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Conference : National literary fields and European space

'The dialectic interaction of the national (regional) and the transnational levels in the production and the reception of cultural goods. '

Studies in comparative literature deserve some credit for the fact that they have underlined the transnational aspect of literature in a time when the literary historiography of each country was, on the contrary, mainly interested in retrospectively building the story of the origins and of the expansion of its national literature. However, traditional comparatists usually work according to only two types of operations; on one hand, they investigate the relationship between the products that come from different locations and/or times, and raise some discrepancies and similarities; on the other hand, they study effective contacts and exchanges. They usually take on an impressionist and eclectic approach without questioning or historicising the preconcepts inherited from the literary history. Since they do not take into account the diversity of the historical processes they study, they thus might compare what cannot be comparable. Furthermore, they implicitly presuppose an interactionist theory of action, for which facts are the result of the interactions between subjects (or institutions, regarded like subjects) since it only takes into account the immediate and visible relations between agents. Since Durkheim though, sociology has been challenging those explanations. The social world already exists when the agents enter it, its structures and “objectivity” being the result of its history. Its structures, its divisions and its hierarchies influence the perception and the choice of agents through oppositions and/or affinities which define the possibility, the probability and the mode of the interactions (alliances, struggles…). The space of positions “reveals dispositions” and tend to orientate the positions that the agents adopt. These structural effects are far from being the result of observable interactions only. Thus, according to Bourdieu, “objectified” social structures as well as the position of the subject within these structures must be analysed in the first place in order to understand the “subject’s point of view”, although the subjective and symbolic dimension must not be forgotten since the perceptions, the representations, the intentions and the emotions of the agents have an impact on the meaning of the world and of the way it works. This method consists in reconstructing both the structure of the power struggle at stake (in the political, economical, symbolic field and so forth…) and of the representations (the various concepts of intellectual, literature, literary genres, art, philosophy…; the perceptions of the different countries and regions of the world; religions; disciplines; outlooks on history…) as well as the processes which have generated and reinforced these representations, including the decision-making bodies and the institutions responsible for their transmission. It is therefore insufficient to look at the transformations of the economic market and at the political history. The State’s role, the education systems, the impacts of the progress of education, the religious traditions, the organisation of culture and the media power should also be closely looked at. Being a structural outlook, Bourdieu’s approach is close to theories such as the polysystem theory mapped out by Itamar Even-Zohar and by Gideaon Toury, which has been inspired by the works of the Russian formalists and especially by Tynianov’s. Among other influences, there are the works of authors such as Immanuel Wallerstein, De Swaan, Schott and Laitin. Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s project differs in the way that he tried to elaborate general, coherent and systematic anthropological principles, which were better suited to analyse and account for the creation, the evolution and the transformations of cultural structures as well as the relations between the different aspects of the social world. The theory of fields, which cannot strictly be understood as correlated “systems”, studies cultural phenomenons as the products of the relational differences between the various logics that account for them, issued from various hierarchic principles: linguistic, cultural (in all senses of the word), media, politic, economic principles; transnational principles and local principles (regional/national), autonomy and heteronomy, diversity and standardisation, universalism and particularism, hybridisation and identity search. Although the structure and the hierarchies of the global transnational space always have an impact on the production, the properties, the circulation and the reception of cultural goods, it is also necessary to take into account the specificities of each tradition. Establishing themselves in minds and in objects, national and/or regional traditions have played a major role that might be overlooked by those who, according to Edward Said, incriminate domination and look for contact points between dominated cultures in order to rehabilitate them. It is hopeless to try and understand the role played in cultural transfers by the different logics mentioned above without taking into account the position of the space of emergence and that of the space of reception within the transnational space, the structure of these spaces, the way they function, and the position of decision-making bodies and agents involved. This “relational” approach does not go without saying. On the contrary, it needs to be constantly reaffirmed against false proofs, as shown by the fact that a lot of so-called sociological works tend to base their argument on the “personality”, the initiative or the role of the agents – authors, “discoverers”, “mediators”, translators, publishers, preface writers, critiques, readers – instead of questioning the social conditions that account for the spaces from which these agents emerged, and which orientate their relationships as well as their strategies for the production, the distribution and the reception of works. Whatever their research object might be, the participants of this colloquium are asked to adopt a structural point of view, by going back to the relevant system of relations (which will have to be defined for each case) that is necessary to explain the main features and the behaviours of the agents as well as their products. Bourdieu’s analyses in Rules of Art are mainly focused on the French literary history, which can only be seen as one “particular instance of the possible” and a borderline case, since nowhere else were the autonomy of the field and the structural differentiation between the pole of restricted production and that of large production have been through so developed. However, like Marx and Weber, Bourdieu believed that transferring elaborated models created for the analysis of more complicated and differentiated realities was helpful to understand simpler configurations, through a methodological comparison. The ESSE network, which favours the confrontation between researchers working on different cultural areas, times or objects, allows to verify and to develop the establishment of this model and this system. It also prevents haste generalisations by underlying what is specific to each field and what deserves to be analysed through a historical perspective or, better, a “genetic” perspective. Many of the obstacles we have encountered through the establishment of such a model might be due to the fact that we have not been careful enough, epistemologically speaking, in the way we have used and transferred concepts. Without noticing, one can naturalise the concept of field, and therefore forget that theoretical concepts do not account for real objects, that they are instead nothing more than instruments used to describe thought processes and object building. One might therefore implicitly give a normative meaning to this concept, as if the use of the concept of field requires an autonomy and a bipolarisation as high as the one of the French literary scene at the end of the 19th century. When no distinction is made between the autonomy regarding the political power and the autonomy regarding the economic market, the concept of autonomy itself gets confusing. And the chance of regarding autonomy as an axiological principle or measure always exists. It is a temptation that Bourdieu himself could not avoid, especially during his last years, probably because he wanted to struggle harder against the market invasion. The concept of field is a spatial metaphor, like the concepts of cultural space, artistic geography, centre and periphery. These metaphors can be of some use provided these representations are not regarded as descriptions of reality. Thus the opposition centre/periphery should not obliterate the fact that there never was only one centre in the world, but several; that there are more autonomous or heteronomous positions, dominants and dominated positions within literary major cities and even in peripheries; that innovations are not necessarily found in major cities, produced by the more able and autonomous authors: on the contrary, literary history shows that innovations often come from the periphery, although these cities detain the consecrating power. Spatial metaphors might overlook the fact that agents and their behaviours can simultaneously refer to several “games”, which are relatively autonomous and at the same time closely intertwined or even interdependent to some regard. Everyone should be more and more specific about the logic that accounts for the discrepancies and that they have chosen to refer to, be it linguistic, cultural, religious or geopolitical. The same language, according to different logics, can be used in various countries and these differences do matter. The cultural field cannot be considered as an empirical reality restricted to the political borders of a country or to a linguistic area. Thus, the cultural production of the GDR, at the time when Germany was divided, worked like a field to some extent. It had its own dynamics but it was also part of the global German field, which was itself related to other German-speaking national traditions and located in the world’s cultural field, which is defined by the state of power struggle between countries, cultures, languages and markets. Whatever the size of the space considered might be, the concept of field can generally be useful when a social phenomenon works like a somehow independent system of power struggle, which has to be taken into account (as well as its context) in order to explain its products: a group, a review publishing-board, the field of reviews or groups, a disciplinary tradition, the body of disciplines, a regional context, a nation, the transnational space… One might question whether it would not be more relevant to use the concept of sub-field, which is falsely precise, since each field can be seen as a sub-field in regard to various other fields. In one of the chapters of Rules of Art, Bourdieu describes the relation between the space of the works and the space of the readers (critiques, sections of the public) as being a “willing adjustment”. It could be seen as a “pre-established harmony”, since it is “quite perfectly” homologous to the relation between the space of the producers and the space of the consumers (the field of power). Now this automatic homology between the structure of the cultural offer and the structure of demand is probably just a particular case, only feasible in a unified market favouring mutual knowledge like the Parisian market. It is also possible provided the agents involved in the production, the distribution and the sanctioning of works share the same perception and appreciation categories, meaning that they are contemporaries integrated enough within the space to know and control the principles of divisions. Because this set of conditions rarely and imperfectly exists, even within a national market, the de-contextualised readings and the “misinterpretations” that Bourdieu has underlined in his article “Les conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées”, are far from relating only to the importation of foreign works. They are rather normal: there is nearly always a more or less important distance (historically and/or culturally) between the mental structures of the producers and that of the consumers. Moreover, these “misunderstandings” can be fruitful when they can give way to some new forms. Thus, researches which want to explain the social conditions of the existence of the works and the works’ readings cannot halt to the concept of homology. Like Bourdieu himself in one of the chapters of Rules of Art, they also have to give an account of the construction of the producers’ “point of view” as well as the space of the readers and that of their categories of perception. One should not forget that Bourdieu was addressing researchers who shared his scientific goals, when regarding the issue of import-export in social sciences and having personally experienced some trouble in trying to make his work understood in foreign countries. He never thought about imposing this work of contextualisation as a universal model of a “good reading”, even though, according to him, the scientific effort of knowledge, far from killing “the pleasure of the text”, could only increased it. * This colloquium aims at developing the knowledge of the social conditions of production, circulation, transformation, reception of ideas and of textual and artistic forms, thanks to analyses focused on the links and the tensions between the local and the global, without any time or disciplinary limit. Empirical researches (analyses of flows or case studies) will be favoured. They will have a global approach, not only regarding translation but also the consequences of transnationality on the national level and its opposite, which is the specific focus that each tradition adopts towards representations and products issued from other traditions. Scheduled dates: May 2nd-5th, 2007 Languages: French and English

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