference to the economic or social conditions of the
work's production or that of the work's producers (such as the
educational system). Rejecting all forms of universalization (Levi-
Strauss clearly stated his opposition to Eliade and comparative
mythology), structuralism seeks to isolate the specific code particular
to a myth, which is to say to a historical tradition, or, in the case of
literature, to a single work, treated as a little private mythology. But in
fact structuralism does not only dodge the question of the social
conditions of possibility of the works considered (forgetting, for
example, that the formalism that frees the work from the most visible
determinations of history is itself a historical invention); it also
dodges, by applying the analysis to an isolated work, for example, in
the case of Jakobson and Levi-Strauss, to one of Baudelaire's sonnets
(even though the set of Baudelaire's poems that mention cats may
furnish many clues), the absolutely fundamental question of the
delimitation of the corpus: one of Baudelaire's sonnets, Baudelaire's
works as a whole, the selection of poetical works from Baudelaire's
time, etc.
In fact, notwithstanding a number of quarrels between ancients and
moderns, such as the Barthes-Picard debate, which have obscured a
profound agreement on the main issue, structuralism only "caught
on" in academia because it furnished the opportunity to update the
old internal reading so dear to the Jector acadernicus. However, the
structuralist tradition does have more to offer, provided one poses the
problem of the corpus that I just suggested. And Michel Foucault's
merit lies in having given what seems to me to be the only rigorous
175
 Pierre Bourdieu
formulation of the structuralist project (other than that of the Russian
formalists) as regards the analysis of cultural works.
Symbolic structuralism as elucidated by Foucault retains the
essence of Saussure's thought, namely the primacy of relations: "la
langue," says Saussure, in language very similar to Cassirer's in
Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, "is form and not substance."
Aware that no work exists by itself, that is to say, outside the relations
of interdependence that link it with other works, Foucault proposes
to call the "ordered system of differences and dispersions," within
which each individual work is given definition, the "field of strategic
possibilities." 1 But much like the semiologists, with the uses they,
Trierfor example, were able to make of a notion like that of ''semantic
field," Foucault refuses to search anywhere outside the field of
discourse to elucidate each of the discourses that is thereby invoked:
"If the analysis of the physiocrats belongs to the same discourses as
that of the utilitarians, it is not because they lived during the same
epoch, nor is it because they were confronted with the same society,
nor is it because their interests were tangled up in the same economy,
it is because both options derived from one and the same distribution
of points of choice, on one and the same strategic field." (p. 29)
Therefore, what cultural producers share is a system of common
references, of common landmarks, in short, something akin to my
earlier suggestion of a space of possibilities. But Foucault, faithful in
this to the Saussurean tradition and to the clear-cut rupture that it
anticipates between internal linguistics and external linguistics,
affirms the absolute autonomy of the "field of strategic possibilities,"
which he calls 6pisteme; and he quite logically challenges as "doxo-
logical illusion" the claim that the explicative principle of what
i:tccurs in the "field of strategic possibility" is to be found in what he
calls the "field of polemic" and in "the divergence of interests or
mental habits among individuals" (I cannot but feel that I am the o~e
referred to here ... ). In other words (and this is where the border
between orthodox structuralism and the genetic structuralism that I
propose lies), Michel Foucault transfers the oppositions and the
antagonisms, which have their roots in the relations between the
producers and the users of the works under consideration, into the
heaven of ideas, if I may call it that.
There is, of course, no question of denying the specific determi-
nation exerted by the space of possibilities, given that it is one of the
functions of the concept of a relatively autonomous field, which has
its own history, to explicate this determination. However, it is not
176
Principles of a sociology of cultural works
possible to treat the cultural order, the episteme, as a totally autono-
mous system, if only because in so doing one would be prohibited
from giving an account of the changes that occur in this separate
universe except by according it an immanent propensity for chal'ige,
as in Hegel, by a mysterious form of Selbstbewegung. (Foucault, like
so many others, succumbs to this form of essentialism, or, if you like,
of fetishism, which has appeared in other domains, particularly in
mathematics: here it is necessary to follow Wittgenstein, who notes
that mathematical truth; are not eternal essences, springing fully
armed from the human brain, but historical products of a certain type
of historical work accomplished in the particular social world that is
the scientific field.)
The same criticism applies to the Russian formalists. Like Fou-
cault, who drew on the same source, they consider only the system of
works, the network of relations between texts: intertextuality. Again,
like Foucault, they are obliged to locate the dynamic principle of the
system of texts in the system itself. Tynianov, for example, explicitly
affirms that everything which is literary can be determined only by
the anterior conditions of the literary system. (Foucault says the same
of the sciences.) They ·make the process of "automatization," or of
"disautomatization," into a sort of natural law of poetical change,
analogous to the effect of mechanical wear and tear.
I shall return to this point. Now I proceed to the external analysis,
which, viewing the relationship between the social world and cul-
tural works according to the logic of "reflection" (ref1et), links works
directly to the social characteristics of their authors (to their social
origin) or to the groups to which they are actually or supposedly
addressed, and whose expectations they are supposed to fulfill. The
biographical method, looking now at its most favorable case, which
in my opinion is the analysis Sartre devoted to Flaubert, exhaustively
investigates the particular condition of the author's existence in the
search of the explicative principles that can be discovered only if one
takes account of the literary microcosm in which that existence took
· shape.
Statistical analysis is no better. In effect it most often applies
predefined principles of classification to populations that are them-
selves predefined. To give this method a minimum of rigor it would
be necessary, first of all, to study, as Francis Haskell has done for
painting, the history of the process of drawing up lists of authors
which are the objects of the statistician's work; in other words, the
history of the procedure of canonization and of hierarchization that
177
 Pierre Bourdieu
leads to the demarcation of the population of consecrated writers. But
it would also be necessary to study the genesis of systems of
classification, names of epochs; schools, genres, etc., which are, in
actuality, the instruments and the stakes of struggles. In the absence
of such a critical genealogy, one runs a risk of cutting off from the field
of research.that which is at issue in reality, for example, the limits of
the population of writers - in other words, those who are recognized,
by the best-known writers, as having the right to call themselves
writers (the same thing applies if we are studying historians or
sociologists). Moreover, without goi~g on to an analysis of the real
divisions of the field, one risks, as a result of the regroupings that the
logic of statistical analysis imposes, destroying the real cohesions,
and thereby the genuinely established statistical relations which only
a statistical analysis armed with a know ledge of the specific structure
of the field could apprehend.
However, the studies that are most typical of the external mode of
analysis are Marxist-inspired researchers, represented by such
diverse authors as Lukacs, Goldman, Borkenau (on the genesis of
mechanistic thought), Antal (on Florentine painting), and Adorno
(on Heidegger), who try to relate works to a world-view or to the
social interests of a social class. The presupposition in these cases is
that to understand a work is to understand the world-view of a social
group as expressed through the artist, who acts like a sort of medium.
Ideally, o~e would have to examine all the extremely naive presup-
positions of these imputations of spiritual paternity which led all
these researchers to suppose that a group can act directly, as the final
cause (function) of a work's production (for example, is a work's
avowed commissioner, where one exists, really the person to whom
'~the work is addressed?). But, at a deeper level, supposing that one
succeeds in determining a work's social functions, the groups and the
"interests" which it "serves," has one then advanced even slightly
the understanding of the work's structure? To say that religion is the
"opiate of the people" is not to say a great deal about the structure of
the religious message; and, if I may anticipate the logical sequence of
my exposition, the structure is the condition for the accomplishment
of the function, if there is a function.
It is in opposition to this sort of reductive "short-circuit" that I have
developed the theory of the field. In fact, exclusive attention to
functions (which the internalist tradition, and notably the structura-
list tradition, were certainly wrong to neglect) leads us to ignore the
question of the internal logic of cultural objects, their structures,
178
Principles of a sociology of cultural works
considered as languages; but, at a deeper level, it results in a failure to
consider the groups which produce these objects (priests, jurists,
intellectuals, writers, poets, artists, mathematicians, etc.) and for
whom the objects also fulfill functions. It is here that Max Weber,
with his theory of religious agents, is a great help. But, in fact, though
he has the merit of reintroducing specialists and their particular
interests - that is, the functions that their activity and their products
(religious doctrines, juridical corpuses, etc.) fulfill for them - he fails
to see that the circles of clerics are social microcosms with their own
proper structures and laws. It is these microcosms that I have called
fields and whose general laws of functioning I have attempted to
describe.
In fact what is needed is to apply the relational, or, if you like,
structuralist, mode of thought to the social space of the producers.
The social microcosm that I call the literary field is a space of
objective relations between positions (for example those of the
consecrated artist and the artist who is beyond the pale), and one can
understand what happens there only if one situates each agent or
each institution in its relations with all the others. It is in this
particular universe, this "republic of letters," and in the relations of
force and the struggles which aim to conserve or to transform the
established order, that the principle of the producers' strategies, of
the form of art that they defend, the alliances that they make, the
schools that they found, resides; and this through the specific
interests that are determined there. External determinants, for
example the effects of economic crises, technical advances, or poli-
tical revolutions, which the Marxists used to invoke, cannot exert
themselves except through the intermediary of transformations in the
structure of the field which results from them. The field exerts an
effect of refraction (in the manner of a prism) and it is only on the
condition of knowing the laws specific to its function (its "coefficient
or refraction," that is, its "degree of autonomy") that one can
understand what it is that occurs, for example, in the disputes
between poets, between those who champion social art and the
defenders of art for art's sake, or, more generally, in the struggle
between the practitioners of different genres (e.g., novel and theater)
as one passes from a conservative monarchy to a progressive republic.
But what becomes of the works themselves in all this? And have we
not lost along the way the gains made by the more subtle supporters of
the internal reading? The logic of the fields' functioning creates a
situation where the different possibilities constituting the space of
179
 Pierre Bourdieu
possibilities at a given moment in time can appear, to the agents as
well as to the analysts, as incompatible from the logical point of view
(this is the case, for example, with the various methods that I have
examined - and also with the positions in the literary field that they
propose to analyze). The logic of struggle, and the division into
antagonistic camps according to objectively offered possibilities - to
the point that no one sees more than a tiny fraction of the space - can
make certain options which, in some cases, are not logically separate
appear irreconcilable. Because each camp places itself by opposing
another, it cannot see the limits that it imposes on itself by the very
act whereby it constitutes itself. This is particularly clear in the case
of Foucault, who, in order to constitute the space of possibilities,
feels himself obliged to exclude the social space of which this space is
the expression. Very often, as here, the social antagonisms which
subtend the theoretical oppositions and the interests attached to
these antagonisms form the sole obstacle to the transcendence and
synthesis of these oppositions.
Retaining what we get though the idea of intertextuality - the fact
that at each moment the space of works presents itself as a field of
positions-taken which can only be und~rstood relationally, in the
manner of a system of phonemes, that is, as a system of differentials-
one can pose the hypothesis (a heuristic instrument confirmed by
analysis) of a homology between the space of works, the field -of
positions-taken, and the space of positions in the field of production.
Thus many fundamental problems are resolved at a stroke: first of all
the problem of change. For example, the driving force of the process
of "banalization" and "debanalization," which the Russian forma-
lists describe, is not inscribed in the works themselves but in the
·~opposition between orthodoxy and heresy, which is constitutive of
all the fields of cultural production, and which takes its paradigmatic
form in the religious field. It is significant that Weber, discussing
religion, specifically the problem of the respective functions of the
priesthood and the prophets, also speaks of "banalization" or "routi-
nization," and of "debanalization" or "deroutinization." The process
that results in works is the product of the struggle between agents
who, as a function of their position in the field, linked to their specific
capital, are interested either in conservation, in other words in
routine and routinization, or in subversion, in other words in the
return to sources, to the purity of origins and to heretical critique.
It is certain that the orientation of change depends on the state of
the system of possibilities (stylistics, for example) which history
180
Principles of a sociology of cultural works
offers, and which determines what is possible or impossible to do at a
given moment in time and in a given field. But it is no less certain that
this orientation also depends on interests (often entirely "disinter-
ested") which orient the agents - as a function of their position at ithe
dominant pole or at the dominated pole of the field- toward the more
open, the more innovative possibilities, or toward the more sure, the
more established possibilities, or toward the possibilities which are
newest among those that have already been socially constituted, or
even toward those that must be created wholesale.
The science of cultural works has as its object the correspondence
between two homologous structures: the structure of the works
(genres; forms, themes, etc.) and the structure of the literary field, a
field of forces which is inseparable from the field of disputes. The
driving force of change in cultural works (language, art, literature,
science, etc.) resides in the struggles that take place in the corres-
ponding fields of production. These struggles, which aim to conserve
or to transform- the relations of forces instituted in the field of
production, obviously have the effect of conserving or transforming
the structure of the field of works which are themselves both the
instruments and stakes of the struggles.
The strategies adopted by the agents and institutions engaged in
literary struggles, that is, their positions-taken (specific positions,
e.g., stylistic, political, ethical, etc.), depend on the position they
occupy in the structure of the field, that is, in the distribution of
symbolic capital, whether institutionalized or not ("celebrity," inter-
nal recognition). This position, mediated by the constitutive dis-
positions of theif habitus - which are relatively autonomous relative
to position - inclines them either to the conservation or to the
transformation of this distribution, and therefore to the perpetuation
of the rules of the game in force or to their subversion. But these
strategies, by virtue of the stakes of the struggle between the rulers
and the pretenders, that is, the issues over which they oppose one
another, also depend on the state of the legitimate problematic, that
is, the space of possibilities inherited from previous struggles, which
tends to define the space o(possible positions-taken and accordingly
to orient research into solutions and, consequently, the evolution of
production. The relationship that develops between the positions
and the positions-taken is not, as we see, a mechanistic determi-
nation. Each agent, artist, writer, scholar, constructs his very own
creative project as a function of the perception of the possibilities
available which assure him of the categories of perception and
181
 Pierre Bourdieu
appreciation inscribed in his habitus by a certain trajectory, and also
as a function of the propensity to seize or reject the various possi-
bilities, which inspires in him the interests associated with his
position in the game. To-sum up this complex theory in a few words,
I would say that each author, in so far as he or she occupies a
position in a space, in a field of forces (irreducible to a simple
aggregation of material points) which is also a field of struggles for
either the conservation or the transformation of the field of forces,
exists and subsists only under the structured constraints of the field
(for example, the objective relations that become established
between genres). But I would add that each author also affirms the
differential that is constitutive of his position, his point of view
(understood as a view taken from a point), taking one of the aesthetic
positions actually or virtually possible in the field (and thus taking a
position on the other positions). Being situated, he cannot but locate
himself, distinguish himelf, and this irrespective of any attempt to
gain distinction. By entering the game he tacitly accepts the con-
straints and the possibilities inherent in the game (which present
themselves not in the form of rules, but as possible winning
strategies).
Difference, the differential, is the principle of the field's structure,
and also of its changes; these occur through the struggles which arise
regarding. the stakes, which are themselves produced by the dis-
putes. However complete the autonomy of the field may be, the
outcome of these struggles is never completely independent of
external factors. Thus the relations of force between the "conserva-
tives" and the "innovators," the orthodox and the heretics, the
ancient and the "new" (or the "modern"), closely depend on the
·~state of external struggles and the reinforcement that one or another
group can get from outside -for example, the heretics might receive
assistance through the emergence of a new clientele, whose appear-
ance is often linked to changes in the educational system. Thus, for
example, the success of the impressionist revolution would; no
doubt, not have been possible without the appearance of a public
made up of young artists and young writers, which was determined
by an "overproduction" of diplomas.
In order to give c'oncrete illustration to this program of research it
would be necessary to present a thorough description of a state of the
literary field. I should like, at the risk of seeming simplistic or
dogmatic, to mention only a few of the major characteristics of the
literary field such as it appeared in France during the 1880s, at the
182
Principles of a sociology of cultural works
time when the structure of the literary field as we now know it was
established.
The opposition between art and money, which structures the field
of power, is reproduced at the heart of the literary field under the form
of the opposition between "pure" art, symbolically dominant but
economically dominated (poetry, the exemplary incarnation of
"pure" art, does not sell), and the two forms of commercial .art:
variety theater (le thedtre de boulevard), which procures major
revenues and the consecration of the bourgeoisie (the Academy), and
industrial art, vaudeville, the popular novel (the feuilleton), journal-
ism, cabaret. Thus we have a chiasmatic structure, homologous to the
structure of the field of power, which opposes, as we know, the
intellectuals (rich in cultural capital and relatively poor in economic
capital) and the captains of industry and commerce (rich in economic
capital and relatively poor in cultural capital): on one hand maximum
independence with regard to the demands of the market, and exal-
tation of the value of disinterestedness, on the other hand direct
dependence, recompensed by immediate success, with regard to the
demands of the bourgeoisie and even of the working class (in the case
of theater) and of the petite bourgeoisie (in the case of vaudeville and
the serialized romance). Thus we have all the recognized character-
istics of the opposition between two sub-fields which are virtually
closed in on each other: the sub-field of restricted production, which
is a market unto itself, and the sub-field of large-scale production.
This primary opposition is crossed by a secondary opposition,
orthogonal to it, that of the social quality of the works and the social
quality of the corresponding publics. At the most autonomous pole
this opposition occurs between the established avant-garde (for
example, in the 1880s, the Parnassians and, to a lesser extent, the
Symbolists) and the nascent avant-garde 0r the failed avant-gardes
(who become outmoded without ever having been established). At
the most heteronomous pole the opposition is less clear and is
established primarily according to the social quality of the publics -
opposing, for example, variety theater to vaudeville and all other
forms of industrial art.
As we can see, since around 1880 the principal opposition is
partially superimposed on the opposition between genres, that is,
between poetry and theater, with the novel occupying a highly
dispersed middle ground. The theater, which is globally situated in
the sub-field of large-scale production (we recall the theatrical fail-
ures of all the supporters of art for art's sake), is itself divided, with
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the appearance of the new figures of the directors, notably Antoine
and Lugne-Poe, who, by their opposition, give rise to the whole space
of possibilities which the subsequent history of the theatrical sub-
field has merely to act out.
+ : i
+ in the field) and who struggle to endure (become classic) and those
N.B. the + and - signs measure specific capital.
Thus we have a two-dimensional space and two forms of struggle and
of history. On the one hand (in the horizontal dimension of the
"cross") there are the struggles, between the artists engaged in the
pure and commercial sub-fields, over the very definition of a writer,
and over the status of art and of the artist - through which there
occurs the struggle to impose the principle of domination which
opposes the intellectuals of the restricted field to the "bourgeois,"
those who act through the intermediary of the bourgeois intellectuals.
On the other hand (in the vertical dimension of the cross), at the most
autonomous pole, in the midst of the restricted sub-field, the
struggles are between the established avant-garde and the new
avant-garde.
In fact the history of art knows and recognizes only the restricted
sub-field, and all representations of the field and of its history are
thereby falsified. The changes that continuously occur, for the pro-
:1iucers in the midst of the field of production, originate from the very
structure of the field, from synchronic oppositions between antago-
nistic positions based on the degree of acceptance or, if we prefer, the
position in the structure of the distribution of the specific capital of
recognition. This position is strongly correlated with age; the oppo-
sition between (symbolically) dominant and dominated, between
orthodox and heretic, tends to take the form of a permanent revo-
lution between the young and the old, the new against the ancient.
Issuing from the very structure of the field, the changes that occur
in the restricted field are largely independent of the chronologically
contemporaneous external changes which can seem to determine
them - this would be the case even though the subsequent estab-
lishment of the changes may owe something to this conjuncture of
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Principles of a sociology of cultural works
"independent causal series" (according to the formula Cournot used
to define chance). It is the struggle between the champions and the
pretenders, between the title-holders ("writer," "philosopher,"
"scholar," etc.) and their challengers, as they say in boxing, wlfich
gives rise to the history of the field. The aging and becoming
outmoded of writers, of schools, and of works is the result of the
struggle between those who made history (by creating a new position
who cannot make history in their turn without returning to the past,
those who are interested in eternalizing the present state and arrest-
ing history.
In the struggles that, within each genre, oppose them to the
established avant-garde, the new avant-garde is inclined to call into
question, by a return to sources and to the purity of origins, the very
foundations of the genre. It follows that the history of poetry, of the
novel, and of theater tends to present itself as a process of purification
whereby each of these genres, by means of an incessant critical return
upon itelf, upon its principles and presuppositions, reduces itself
more and more completely to its most purified quintessence. Thus
the series of revolutions, against established poetry, which have
marked the history of French poetry since Romanticism, have tended
to exclude everything that is most "poetical" from poetry: the most
clear-cut forms, the alexandrine, the sonnet, the poem itself, in short,
what one poet called poetical "humming," in9luding the figures of
rhetoric, comparison, metaphor, conventional sentiments, lyricism,
effusion, psychology. Likewise the history of the French novel since
Balzac tends to exclude the "novelistic." Flaubert, with his dream of
the "book about nothing," and the Goncourts, with the ambition of a
"novel without peripeties, without intrigue and without base amuse-
ments," have certainly contributed to the program, announced by the
Goncourts themselves, ''to kill the novelistic." This program con-
tinued, from Joyce, through William Faulkner, to Claude Simon, with
the invention of a "pure" novel, from which all linear narrative, and
thus all pretension to realism, has disappeared, a novel that den-
ounces itself as fictional. And finally the history of the stage always
tends towards the exclusion of the "theatrical" and reaches com-
pletion in a deliberately illusionistic, and therefore illusory, repre-
sentation of theatrical illusion.
Paradoxically, in this field which is the site of a permanent
revolution, the avant-garde producers are determined by the past in
so far as their innovations, which are intended to transcend it, are
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 Pierre Bourdieu
inscribed, as though in an original matrix, in the space of possibilities
immanent to the field itself. That which is produced in the field is
increasingly dependent on the specific history of the field, and
increasingly difficult to deduce or to foresee from a knowledge of the
social world (the economic situation, political situation, etc.) at the
moment under consideration.
Another consequence: the relative autonomy of the field is always
more fully realized in works which owe their formal properties and
their value only to structure, and therefore to the history of the field,
further disqualifying interpretations which, by means of a "short-
circuit," authorize themselves to pass over what happens in the
world and go directly to what happens in the field. Just as there is no
longer a place, in the realm of production, for "naifs," except as
artist-objects (it would be necessary, here, to contrast the customs
officer Rousseau with Duchamp), so there is no longer a place for a
naive reception. Work produced according to the logic of a strongly
autonomous field calls for a differential, distinctive, perception,
attentive to divergences in relation to other, past or contemporary,
works. It follows, paradoxically, that adequate consumption of this
art, which is a product of a permanent rupture with history, with
tradition, tends to become completely historical. The enjoyment of a
work has as its condition the consciousness and knowledge of the
space of possibilities of which the work is the product, of the
"contribution" which the work represents, and which cannot be
grasped except by historical comparison.
Thus the epistemological problem posed for science by the exist-
ence of "pure" arts, and.of "formalist" theories which explain their
principles, is resolved: it is in history that the principle of liberty with
regard to history resides, and,the social history of the process of
automatization (of which I have just given a sketch) can account for the
freedom with regard to the" social context" which the direct relation-
ship with the social conditions of the moment annuls in the very
movement of its explanation. The challenge laid down to sociology
by formalist aesthetics, which deliberately excludes everything
except form, both in production as in reception, has been surmoun-
ted. The formalist's refusal of any kind of historicization rests
on a refusal to take account of its own social conditions of possibility,
or, more precisely, on neglecting the historical processes in the
course of which the social conditions of liberty with regard to
external determinations, that is, the field of relatively autonomous
production and the pure aesthetics that it makes possible, have been
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Principles of a sociology of cultural works
instituted. The basis of an independence from historical conditions,
which is affirmed in works originating from a pure concern for form,
lies in the historical process which has led to the emergence of an
autonomous field (univers).
Having thus rapidly sketched the structure of the field, the logic of
its functioning and its changing (ideally, one would have to discuss
the relationship to the public), I shall conclude by describing the
relationship between singular agents, which is given expression in a
trajectory and a work, and therefore their habitus, and the forces of
the field. By contrast with ordinary biographies, the trajectory des-
cribes the series of positions successively occupied by the same
writer in the successive states of the literary field, given that it is only
in the structure of the field that the sense of these successive positions
- directorships of magazines, publication by such and such an editor,
participation in such and such a group - are defined. It is within each
state of the field, defined by a certain state of the space of possibilities,
that - as a function of the position occupied and of sentiments of
success or failure, recognized to a greater or lesser degree, with which
that position is associated - the predispositions linked to a certain
social origin orient practice toward such and such an available
possibility. Most often this occurs in an entirely unconscious manner
(habitus, as instinct for the game, excludes and spares calculation).
Since I am unable to enter into the details of the dialectic between
positions and dispositions,! shall say only that we can observe an
extraordinary correspondence between the hierarchy of positions
(those of genre, and, within it, that of styles) and the hierarchy of
social origins, and therefore the associated dispositions. Thus, to take
but one example, it is notable that within the domain of the popular
novel, which is the category of novel most often relegated to writers
issuing from the lower classes and the female sex, it is in the works of
the authors who are the most favored, relatively, that we encounter
the most distanced, semi-parodic treatments - the best example being
Fantomas, celebrated by Apollinaire.
However, I do not want to conclude without explicitly posing a
question that I have been implicitly posing all along: what does this
particular way of understanding the art work show? Is it worth the
bother to give an apology for works, to know what they are about, to
reduce and destroy them, to unmask and dismantle them, in short, to
strip them of charm?
The resolutely historicist vision which leads one to a rigorous
knowledge of the historical conditions of the emergence of
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 Pierre Bourdieu Principles of a sociology of cultural works

transhistorical logics such as those of art or science has the initial Note
effect of clearing critical discourse of the platonic temptation to
produce essences, of literature,-of poetry, or, in another domain, of 1 I am referring here to a text which is without doubt the clearest expression
of the theoretical presuppositions of Foucault's work: "Repose au cer,cle
mathematics, etc. Many "theorists" were guilty of this analysis of
d'epistemologie," Cahiers pour L' Analyse 8 (Summer, 1968), pp. 8-40,
essence, notably, concerning "literariness," the Russian formalists
especially p. 40.
and Jakobson, who was familiar with phenomenology and eidetic
analysis, but many others as well, from Bremond and Artaud on,
concerning "pure poetry" or "theatricality." But these analyses only
unconsciously recapitulate the long, slow work of purification which
I described earlier, and which, in each genre (poetry, the novel,
theater), has accompanied the autonomization of the field of pro-
duction. From purification to purification, the struggles that take
place in the field of production lead gradually to the isolation of the
specific principle of the poetic (or theatrical, or novelistic) effect.
Only a sort of highly concentrated extract, such as we find in the work
of Ponge, of the properties best suited for the production of the effect
specific to each genre - in the case of poetry the effect of debanali-
zation, the ostranenie of the Russian formalists - is allowed to remain
in existence, and this without recourse to the techniques socially
designated as poetical. The field of restricted production, or, rather,
the historical process that establishes it, is .the true abstraction of
quintessence.
But what have we gained from this historical reduction of some-
thing which ought to be lived as an absolute experience, alien to the
contingencies of a historical genesis, other than the always slightly
sad pleasure of knowing what it is about? "The action of works on
works," which Brunetiere spoke about, occurs only through the
intermediary of authors, whose strategies owe their form and their
:content to interests linked to the positions that they occupy in the
structure of a highly particularized game. History can produce
transhistorical universality only by instituting social fields (univers)
which, as an effect of the social alchemy of the specific laws by which
these fields function, -tend to draw the sublime essence of the
universal out of the often ruthless confrontations of particular inter-
ests. This realist perspective, which makes the production of the
universal a collective enterprise, seems to me, after all, to be more
reassuring, more humane, than the belief in the miraculous virtues of
a pure interest in pure form.

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