The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field

ArtForum, Nov, 1996 by Arthur Coleman Danto

It is one of Pierre Bourdieu's polemical aims in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field to challenge Sartre's scheme of free original choice - what he contemptuously describes as "this sort of conceptual monster . . . a free and conscious act of autocreation" - by identifying, in massive detail, precisely the social and historical structures within which choices are made and what he terms "cultural products" are created. "God is dead, but the uncreated creator has taken his place." And a kind of illusio "directs the gaze towards the apparent producer - painter, composer, writer - and prevents us from asking who created this 'creator' and the magic power of transubstantiation with which the 'creator' is endowed." But "it is enough to pose the forbidden question to perceive that the artist who makes the work is himself made, at the core of the field of production, by the whole ensemble of those who help to 'discover' him and to consecrate him as an artist." The book's piece de resistance, clearly a challenge to Sartre, is a political reading of Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale against the complex of literary and artistic practices and attitudes that made Flaubert Flaubert.

Le bon Dieu est dans les details - "God is in the details" - was one of Flaubert's bright sayings, adopted as a working motto by the Warburg Institute and certainly put into practice in Bourdieu's study. He describes corresponding structures in nineteenth-century French literary and art worlds; of particular interest is the provenance of the concept of artistic purity, especially "pure painting," which was to play so considerable a role in the aesthetics and rhetoric of modernism, and the correlative "model of the pure artist" whose painting was "set up in opposition to the academic tradition and freed from the obligation to serve some purpose or simply to mean something." In the course of the century, "there develops at the heart of each genre a more autonomous sector - or, if you will, an avant-garde. Each of the genres tends to cleave into a research sector and a commercial sector" - between avant-garde and kitsch, we might, since Clement Greenberg, say - "two markets . . . defined in and by their antagonistic relationship." Indeed, part of the beauty of Bourdieu's marvelous analysis lies in the way in which we can see the formalist critical practice, not to mention the ethics of artistic production so influentially affirmed by Greenberg and internalized as aesthetic truth by those who followed him, emerge institutionally through the world that created Flaubert and Manet. "The history which I have tried to reconstruct in its most decisive phases by using a series of synchronic slices leads to the establishment of this world apart - the artistic field or the literary field we know today."

Analytical philosophers have tended to resist the "death of the artist" by insisting on the role of artistic intention in identifying and explaining works of art, without realizing that a further step must be taken in order to explain intentions themselves. We cannot form just any intention whatever. Bourdieu's concept of the field, "a network of objective relations . . . between positions - for example, the position corresponding to a genre like the novel . . . or from another point of view, the position locating a review, a salon, or a circle," is his way of charting the universe of intentions. But "each position is objectively defined by its objective relationship with other positions." To be an artist is to occupy a position in the field known as the art world, which means that one is objectively related to the positions of critics, dealers, collectors, curators, and the like. It is the fields that "create the creators" who internalize what is possible in reference to other positions. Fields, of course, are always in the process of change, so the intentions that can be formed at one stage in their evolution cannot be formed at another. The "field" is an immeasurably more nuanced structure than whatever it is that philosophers subscribing to what is called the "Institutional Theory of Art" have so far sought to make explicit. One of the chief architects of the Institutional Theory, philosopher George Dickie, has recently given particular prominence to the role of the artist in determining what can and cannot be a work of art, but he failed to appreciate that there is a prior question of who is an artist, and for this one must refer to something like Bourdieu's field for an answer. Since fields are objective structures, the questions of what is art and who are artists are themselves objective matters, and Bourdieu has sought to put in place the kind of science required for understanding both: it is a historical science of cultural fields.

It is not clear that Sartre's question of what makes Flaubert Flaubert has been answered, inasmuch as a field will account for everyone, great or good or competent, who exists in it at any given time. There is an implied criticism that this sort of social-scientific analysis might "somehow have the effect of 'levelling' artistic values by 'rehabilitating' second-rate authors." The Musee d'Orsay opened to cries of indignation for seeming to give the same degree of prominence to the lesser contemporaries of great artists as to those artists themselves. To this Bourdieu offers a compelling response: "Everything inclines us to think that, on the contrary, one loses the essence of what makes for individuality and even the greatness of the survivors when one ignores the universe of contemporaries with whom and against whom they construct themselves." Yes and no. It is certainly true that we get a definite perspective on Courbet's masterpiece, The Studio, when we see it in the context the Musee d'Orsay provides. But I incline to view that its greatness is somehow independent of that understanding, and that the work's power is present in it however much or little we may happen to know about the field that made Courbet and that Courbet in turn transformed. There are autonomous experiences with art that do not entail that art itself is autonomous. There are statements in Bourdieu's text that make me certain he would indignantly resist this claim; regardless, The Rules of Art is consistently interesting, sometimes enthrallingly so. It is written with a clarity not commonly encountered in French writers on art, and with an irascible authority to which Bourdieu's acuity and learning certainly entitle him.