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Resumo

This article attempts to outline the general properties of fields of cultural production and symbolic struggle. It is based on the systematic comparison of the laws of operation of various fields (painting, theatre, literature, journalism): this allows for the explanation and formulation of properties which, when re-examined in the case of a particular field, may only be partially or incompletely revealed. Neglecting to recognize and define the particular kind of capital that is at stake in the struggles between agents is to risk falling into the partial materialism of economism. In the art trade, which obeys a logic close to that of the pre-capitalist economy, strictly economic profit is secondary to the accumulation of symbolic capital, a necessary if not sufficient condition of which is economic disinterestedness. These distinctions make it possible to understand the variations in the life cycle of cultural goods (short-cycle cultural goods are goods that incorporate a small amount of symbolic capital; long-cycle cultural goods are those whose launch implies a strong credit of specific authority, which is only built up slowly). The fields of production, as systems of agents and institutions contributing through their struggles to the production and distribution of this capital, can be considered as the system of production of the value of works, which makes it possible to break with the illusion of the creative subject that the seemingly most reductive vocabulary (production, producer) preserves and reinforces. Relations of homology link, on the one hand, the institutions of production and distribution of cultural goods to one another (as shown in particular by the study of theatre and the publishing of literature); on the other hand, these various fields to the field of fractions of the dominant class (as shown in particular by the study of the variation in theatre reviews from one periodical to another). These relations of homology make it possible to understand as the product of an objective collusion what partial critiques tend to describe as arbitrary adherence (terror exerted by intellectual fashion - critiques from the right against critiques from the left -; or seduction exerted by material means of corruption - critiques from the left against critiques from the right -). On the other hand, they make it possible to refer the internal struggles to the fields, even the most apparently autonomous ones, to the external struggles, political struggles between fractions of the dominant classes and between classes. The specific temporality of the fields of production results from the internal movements of struggle between agents and is inscribed in different types of production enterprises. Production and distribution companies can be situated on a continuum whose two extreme poles are, on the one hand, the production of short-cycle symbolic goods managed in the manner of ordinary economic goods, and on the other hand, the risky and slow production of long-cycle symbolic goods. By struggling to define new positions and to introduce significant deviations, newcomers to the field produce the avant-garde and relegate the previous avant-garde to the past.

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