‘Swallows’, Edouard Manet (1873).
Politics, social sciences and journalism are relatively autonomous and independent social worlds, but nevertheless they have effects on one another. For example, these fields are present on television on election night, in the form of people. A well-known historian will comment on the result, alongside a journalist and, say, the director of Sciences Po in Paris, a member both of the academic field and that of social sciences, via the polling companies he also advises. You could describe the event in interactionist terms (limited to describing interactions between people) or analyze the discourse with a focus on its rhetoric, manner, strategies and so on.
The field analysis model is quite different: it allows you to put forward the hypothesis that, when a historian addresses a journalist, it isn’t a historian talking to a journalist, it’s a historian occupying a specific social position in the field of social sciences talking to a journalist occupying a specific position in the field of journalism. Ultimately the field of journalism is talking to the field of social sciences.
The properties of the interaction — the fact that the journalist will address the historian as a sort of transcendent arbiter in relation to a strictly political debate, the one who will have the last word — express the structure of the relationship between the journalistic field and that of social sciences. For example, the statutory objectivity granted to the historian is linked not to the intrinsic properties of a particular person but to the field of which he is part; this maintains an objective relation of symbolic domination, at one level, with regard to the journalistic field (which can also exercise symbolic domination of this field in other respects, such as controlling access to the public). So a TV set, viewed through the concept of fields, delivers a host of unexpected properties.
One of the questions to ask about a field is its degree of autonomy. For example, in relation to the field of sociology, journalism is characterized by a high degree of heteronomy (still more in relation to the field of mathematics). It’s a field with little autonomy but, however weak, that autonomy means that part of what happens in the world of journalism can only be understood if we think of this microcosm as such, and if we try to understand the effects the people in this microcosm have on each other.
Parliament is a kind of theater
The same is true, more or less, of the political field, as narrowly conceived. Marx says somewhere that the world of parliamentary politics is a kind of theatre, offering a theatrical representation of the social world and social struggle, which is not entirely serious, and which is derealized, because the real issues and struggles are elsewhere. In doing so, he points to one of the important properties of the political field: however weak its autonomy, this field has a certain independence. So to understand what is happening there, it’s not enough to describe its agents as being in the service of steel producers or beet growers or big business. We must also take into account the position people occupy in the political game, whether they are at the most autonomous or heteronomous pole of the field, or members of a party at the more, or less, autonomous pole, and, where they fall within this party, have a more or les autonomous status.
When a bishop declares, in an interview with a daily paper, that he will take 20 years for French people of Algerian origin to be considered French Muslims, he is making a prediction with serious social consequences
In fact, the more autonomous the field, the more can be explained using field theory. Although the political field seems subject to the pressure of constant demands, to the control of its clients (through the electoral mechanism), these days it is very independent of these demands and also more inclined to look inward, focusing on its own issues (competition for power between and within parties). Much of what happens in the political field finds its principle in the complicity of belonging to the same political field (which is what populists intuit). In the anti-parliamentary, anti-democratic language of fascistic parties, this complicity is described as participating in a kind of corrupt game. In fact, it is inherent to being part of the same game. And one of the general properties of fields is that there are struggles within them to impose their dominant vision, even if those struggles are always based on the fact that even the most intractable adversaries accept several common presuppositions, necessary to the field’s very functioning. To fight, you have to agree on the areas of disagreement.
I have described the political field without saying what it has in common with those of social sciences and journalism. I brought these three worlds together in order to try to think about their relations because they all claim to be imposing a legitimate vision of the social world, they are all the site of internal struggles to impose the dominating principles of vision and division. We go into the social world with categories of perception and principles of vision and division that are themselves partly the product of the incorporation of social structures. We apply categories to the world, such as masculine/feminine, high/low, rare/common, distinguished/vulgar etc., through adjectives that often work in pairs.
Professionals who specialize in clarification and discourse — sociologists, historians, politicians, journalists — have two things in common. They work to articulate practical principles of vision and division. And they strive, each in their own universe, to impose these principles and ensure they are recognized as legitimate categories for the construction of the social world. When a bishop declares, in an interview with a daily paper, that it will take 20 years for French people of Algerian origin to be considered French Muslims, he is making a prediction with serious social consequences. This is a good example of claiming legitimately to manipulate categories of perception, of a kind of symbolic violence based on a tacit, surreptitious imposing of categories of perception endowed with authority and destined to become legitimate categories of perception; this is exactly the same move one makes when one slips imperceptibly from ‘Islamic’ to ‘Islamist’, and from ‘Islamist’ to ‘terrorist’.
Everyday insults
Professionals who specialize in clarifying the categories of reality construction and imposing them must therefore start by transforming schemes into explicit categories. ‘Category’ comes from the verb kategorein in Ancient Greek, which means to publicly accuse: the acts of categorization used in ordinary life are often insults (‘you’re nothing but a…’, ‘you’re such a…’). And insults, for example racist ones, are categories, as Aristotle said, that is to say acts of classification based on an often implicit principle of classification that need not state its criteria or be consistent with itself.
The etymology of the word rex that Benveniste offers shows that rex is related to Regret (to govern), and one of the main functions of the king is to fine, to define borders like Romulus with his plow
In The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, (1) an analysis of the philosophical field shows that in a number of Heidegger’s central philosophical theses there are taxonomies of common sense such as the opposition between ‘unique’ and ‘rare’ or ‘common’ and ‘vulgar’, between the ‘authentic’ or ‘ unique ‘subject’ etc and the ‘one’, the ‘common’, the ‘vulgar’ etc. Common class racism’s oppositions — ‘distinguished’ people, ‘vulgar’ people — are reconverted into unrecognizable philosophical oppositions, which are bound to go unnoticed by a teacher of philosophy who claims to be completely democratic and comments on Heidegger’s famous text using ‘we’, without realizing that this is a perfect expression of sublimated racism.
Therefore, those involved in these three fields work hard to make implicit principles of qualification explicit, to systematize them and make them coherent (or, as in the religious field, make them effectively systematic). In doing so, they struggle to impose them. The fight for a monopoly over legitimate symbolic violence is the fight for symbolic royalty. The etymology of the word rex that Benveniste proposes in The Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions (The Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions) shows that rex is related to Regret (to govern), and one of the main functions of the king is to fine, to define borders like Romulus with his plough.
A function of taxonomies is therefore to say who is in and who is out, nationals, foreigners etc. One of the dramas of the political struggle in today’s France is that, when a new player, the Front National, burst onto the field, the principle of dividing ‘French nationals’ from ‘foreigners’ imposed itself very generally on all agents in the political field, to the detriment of a principle that previously seemed dominant: the opposition between ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor’ (‘Workers of the world, unite!’).
trueideas vs. key ideas
Beyond their shared issues, we should consider the specific logic of each of these fields. The political field defines itself as aiming to say what is happening in the social world. In a discussion between politicians attacking each other with facts and figures, each seeks to present a well-founded vision of the world of politics — founded in objectivity — because it is endowed with real referents, and also founded in the social order by the confirmation it receives from all those who espouse it. In other words, the aim is for a speculative idea to become an main idea (socially powerful idea), through its ability to mobilize people by getting them to take up the principle of the proposed vision. Imposing a definition of the world is in itself a mobilizing act that tends to confirm or transform the balance of power. An idea becomes an main idea through the strength that it displays when it imposes itself as a principle of vision. A true idea can only be opposed by a refutation, whereas an main idea can only be opposed by another key idea, capable of mobilizing a counterforce.
Competition between newspapers leads to their obsessive search for difference tends only to bring them closer together as they steal each others’ splashes, stories and editors
The field of journalism, increasingly heteronomous — that is to say more and more subject to the constraints of economics and politics (the former mainly through ratings) — increasingly imposes its constraints on all other fields, especially those of cultural production (social sciences, philosophy etc) and the field of politics. A field is both a field of forces and one of struggles that aim to transform those forces. In other words, in a field there is competition for the legitimate appropriation of what is at stake in the struggle in that field. And, within the field of journalism, there is a permanent competition to appropriate both an audience and that which will bring in an audience — breaking news, a scoop, an exclusive, major by-lines, a unique quality.
One paradox is that competition, always said to be the condition of freedom, has the opposite effect in fields of cultural production under commercial control, namely of producing uniformity, censorship and even conservatism. A simple example: the struggle for supremacy between the three French weeklies — The New Observer, The Express and Point — makes them indistinguishable. In large part because the competition between them that leads to their obsessive search for difference tends only to bring them closer together as they steal each others’ splashes, stories and editors. And this type of frenzied competition extends outward from journalism into other fields.