Revisiting the Classics Sociology and Interculturality: Creating the Conditions for Inter-national Dialogue across Intellectual Fields Reine Meylaerts, Belgium Book Reviews Ebru Ditiker: De-/Re-Contextualizing Conference Interpreting Nadja Grbié, Austria ‘Myriam Diocaretz and Marta Segarra (eds): Joyful Babel: Translating Hélene Cixous Helena Miguélez-Carballeira, UK ‘Tean-Mare Gouanvie: Saciologie de la traduction: la science fiction américaine dans l'espace culturel francais des années 1950 Julie Arsenault, France Leo Tak-hung Chan: Twentieth-Century Chinese Translation Theory: Modes, Issues and Debates Red Chan, UK Recent Publications Conference Diary 2 285 289 293 297 303 The Translator. Volume 11, Number 2 (2005), 125-145 ISBN 1-900650-86-X The Sociology of Bourdieu and the Construction of the ‘Object’ in Translation and Interpreting Studies MOIRA INGHILLERI Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK Abstract. This article introduces Bourdieu’s sociological perspec- tive and its relevance to translation and interpreting studies. It discusses Bourdieu's key concepts ~ habitus, field, capital and illusio ~ and their contribution to theorizations of the interaction between structure and agency in sociological and philosophical debates. Considerable attention is paid to the relationship between Bourdieu's reflexive sociology and the emergent interest in the ethnographic tradition within translation and interpreting stud- ies, particularly he influence of he interpretive approach of Geertz and the subsequent work of Clifford and Marcus within the culturalist paradigm. The question of methodology is addressed in relation to Bourdiew’s reflexive sociology and the construction of the ‘object’ of sociological research. The article further explores how Bourdieu's concepts may be made to work empirically within translation and interpreting research and how much this depends ‘on embracing Bourdieu's ontological and epistemological stance. Bourdieu's work is briefly explored in relation to other sociologic- al theories that have begun to emerge as relevant to translation studies, in particular the work of Latour and Luhmann, and addi- tional future directions for research within the sociology of translation and interpreting are suggested. In the past decade, research in translation and interpreting began to draw on Bourdieu’s sociotogical theory. This interest in Bourdieu’s work is part of a shift within translation studies away from a predominant concern with trans- lated textual products and toward a view of translation and interpreting as social, cultural and political acts intrinsically connected to local and global relations of power and control (Cronin 2003). The increased attention to Bourdieu is indicative of a paradigmatic shift within the discipline, toward ‘more sociologically- and anthropologically-informed approaches to the study of translation processes and products. Bourdieu’s theoretical insights con- tribute a distinctive perspective in relation to the increasingly influential culturalist and globalist research paradigms within translation studies. The application of his theory fo translation and internretine recearch hae al—— 126 The Sociology of Bourdieu and the Construction of the ‘Object’ been considered more specifically as part of the re-evaluation of descriptive and polysystems approaches, offering a more powerful set of concepts than norms and conventions to describe socio-cultural constraints on acts of trans- lation and their resulting products (Simeoni 1998, Hermans 1999, Gouanvie 2002). His views on organized social and cultural practices and the strategies of different forms of capital have been used effectively to inform the insights offered by both existent and emerging perspectives within the discipline. Bourdieu's work has also made a significant contribution to attempts ‘within translation studies to focus more attention on translators and inter- preters themselves ~ to analyze critically their role as social and cultural agents actively participating in the production and reproduction of textual and discursive practices. In particular, Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field, capital and illusio have made a valuable and unique contribution to the theo- rization of the interaction between agency and structure ~ the initiating activities of individuals and the structures which constrain and perhaps en- able them - within translation and interpreting research. Bourdieu’s conceptualization of this relationship, which will be explored more fully below, has proved useful for addressing the reproductive or transformative potential of acts of translation and interpreting within particular historical and socio-cultural contexts and the specific impact of translators, interpret- ers — and the complex of networks in which they operate ~ on translation and interpreting activities. ‘The emergent perception of translation and interpreting as socially- situated practices and their function in the production or reproduction of the Jocal/global social order constitute the beginnings of a more sociological or ‘social’ approach to translation and interpreting research and practice. Not only has this view encouraged a greater interest in the role of agents and of institutions involved in translation or interpreting activity, it has also stimu- lated a focus on the location of and recognition given to translation and interpreting studies within academic disciplines and departments. But while there is a general acknowledgement that translation studies research has experienced a ‘cultural tum’ away from the dominance of linguistic and semi- otic approaches (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999)and their bias towards text-based analyses, distinctly sociological approaches remain at the development stage. Itseems likely that any such approach will involve a certain degree of eclecti- ‘ism with regard to theory, and itis therefore important to consider: (a) the particular relevance of Bourdieu’s concepts within the context of this devel- opment; and (b) the extent to which Bourdieu’s underlying ontology and epistemology can be integrated (if not fully embraced) within this endeavour. In this introduction, several key aspects of Bourdieu’ social theory will be briefly and critically explored. Bourdieu’s key concepts and their rela- tianchin 9 the erhiest/ohiest dichotomy within the social sciences will be Moira Inghitleri 12 lation and interpreting research and practice will be considered. The issue of method in Bourdieu’s sociology will be addressed, focusing particularly on Bourdieu’s views on reflexivity and the construction of the ‘object’ of so- iological research. These will be discussed in the light of recent interest in ethnographic traditions within translation and interpreting research, particu- larly, though not exclusively, within the postcolonial paradigm. Some final insights will be offered regarding the future role and direction of a sociology of translation and interpreting studies. 1. Agency and structure One of Bourdieu’s main contributions to the social sciences has been to challenge traditional dichotomies, emanating from the Westen philosophic- al tradition, between subject and object, rationalism and empiricism, relativism and universalism. At the heart of these dichotomies is the division between the individual and the external world, The rationalist view was that knowledge of the world was based on the inner subjective world of the mind, that it was innate, Rationalists believed in the possibility of objective know!- edge, uncontaminated by the point of view of any observer and derivable from reason alone. For empiricists, the foundations of knowledge were to be found in immediate intuitions. The empiricist mind was an observer and collector of facts or appearances; it relied on faith in its own perceptions that the knowledge it acquired represented actual reality. Following Kant, the relationship between the self and the objective world came to be perceived more in terms of a clash between two fundamental epistemologies for which some form of synthesis was sought. The elaboration of this relationship has continued to influence attempts by modem philosophers and social scien- tists to construct an adequate ontology of the “general structures of human being” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1999:86), to explore the question of how in- dividuals come to ‘know’ the world, whether all humans know the same world or know the world in the same way. In the social sciences, this divi- sion has been maintained, for example, in the contrasting epistemologies of phenomenological and ethnomethodological approaches, on the one hand, and various forms of structuralism, on the other. Bourdieu’s sociology is continuous with these philosophical and socio- logical traditions. His sociological project involves a radical critique of theoretical reason ~it seeks to reveal the limits of theoretical knowledge and also to illustrate, through empirical investigation, the gap between the logic of theory and the logic of practice. This involves a critique of structuralist attempts to develop conceptual schemes divorced from conerete analytical objects or projects. But it also includes his rejection of a philosophy of the subject which turns away from the external world and concentrates exclu-128 The Sociology of Bourdieu and the Construction of the ‘Object’ familiar and meaningful. Bourdieu’s social theory can be seen as an attempt to extend ontology to the social field (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1999) through his particular elaboration of a ‘reflexive sociology’ which insists on a recog- nition of the interdependence of theory and method and the “self-analysis of the sociologist as cultural producer and a reflection on the sociohistorical conditions of a science of society” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:36). The sociologist is not only obliged to provide an account of the meaning of spe- cific social practices in specific societies at specific historical moments, but also to contribute to an understanding of the human condition, One of Bourdieu’s key concerns is to conduct an examination of social life as constituted in social practices, not in individual actions, decision- making processes or expressions. For Bourdieu, individuals ‘act’ in habitual, conventionalized ways not through an act of special knowledge, drawing on world of possible meanings, but in and through social practice. He rejects the idea of social actors as conscious, calculative rational beings, although he does allow for the possibility of “rational choice” under specific circum- stances (ibid.:131). For Bourdieu, the social is not derived from the aggregation of individuals. The social predates the individual, and the indi vidual is always viewed through his or her membership in some collective history (Bourdieu 1977:86). This relationship is at the heart of Bourdieu’s genetic structuralism (Bourdieu 1990:14): ‘The analysis of objective structures — those of different fields — is, inseparable from the analysis of the genesis, within biological indi- ‘viduals, of the mental structures which are to some extent the product, of the incorporation of social structures; inseparable, too, from the analysis ofthe genesis of these social structures; the social space, and the groups that occupy it, are the product of historical struggles (in ‘which agents participate in accordance with their position in social space and with the mental structures through which they apprehend this space). ‘The concept of ‘social space’ in combination with the concepts of habitus, field, capital and illusio provides the framework for Bourdieu’s intellectual project. Each of these concepts will be considered below. They are further explored in the papers in this volume from a range of critical perspectives with regard to specific translation and interpreting contexts of practice where their sociological and theoretical significance — their use as conceptual tools ~is demonstrated. 1.1 The construction of the ‘object’ in translation and interpreting studies Moira inghilleri 129 posed as a ‘method’ by which to challenge the persistent dualism within the social sciences between subject and object. It is worth considering then how these concepts can be made to ‘work empirically’ within translation and in- terpreting research and to what extent this depends on embracing Bourdieu’s ‘ontological and epistemological stance. This is not to suggest that a sociol- ogy of translation or interpreting need become too involved in the debates within the field of sociology over theoretical positions and positionings, though of course it might contribute to such debates. However, itis worth- while to contemplate what the aims of a ‘sociology’ of translation or interpreting might be ~ and in what ways these might be distinguishable from culturalist, linguistic or semiotic approaches. This may contribute to a better understanding of where sociologically-located researchers and/or practitioners can stand in relation to translation (or interpreting) practices, a question which has recently been raised with respect to translation as a whole (Simeoni 2005:13): ‘Where can one stand {0 turn it [translation] into an object and cir- ccumscribe its limits? In the end it would seem that there is something about translation itself that must have been unsettling for the disci- plines in the social sciences. Could it be related to the fact that translation — like languages more generally ~ is not an ordinary ob- ject, certainly not one that is easy t0 ‘objectify"? Where can one stand to turn it into an object and circumseribe its limits? Simeoni raises an important question ~ if translation cannot easily be “objectified’, how can it be taken up within the social sciences as a legitim- ate form of knowledge? We can re-pose this to consider how any attempt to objectify translation might be framed within Bourdieu’s epistemological framework. Bourdieu’s approach to the subject/object relation would suggest that the starting point for any attempt to objectfy translation or interpreting should not be to try to define any ‘intrinsic properties’ of translation or to apply, a priori, scientific concepts like field or habitus, for example. The real start- ing point is the empirical investigation of the relevant social practices, their location within particular fields and the relational features of capital involved. in both acts of translation or interpreting (see Thoutenhoof, this volume) as well as the academic scholarly activity which takes place in relation to such acts, and their relationship to the field of power. This would include an ac- count of the ‘taken for granted” sets of dispositions of the individuals and institutions involved and of what appears to ‘commit’ the individuals or in- stitutions involved to the specific social practices under investigation. It would involve the recognition of the social determinations that motivate the re-Fr" — 30 The Sociology of Bourdieu and the Construction of the ‘Object’ scientific’ stance (everything from what factors determine what cove So ser practice to decisions about field methods), as well a the social and sprogical trajectories of translators or interpreters (See Fekry Hanna, this ios other words, it would necessitate ‘objectivizing the objecivining saevegkvien” = itis this ‘view from the field” that would ultimately create and determine the ‘object’. 2, Ethnography, reflexivity, objectivism In Boudieu’s ethnography of Algeria, presented in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), one of his main objectives was to challenge the nati’ of Enhopologists” accounts of cultural life through thei fllure yo Scout sara ationship to their object of stady. This, he suggested “conderpet [them] to see all practice as spectacle” (Bourdieu 1977:1). The const of aoe spmboti capital that appeared in tis work played a centr role aati rigne and continue to inform the relationship of Bourdieu's thovght in hmographie practice. As arole for contemporary ethnography has Pet aaron translation studies, particularly in approaches concemed with soosige cultural and politcal significance ofthe research (Sturge 1987. rear 2002, Tymocako 2003, Buzelin 2008), it is worth considering what might constitute ethnography in this context and how i ‘would relate to aa core interpretation and application of ethnographic practice within ha reflexive sociology. Before discussing this, however, a brief account of developments in ethnography since the 1970s may be useful. 2.1 The textualization of culture ‘After a longstanding tradition of ethnographic field work as the sine dt Ae anthropology, from the 1960s onwards ethnography came under Ser tiny as a result of decolonialzaton, feminist and civil Fights ‘movements, Ung also as a consequence of emerging critiques within the social Sconets a aequratist and other Ttalzing” accounts of cultures (Clifford and! Mores opel. 26). As a method in social science research, ethnography (and eth- nographic writing) had normally been associated with social anthropology ~ pee atinowski's writings on the Trobriand Islanders andthe urban stud sera the Chicago School to more recent figures like Clifford Geer’, Paul Tessinow, James Clifford and George Marcus. Under the sulse of 8 ‘anise eeentifie objectivism’, social anthropologists had traditionally give little sererkon to the geo-political implications of their ethnographic feld work, aacrretagonship to thet ‘subjects’ thei eventual written accounts ofthese cee noes, The tendency had been for abstraction and impersonalization Toe ee DANY Nesnite a Moira Inghilleri 131 ample, it was not, in truth, normal practice for eth amp : tice for ethnographers to know muct the local language(s) ofthe groups they studied (or even to emplo; ince Ethnographessbservations and descriptions nt thei dslopue with inform ants (Clifford 1983:124-29, The adional ehaogaphic encounter with the pope maid a rarely described written accounts provided only an ion of specificity” without any speci ral or: i Ziltson of recieny ¥ specific temporal or spatial vantage point At the same time, there had been a lo . there ha ng-standing tradition amon cial anhopeogis whan ines in teary theory ofcollectng and wing up fieldwork as though it were a literary text.' Clifford Geertz gave ex; fit wes oh on iene prac cle which Wa devel sped remo aa prevailing view amongst cognitive antropologisis language existed in individual minds as a set of organizing pais or strains appropiate behaviour within clare (Goodenough jeertz viewed culture as an assemblage of texts, thi 968). In texts the strati- fede of meaningful suse tht abe society to exist as more shan just an eppeqae finials Geertz’ semiotic approach foregrounded e social dimension of cultural knowledge and i i practice, viewing cultu rounded in social processes and eavonships, The task of the ethnographer sto repmsent social ely through ‘hick escripdon, tem Geertz ap- propriate fom the analytic philosopher Gilbert Ryle who distinguished ssveen the ontological status of a blink, the involuntary) act of contract- ing one's eyelids, anda ‘wink, a purposeful, cultural sign (Geertz 1973:6). , doing ethnographic analysis meant sorting out the struc ee ing out the structures of sai ons ae eid eos of culture (bid:9),analytieally ror itizing the sign over the ‘lived ex ; e wing cperiences’ it was deemed to represent (Lee The ‘interpretive’ paradigm associated primaril 7 sociated primarily with Geertz dominated cil enshropcogy thcogbont he 1970s, though not uncritically. A mé concern was that the emphasis and value placed on the ext exon jue ethnographic text meant hat, hough eee repre ia al itactualy served ifference between reality and representation (S; ‘The text came to be ed as a controll cs te ‘be viewed as a controlling discourse, and the shared sys- a of eaeigs Ippo epee ero Tovopiized a eoosrucions ethnographer alone ~ an effect of style. Ar - a . Arguments were made for acknowioieing td, where pombe, making meee the source of a par- icular textual construction in the form of notebook entries, informants explications backed by quotations, descriptive comments, etc, in an attempt clas asthe Mansa Lo rat Dvgel ise Mary Dols Margate Mea uth Benet, Edvard Sapir and Chifrd Gere132 The Sociology of Bourdieu and the Construction of the "Object" to present less mediated representations (ibid.): By providing their audi- ence with access to the ‘raw data’, it was claimed, the ethnographer’s text could be read as only one possible version of the ‘reality’ described and not as a finished product, thus opening up the possibility of empirical challenge to both description and interpretation (Sperber 1986). Geertz, however, always maintained the impossibility of the use of ‘uninterpreted data’ — “what we call our data are really our own construc tions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to” (Geertz, 1973:9). For Geertz, ethnographic descriptions represented the imaginative reach of our subjective consciousness; the value of ethnog- raphy was to “enable a working contact with a variant subjectivity” (Geertz 1986:119). Ethnographic descriptions represented a ‘meeting of minds’, en- counters which, for Geertz, always offered “the possibility of quite literally, and quite thoroughly, changing our minds” (ibid.:114). 2.2 Authority, authenticity and the text ‘A further and more significant challenge to the interpretive paradigm came in the form of a critique of both the authority and authenticity of the ethno- graphic text. This critique took a variety of forms, but its main aim was to challenge the very idea of textual representation. In particular, it called into question the authority of the author, the specialized competence of the an- thropologist, and the notion of an autonomous subject. It focused attention on the suppression of multiple voices in the ethnographic text, and sought to radicalize the ‘dialogic’ dimension in ethnographic writing (Clifford 1983, Clifford and Marcus 1986). A variety of strategies were pursued in order to represent the ethnographic text as dialogic and polyphonic, drawing on a range of influences associated with the then emergent poststructuralist, postcolonial and feminist critiques of the modemist project. Some were underscored theoretically by Bahktin’s ideas of heteroglossia and the carnivalesque — the interplay and struggle of diverse voices within a novel/ext. Derrida's notion of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ was also brought to bear on the question of representation, point- ing to the impossibility of bringing the phenomena of the field in ethnographic research into full presence, the idea of the ethnographic event as an exem- plar of an absent present, and of ethnographic writing as nothing more than meaning deferred, the writing of difference — the elusive gap between the inscription and the unfolding of the event observed. From Foucault, ethno- 2 Clifford (1986:136) notes that the early final works of Malinowski, Boas and Lienhardt, Moira Inghilleri 133 ‘graphic representations were taken to be examples of ‘social facts’, neither true nor false, but located “within the true” of particular social practices and ‘constrained by historical, social and political relations of power (see Rabinow 1986:238-43).. In the context of these differing views of representation, the status of the ethnographic text was irreversibly altered. Although it remained a central ‘object’ of research, it was no longer evaluated in terms of its correspond- ence to any social reality; rather it was understood to be both contestable and contingent. Ethnographic fieldwork was also viewed as explicitly caught up in networks of power, at both the micro and the macro level. Practical strategies to counter and address these dynamics both in the field and be- yond included the creation of multi-authored texts, the collaboration of the individuals or groups studied in all phases of the research, and an explicit acknowledgement of the complicity of the ethnographer in the reproduction and transformation of local/global relations of power. Spencer offers other ‘examples of what he calls “formalized versions of post-modern ethnogra- phy” (Spencer 2001450), including the frequently cited “stock passages of, ethnographic self-reflection” and the growth of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) methodologies which he (ibid.) somewhat cynically suggests at best, force researchers to think about ways in which the powerless ‘and the excluded can be encouraged to articulate their concerns about policies that directly affect them, but which, at their crudest, might be seen as instant polyphony kits, allowing even the least engaged re- searcher the opportunity to obtain ‘authentic voices’ to paste into their otherwise prefabricated reports Such strategies have more recently been linked to the type of subjectivist reflexivity that has predominated in anthropology, from earlier functionalist to more recent post modem ethnographies (Marcus 1998:193). They are as- sociated with what Marcus refers to as the self-indulgent and narcissistic “null form of reflexivity” (ibid.) that extends from the confessional to the ‘polyphonic kits’ alluded to above. Bourdieu has also criticized this form of reflexivity in anthropology from his earliest engagement with ethnography for failing to adequately engage with notions of truth, representation and power. These issues, which remain central to the ongoing ‘crisis in ethnog- raphy’, are central to Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology. A key aspect of ‘Bourdieu’ epistemology is its grounding in critical ethnographic understand- ing that is, at the same time, objective (see Blommaert, this volume). In the following sections, the ethnographic traditions discussed above will be re- considered in relation to Bourdieu’s insistence on ‘objectivizing the objectivizing distance’ and in so doing theorizing the limits of anthropologic-134 The Sociology of Bourdieu and the Construction of the “Object 2.3 Bourdieu’s theory of practice As discussed above, Geertz’s interpretative approach to culture theorized the relationship between the subject and the objective system of signs through the textualization of the social world. Ethnographic data was ‘socially con- structed’ in the sense that it was the product of the ethnographer's subjective experiences of another culture objectivized in a text. The text was the repre- sentation of the inter-penetration of cultures based solely on the authority of the ethnographer’s imaginative grasp of the publicly available meanings ‘operating within the culture under investigation. For more contemporary in- terpretive ethnographers, the intersubjective experience has been perceived more dialogically and self-consciously ~ the ethnographer engages his or her cultural informants in the interpretative process as equal partners, each tuthentically” contributing to the creation of the ethnographic text, engaged ‘openly in the hermeneutic task of intersubjective understanding. Despite their differences however, in both versions the ethnography, the cultural encoun- ter, is viewed essentially in hermeneutic terms. In Geertz’s version, the social nature of the encounter is absorbed into the semiotic space of the text; in the other more critical perspectives, the social takes the form of subjective self- criticism based on the ethical, moral or political positionings of the ethnographer in relation to his or her subjects. Even the more explicitly post- modern versions of ethnography, which stress the limitations of all forms of representation, nevertheless continue to engage in a hermeneutics of the text through techniques such as defamiliarization, polyphony, etc. (Tyler 1986). Bourdieu’s response to each of these positions (and positionings) is to argue that intersubjectivity never occurs between individuals except in ap- pearance; the ‘truth’ of the interaction is never entirely contained in it (Bourdieu 1977:83; emphasis added): to describe the process of objectification and orchestration in the lan- guage of interaction and mutual adjustment is to forget that the interaction itself owes its form to the objective structures which have produced the dispositions of the interacting agents and which allot them their relative positions in the interaction and elsewhere. It is here that habitus, one of Bourdieu’s most widely referenced con- cepts, comes into being. For Bourdieu, intersubjective understanding of the type that occurs between ethnographer and subject, or between members of the same culture, is a product of the habitus. Unlike ethnographic traditions which account for the achievement of or struggle over shared meanings be- tween or within cultures by positing an objective systems of signs or a Bahktinian polyphony. for Bourdien hahitus demonctratec haw casial avante Moira Inghilleri 135 and shared without being the product of conformity to codified, recognized rules or other causal mechanisms. ‘The notion of habitus attempts to account for how regularities of behav- iour become established and maintained through what Bourdieu terms strategies, “the product(s] of the practical sense as the feel for the game, for ‘particular, historically determined game ~a feel which is acquired in child- hood, by taking part in social activities” and that presupposes the capacity for invention and adaptation (Bourdieu 1990:62-63). Strategies are seen as dependent upon social knowledge acquired through socialization, and it is through the habitus that agents come to ‘know’ the world, not consciously, but in a taken-for-granted sense. The habitus is what enables agents to feel at home in the world as the world is ‘embodied’ in them. The body is ac- corded a centrality in Bourdieu’s theory ~ it is in bodily hexis that the individual and the social converge. The body is the carrier of the classificatory schemes of the culture, the practical taxonomies that are produced by per- ceiving subjects, and which position them (and others) in social space. Social conventions animate the body which then reproduces and ritualizes those conventions as practices (Butler 1999). Bourdieu's interest in the classficatory schemes of particular cultures is directly linked to his interest in how knowledge and power are distributed within and between social individuals and collectivities. Such schemes struc- ture the particular ‘logic of practice’ that competing groups use to produce and reproduce themselves and their direct access to different forms of social capital. It is within the contexts of particular fields and through the habitus (normally ‘at home’ in the field it inhabits), that social agents establish and consolidate their positions of power in social space, where all have a stake in the acquisition of specific forms of capital. This is in essence the relation- ship between habitus, field and capital (Bourdieu 1990:87-88): Fields are historically constituted areas of activity with their specific institutions and own laws of functioning. The existence of special- ised and relatively autonomous fields is correlative with the existence of specific stakes and interests; via the inseparably economic and psy- chological investments that they arouse in agents endowed with a certain habitus, the field and its stakes (themselves produced as such by power relations and struggle in order to transform the power rela- tions that are constitutive of the field) produce investments of time, money, work, etc. ... In other words, interest is at once a condition- ing of the functioning of a field, in so far as it is what “gets people moving’, what makes them get together, compete and struggle with each other, and a product of the way the field functions136 The Sociology of Bourdieu and the Construction of the ‘Object’ 1990:75-78). For Bourdieu, the concept of fields captures the relatively au- tonomous social microcosms that constitute a network of objective relations between objectively defined positions of force within social space. The princi ple of the dynamic of a field lies in the relations between the various forces ‘that confront one another. This confrontation between the social agents or institutions located within the field is always constituted in relation to the dis- tribution of specific forms of capital —it involves a struggle to gain symbolic and material advantage with respect to social positioning. These relations can take the form of domination, subordination or homology. The form of the power dynamic is dependent upon the relation between habitus and field, on how the habitus of the agents occupying the field is actualized in a given situ- ation, The actualization of the habitus within a particular field is to a large ‘extent ‘pre-determined! or ‘pre-adapted” by the particular social and biologi- cal trajectory of the agents involved, or as Bourdieu would have it, “social agents are determined only to the extent that they determine themselves” (Bourdieu 1990:136). Bourdieu is keen to point out that the habitus is not necessarily predictive of a determinate action, and that habitus is only revealed in situated social experiences (Bourdieu 1977:82-83). However, given the contological complicity between an individual and the social world ~ habitus and field — social agents are likely to reproduce the conditions of their imme- diate status, favourable or not, with respect to existing field relations. If, as for Bourdieu, competition and conflict are at the core of human activity, or to invoke a metaphor found in Bourdieu’s writings, they are cen- tral tothe “game” of human life, the question of motivation or interest becomes. crucial, particularly where, as suggested above, players enter the playing field from unequal positions of power in the form of varying types and de- grees of capital. Bourdieu draws on the notion of illusio (from ludos, game) to account for what allows agents to become invested, taken in and by the ‘game, which is “both presupposed and produced by the functioning of his- torically delimited fields” (Bourdieu 1990:115). There must be, he suggests, ‘a tacit recognition amongst players ofthe value of the stakes of the game ~ a belief that they are important and worth pursuing — and of the practical mas- tery of its rules. It is both players” belief in the game and their interest in its stakes that grants unquestioned recognition of the rules for both entering the game and competing for its stakes (ibid :115-17), ‘The concept of illusio suggests for some a type of ‘false consciousness’ ~ the “self-deception necessary to keep players involved in the game’ (Rabinow and Dreyfus 1999:90). On the other hand, it has also been under- stood more as a further way of indicating the limits of awareness involved in lived experience, including both mis-recognition and non-recognition, based not on self-deception, but on “culturally-specific modes of grasping the na- ture of actions, the ‘conditions of existence and the dispositions of agents’ Moira Inghilleri 137 Gouanvic, this volume). Furthermore, the experiences and outcomes for play ers, acting agents, in the game ~ which are constantly reproduced and transformed by historical practices — may at any point contribute to signifi- cant ruptures within the field and to the habitus, which may in turn result in disruption and challenge to the status quo. ‘The concept of illusio clearly illustrates the limitations and theoretical distortions involved in hermeneutic representations of social practices which transfigure social reality in their own image whilst intending to reclaim it or even transform it for the social agents who inhabit it 2.4 Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology Perhaps more than any other constructed and constructing relationship, Bourdieu was most interested in the encounter between theory and practice, between the observer and the observed. As suggested above, one of Bourdicu’s principle criticisms of anthropologists doing ethnography was their failure to objectify their own objectifications. His critique of anthropology regis- tered in Outline of a Theory of Practice is echoed in later criticisms of anti-foundationalist positions which “elide the question of the (social) foundation of critique”, ““deconstruction’ that fails to deconstruct the de- constructor” and “the illusion of a ‘view from everywhere’ that narcissistic reflexivity pursues in its postmodern form” (Bourdieu 2000:107). For Bourdieu, all were guilty of what he termed “scholastic epistemocentrism” (ibid.:50) or what Wacquant refers to as “intellectualist bias” (Bourdieu and ‘Wacquant 1992:39-40) — that is, the ignoring or repressing in their accounts of the object of their research, the social and intellectual unconscious em- bedded in the analytical tools and operations of their discipline. This is the ‘moment, according to Bourdieu, when scientific thought encounters the so- cial world and risks destroying its object; when ‘practical logic’ risks being collapsed into “theoretical logic’. It is at this point that the social scientist ‘must acknowledge and maintain the distinct forms of knowledge that inform his or her relation to the social world (Bourdieu 2000:50): first, the primary understanding of the world that is linked to experi- cence of inclusion in this world, the ~ almost invariably mistaken and distorted - understanding that scholastic thought has of this practical understanding, and finally the — essential ~ difference between prac- tical knowledge — reasonable reason ~ and the scientific knowledge ~ scholastic, theoretical, reasoning reason — that is generated in autono- mous fields ence is thus to reconstruct practical logic theoretically ‘The aim of social s138 The Sociology of Bourdieu and the Construction of the ‘Object’ This is achieved by “subjecting the position ofthe observer to the same critic- al analysis as that of the constructed object at hand” (Barnard 1988:75). For Bourdicu, this is of far more relevance than either the social trajectories (the particularities of gender, ethnicity, class, etc.) of individual researchers or their positioning within an academic field, including its relation to the field of power (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 39), For Bourdieu, it is the task of the sociologist to “tell about the things of| the social world, and, as far as possible, to tell them the way they are” (Bourdieu 2000:5). By subjecting the sociologist to the same critical analy- sis of the thing observed, Bourdieu aimed to strengthen the epistemological position of ‘objectivity’ within social scientific knowledge. This distances his position on reflexivity from those discussed above. But to be consciously present in the ethnographic encounter did not force him into an unavoidable subjectivism (Bourdieu 1990:178): ‘To consider the social integration of the scientist as an insurmountable ‘obstacle to the construction of a scientific sociology is to forget that the sociologist can find weapons against social determinism in the very science which brings them to light, and thus to conscious awareness, Bourdieu’s vision for a scientific sociology is clear. He rejects the idea that in order to overcome the subject/object dualism one must abandon @ claim to an objective social science. The possibility that doing objective so- cial science allows one to “step outside the habitus and illusio” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1999:92) is for many critics (and supporters) Bourdieu’s most con- troversial and dubious claim (ibid.; and see Jenkins 1992, Calhoun et al. 1993, Marcus 1998), for it appears to contradict his refusal to accept the autonomy of subjective knowledge. But Bourdieu’s point is that reflexive analysis ~ ‘stepping outside the habitus and illusio’ —is not achieved through subjective understanding. It is achieved by objectifying, in concrete situa- tions, both the object and the objectification of the object ~ engaging in a sociology of sociology ~ in order to apprehend the limits imposed on scien- tific knowledge itself. These limits on knowledge/self-knowledge do not originate in the ‘socially-determined” subject, but in the social determinants of different forms of social practice, including sociology itself. 3. The place of Bourdieu’s sociology within translation and interpreting studies Bourdieu's reflexive sociology has as its central aim a critique of power as constituted in cultural, social and historical practices. In this sense it shares common focus with the culturalist paradigm — largely associated with Moira Inghilleri 139 acts of translation as ethnographic encounters. Tejaswini Niranjana, amongst others, has noted similarities between translation and ethnography in the postcolonial context (Niranjana 1992). Maria Tymoczo has discussed the many similarities between postcolonial writing and translation with respect to the questions of representation, authenticity and authority discussed above (Tymoczo 1999). The almost exclusive focus on the text which writers and scholars working within this paradigm maintain (Sela-Sheffy 2000, Buzelin 2005), however, indicates a continuation of the subjectivist hermeneutics discussed above, regardless of the theoretical perspective adopted — poststruc- turalism, deconstruction, feminism, ete Bourdieu's commentary on hermeneutic approaches and his alternative conceptualizations of the observer/observed relationship suggest significant epistemological differences between the culturalist paradigm and his reflex- ive sociology of translation. These can be noted in his insistence on the idea that intersubjectivity is always marked by and through the habitus; his privileging of the concept of fields and their relation to the distribution of specific forms of capital as the locus for all intersubjective understanding; and his view of the workings of illusio which keep social actors invested in cer- tain social practices and inform the very conditions of their understanding.” ‘But what of the relationship between Bourdieu and other more socio- logical theories currently being developed within translation and interpreting. research? If Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology distances him from the literary/ hermeneutic approaches discussed above, might there be greater potential overlap, despite important differences, with, for example, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (Buzelin, this volume) or Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory (Hermans 1999)? As these theories have been taken up as potential fertile areas for future research, they will be considered briefly below. 3.1 Bourdieu and Latour's Actor-Network Theory Latour’s work is located within an anti-foundationalist philosophy of sci- cence and is opposed to Bourdieu’ s epistemology on a number of levels. As a * Douglas Robinson (1997) has noted a tendency in certain postcolonial readings of the colonizer/colonized relationship to privilege ‘nativist’ and ‘foreignizing” representations ‘of colonized cultures based on abstract theorizations and often with a disregard for the ‘actual complexities ofthe practices and relationships under examination. For Bourdiev, such hermeneutical approaches, even when informed by a strong sense of social justice, serve only to ereate yet another unreflected-upon representation of the translated object. For this reason, both acts of translation (and interpreting) as well as the academic dis- ‘courses attached to these must themselves be objectfied in order to make transparent the potential power off all discursive practices to ‘re-present the real’ (see Vidal140 The Sociology of Bourdieu and the Construction of the ‘Object’ ‘method, it owes a good deal to ethnomethodology (see Garfinkel 1967), a branch of sociology which attempted to define social reality as/through the way members indigenously organize and assess the rationality of their own activities in everyday life. Ethnomethodologists sought to make the familiar strange by deriving notions of the social from informants in order to re- capture a view of social reality as constituted in/through actors’ experiences of everyday practices. Likewise, Latour holds that the fundamental task of social scientists is to provide a platform for social actors to be heard. Like Bourdieu, he seeks an end to the subject/object dualism, However, Latour rejects both the idea of a ‘view from everywhere’ as well as Bourdieu’s claim that scientific objectivity can be accomplished by (the sociologist) ar- ticulating social positions and positionings. For Latour, actors enact particular forms of knowledge, for example ‘doing science’ (or translation or inter- preting), by virtue of engaging in the activities related to and relevant to their production. The task of the social scientist is to assemble, based on solid evidence, information about what matters to the actors involved in the ‘doing’ and to produce good descriptions of these activities. Bourdieu would not argue against the idea of the logic of practice ~ on the contrary, itis of fundamental relevance to his reflexive sociology. Bourdieu would argue, however, that the descriptions Latour’ social actors provide are inherently social ones; they are themselves dependent on the actors’ position in the social world (Bourdieu 2000:189; emphasis in original): Since one cannot be content either withthe primary vision or with the vision to which the world of objectification gives access, one can only strive to hold together, so as to integrate them, both the point of ‘view of the agents who are caught up in the object and the point of ‘view on this point of view which the work of analysis enables one to reach by relating position-takings to the positions from which they are taken, To restrict scientific observation to the point of view of the agents is to “treat as an instrument of knowledge what ought to be the object of know!- edge” (Bourdieu 1992:246). Furthermore, for Bourdieu, the paradoxical implication of this “semblance of radicalism” (due to its claim to rehabili- tate ordinary thinking) is the potential maintenance of a social conservatism (Gbid.), since the objective structures that have produced actors’ disposi- tions — their habitus — remain unexamined. 3.2 Bourdieu and Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory In contrast to Latour, in Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory the individual becomes more of an observer; the autonomous subject is replaced with the Moira Inghitleri Il according to the principle of functional differentiation, lacking any overall integration and free from the influence of human individuals. Unlike Habermas, who argues that the threat to the individual of ‘systems rationali- zation’ can be met through resistance from the ‘lifeworld’ — culture, traditions, etc. (Habermas 1985) — Luhmann emphasizes the total autonomy of func- tional systems from both the environment and the interests or needs of individuals. Society is constituted by these operationally closed, ineommen- surable systems that establish and reproduce themselves autopoetically — they are self-referential and self-organized; “the ‘language’ of one system cannot bbe adequately translated into the ‘language’ of another” (Rasch 2000:145). For Luhmann, these communicative systems (similar to Bourdieu’s fields) are the basic elements of the social system. Each system encodes in binary terms the contingent, disordered and fragmented nature of the modern world; each strives to become internally meaningful through a process of enforced selectivity. By way of illustration, Luhmann contrasts his model with the sender-receiver model of communication that grants priority over the mean- ing of an utterance to the transmitter of a message. Instead, he argues in systems’ terms for the primacy of reception. He distinguishes between an initial ‘utterance’ — any informational input to the system —which, he claims, offers only a suggestion of meaning, and the incoming ‘information’ - the part of the initial utterance that is selected as meaningful by the receiver (ibid. :54; see also Luhmann 1995). Importantly, for Luhmann, the utterance comes into the system not from individuals or some external environment (which remains an ‘unknown’ or ‘unthought’) but from environmental “perturbations” or triggering devices (ibid.:144) that stimulate the system's internal organization to act. Unlike for Bourdieu, there is no relationship between the internal and the external — there is only the autonomous, self- perpetuating system. Luhmann does make a distinction between first order and second order observation (Blithdorn 2000:348) which is reminiscent of Bourdieu’s double reflexivity discussed above. Like Bourdieu, Luhmann was critical of social theory which viewed social reality through first order observation alone, considering it a form of moral fundamentalism (ibid.). Despite this apparent shared critique, however, Bourdieu opposes systems theories like Luhmann’s on a number of grounds. For Bourdieu, society ~ as perceived through the inter-related concepts of field, habitus, capital and illusio — presupposes strug- ‘gles between dominated and dominant fields that are inhabited by significant agents and institutions (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:102-103). Although fields and functional systems may share surface similarities, Bourdieu ar- gues (ibid.:103), different fields form a system of differences, of distinctive and antagonistic proper-142 ‘The Sociology of Bourdieu and the Construction of the ‘Object’ principle of self-referentiality implies) but via conflicts internal to the field of production, The field is the locus of relations of force ~ and not only of meaning ~ and of struggles aimed at transforming it, and therefore of endless change. Unlike Luhmann, Bourdieu believes in the transformative potential of sci entific objectivity derived from sociological, empirically-based observations of the world, On this point, Luhmann, sounding more like Latour, would argue that the sociologist or philosopher can only produce better descrip- tions of modem society ~ though not of actors, only of abstract systems ~ ‘that account for what is rather than what ought to be (morally, politically, ethically, ete). 3.3 Future Directions It seems likely that the emerging sociology of translation and interpreting will develop a certain eclecticism with respect to social theory or, indeed, establish divergent and competing approaches. Each of these possibilities suggests a future of innovative and energized dialogue and debate. It can also constitute the beginnings of a meta-view of acts of translation and inter- preting that will help to erode the established theoretical divisions between the two activities and perceive them instead as different but related socially- and politically-informed practices. The sociological and philosophical per- spectives introduced in this introduction also make clear their distinction from the culturalist paradigm which, though equally concerned with social relations of power, has maintained the literary text as its primary focus. ‘Two important and relevant issues ~ agency and language — have not been examined specifically with respect to translation and interpreting in this introduction. The complex question of agency, which is treated distinctly in each of the perspectives discussed above, has been considered of primary importance in the endeavour to make descriptive theoretical approaches more ‘agent aware’ and translators and interpreters more visible as social actors Latour’s views on the actor network, Bourdieu’ on the habitus and reflexiv- ity, and Luhmann’s on the insignificance of agency, offer interesting ccontrastive methods for exploring the role of translators and interpreters in relation to their respective practices. The potential utility of these methods can be measured through more empirical research on what translators and interpreters actually do and say they do in the widest possible contexts of their professional practice. ‘The funetion of language in the formation of the subject is also of central concern to translators and interpreters and the networks in which they oper- ate, Bourdicu’s view —that the effect of speech acts or ‘social performatives Moira Inghitleri 143 duce and take on specific forms of authorized discourse (Bourdieu 1991) ~ ‘warrants further investigation in translation and interpreting contexts. This limited view of the social nature of language leaves open the question of the potential contributory role of the rational subject as activator of the transformative capacity of the habitus (Inghilleri 2003). As Judith Butler has argued, “the social performative is a crucial part not only of subject ‘formation, but of the ongoing political contestation and reformulation of the subject as well” (Butler 1999:125). Despite such caveats, however, Bourdieu does provide important insights {nto what must be involved in the construction and observation of the object of practice and research in the field of translation and interpreting studies. His underlying assumptions with respect to the production and reproduction of knowledge, captured in the concepts of habitus, field, capital and illusio, can serve as an important starting point for sociologically-informed transla- tion and interpreting research. In particular, Bourdieu’s theorization of the social suggests that acts of translation and interpreting be understood through the social practices and relevant fields in which they are constituted, that they be viewed as functions of social relations based on competing forms of capital tied to local/global relations of power, and that translators and inter- preters, through the workings of the habitus and illusio, be seen as both implicated in and able to transform the forms of practice in which they en- ‘gage. In this way, Bourdieu offers a sound theory of practice to the developing sociological paradigm in translation and interpreting studies ~ and a solid reminder of the social relevance and responsibility involved in both research and practice in the field. MOIRA INGHILLERI Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, SEI4 6NW, UK. minghilleri@ gold.ac.uk References Barnard, Henry (1990) ‘Bourdieu and Ethnography: Reflexivity, Politics and Praxis’, in Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar and Chris Wilkes (eds) An Intro- duction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu, London: Palgrave, 58-85. Bassnett, Susan and Harish Trivedi (eds) (1999) Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, London: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, ‘Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1990) In Orher Words, trans. Matthew Adamson, Stanford: Stanford Uni- versity Press. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Mat-144 The Sociology of Bourdieu and the Construction of the ‘Object’ (2000) Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice, London: Polity Press. —- and Loie J. D.Wacquant (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chi cago: University of Chicago Press. 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(2005) “Translation and Society: The Emergence of a Conceptual Rela- tionship’, in Paul St-Pierre and Prufulla C. Kar (eds) In Translation: Reflections, Refraction, Transformations, New Delhi: Pencraft International, 3-14, Spencer, Jonathan (2001) ‘Ethnography after Postmodernism’, in Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland and Lyn Lofland (eds) Hand- book of Ethnography, Sage: London, 443-52. Sperber, Dan (1985) On Anthropological Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘Sturge, Kate (1997) ‘Translation Strategies in Ethnography", The Translator 3(1) 21-38, Tyler, Steven A. (1986) ‘Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Oc- cult to Occult Document’, in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds) Writing Culture, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 122-40. ‘Tymoczo, Maria (1999) ‘Post-colonial Writing and Literary Translation’, in Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (eds) Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, London: Routledge, 19-40. Wolf, Michaela (2002) ‘Culture as Translation ~ and Beyond Ethnographic ‘Models of Representation in Translation Studies’, in Theo Hermans (ed) Crosscultral Transgressions, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 180-92.The Translator. Volume 11, Number 2 (2005), 147-166 ISBN 1-900650-86-X A Bourdieusian Theory of Translation, or the Coincidence of Practical Instances Field, ‘Habitus’, Capital and ‘Illusio’ JEAN-MARC GOUANVIC Concordia University, Montréal, Canada Translated by Jessica Moore Abstract. This article attempts to adapt Pierre Bourdieu's socio- logical theory of symbolic goods to translation by highlighting points of convergence between the reflections of the sociologist ‘and questions of translation. Founded upon a theory of action, Bourdieu’ sociology allows for an integration of translation prac- tice into his heuristic model. The practice of translation, like every practice in Bourdieu’s terms, is based upon a coincidence of two instances (generally separated by scholars): the external instance of literary texts (what we have customarily called the literary in stitution and what Bourdieu calls the fields) and the internal instance (textual productions and products, the producing agents ‘and their ‘habitus'). Using examples from American literature translated in France in the 19th and 20th centuries, this paper analyzes the effect on translation of the existence, or nonexist- ence, of American and French literary fields, with emphasis on the censorship that the judicial fields attempted to impose upon the literary field during the period under consideration. It then analyzes the ‘habitus" of a number of translators (Coindreau, Vian and Duhamel) and the way in which their social trajectories de- veloped. Finally, itis suggested thatthe ‘illusio’ is ultimately the object of the translator's task. Governed by the principle of ho- ‘mology, translation is the work of a translator who, embodied in his or her bi-cultural ‘habitus’, imports the foreign text into the target culture, thus orienting this culture towards a new social Suture. ‘The effort of Pierre Bourdieu has been principally to construct a theory of action (this is the subtitle of his book, Practical Reason, 1998) that explains the practice of agents, opposing the following two conceptions of action: the rationalist vision that considers “irrational any action or representation which is not generated by the explicitly posed reasons of an autonomous18 A Bourdieusian Theory of Translation structuralist theses that consider the agents as simply “epiphenomena of struc- ture” (ibid.:vii). With the key notions of field, habitus and capital (to which add the notion of illusio), all of which are applicable to translation studies, Bourdieu develops a philosophy of action by constructing a fundamental relationship between the social trajectory of the agent (based on his or her incorporated dispositions, or habitus) and the objective structures (specified ‘under fields). This is a “two-way” relationship (ibid.:vii): the social trajec- tory that constitutes the habirus contributes to the structuring of fields, which in turn structure the habitus. On a global level, the object of research in translation studies uhimately becomes the analysis of the differential rela- tionship between the habitus of translation agents (including publishers, critics, ete.) who have taken a position in a given target field in a given epoch, and the determinant factors of the target field as the site of reception of the translation. Additionally, of course, the object of translation research is a differential analysis of source and target texts as exhibitors of pertinent traits studied in the habitus of agents and in the fields in question. The central notions of field, habitus, capital and illusio are intrinsically ‘woven together, such that none can be defined without recourse to the others. Bourdieu’s theory of cultural action is thus not only a sociology of the inst tution but also of its agents. Itis a sociology of the text as a production in the process of being carried out, of the product itself and of its consumption in the social fields, the whole seen in a relational manner. For Bourdieu, prac- tical instances cannot be adequately described if we neglect one of the elements nor if we make distinctions between things which should not be thought of separately; for example, if we distinguish between the external and internal dimensions of a production, between the objective structures which are the fields and the incorporated dispositions which are the habitus. In this sense, for Bourdieu there exists neither internal nor external dimen- sions but a concurrence of both. It is upon this foundation that I present a sociology of translation below, considering a number of cases of American literature translated into French 1. The present state of research in the sociology of translation Let us tur first to Bourdieu’ influence on translation studies over the past few years. In his article “The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus’ (1998), Daniel Simeoni seeks to reinterpret polysystem theory in order to integrate the notion of habitus. For Simeoni, the notion of habitus encom passes the notion of norms and, unlike norms, incorporates the double dimension of “structuring and structured” function (‘bid.:21-22). Does ‘Simeoni manage to replace the notion of norms with the notion of habitus?” Arguably he doesn’t, because the author neglects to resituate the notion of Jean-Mare Gouanvic 149 in his notion of field, which cannot be dissociated from habitus. It is unfor- tunate that Simeonis treatment of Bourdieu’s theory of culture does not offer any first-hand quotations from Bourdieu, and that it is through the me- diation of John B. Thompson, himself cited by Gumperz and Levinson, that the reader is introduced to the notion of habitus. A recontextualization of habitus within fields, and not just within specialized fields but in fields of power, would allow us to see the insurmountable limitations of this attempt to compare norms and habitus. It is not only the notion of norms that needs to be redefined, but that of system, and it is fundamental that the notion of capital ~ essential to Bourdieu’s theory — be included. It is necessary, then, for polysystem theory to be completely reevaluated in the context of Bourdieu’s social theory, to the point where polysystem theory might have to renounce its own paradigm in order to accommodate that of Bourdieu, In Translation in Systems (1999), Hermans illustrates in detail the nature and influence of polysystem theory on studies of translation. On the ques- tion of resemblances between Bourdieu’s theory and polysystem theory, Hermans writes that “while his [Bourdieu’s] insistence on the relational na-~ ture of his thinking provides an obvious point of overlap (Bourdieu 1994:17),, in his own estimation the empirical urge underlying his work separates him from system theory, which he regards as based on an organicist, totalizing philosophy” (1999:131). Itis true that Bourdieu rejects the notion of system in order to elucidate the rapport between symbolic productions and their ‘mode of reception, but this doesn’t mean that he is simply an ‘empiricist’ (in the sense of ‘empirical studies’). He develops a body of theoretical notions (habitus, field, etc.), all closely dependent on each other, precisely to illus- trate the truth of empirical reality — which, in their own way, the polysystem theorists also do, with the notions of polysystem, of canon, and of norms. In the end, itis doubtful that “the relational nature of his thinking provides an obvious point of overlap” with polysystem theory. ‘The research of Isabelle Kalinowski (2001), whose doctoral thesis on the reception of Hélderlin in France was defended in 1999, offers a theorization of translation based on the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, The author carried out a study of the population of translators (more than thirty) of Hélderlin into French and the “interplay of divisions that structure it [the reception of Holderlin]” (ibid.:26; my translation). The “networks of solidarity [between Holderlin's work and its translators] were constructed separately from recog- nized academic circles” (ibid.:41; my translation), operating according to the model of ‘poetic affinity’, or dialogue between poets (criticized by Berman 1985) and of the proximity of ‘poetry and thought’ established by Heidegger. Heidegger's interpretation of H6lderlin, relayed by Maurice Blanchot, is ‘examined in one case: the translation of im Freien by dans l'ouvert in André du Bouchet’s version of Gréce by Holderlin: Kalinowski’s fine article links_—=_—_ 150 A Bourdieusian Theory of Translation of their translations, the intertextual modes of carrying out the translations and the theorizations upon which they depend. In 1999, Pascale Casanova published la République mondiale des lettres The book is an analysis of Paris’ dominant position in literature since Du Bellay. But the Parisian supremacy is contested by England, and then by Germany (the Herderian revolution), We are in fact in the “period of decolonization”, the “third significant stage” (not yet completed) “of the formation of an international literary space” (Casanova 1999:116; my trans- lation). For Casanova, Joyce and Faulkner brought abgut “one of the greatest revolutions” in the literary universe (ibid.:455). But, if for the centre (Patis) Faulkner was great because of his formal creations, in the marginal zones Faulkner was interpreted as a “liberator”, “because he found a literary solu- ‘tion to what had until then remained a political, aesthetic and literary impasse” (ibid). Finally, a special issue of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (a Journal founded by Pierre Bourdieu) appeared in September 2002 under the direction of Johan Heilbron and Giséle Sapiro. The title ofthis issue is Tra- duction: les échanges littéraires internationaux. Supporters of the polysystem theory are found here alongside proponents of Pierre Bourdieu's theory: Zohar Shavit, Blaise Wilfert, Isabelle Kalinowski, Toana Popa, Hervé Serry, Pascale Casanova, Giséle Sapiro." Al these contributions to a sociology of translation have one thing in common. To the best of my knowledge,’ they nearly all (with the notable exception of Isabelle Kalinowski) reflect prevailing divisions between ex- teal and internal sociologies of the text, and they give exclusive attention to the analysis of external sociology to the detriment of internal sociology, sanctioning a division that is not justified. In the examples that follow, T examine how the two modalities of a sociology of translation — internal and extemal — are expressed. 2. The literary field and translation ‘The specific logic of a field is established in the incorporated state in the form of a specific habitus, or, more precisely, a sense of the game, ordinarily described as a ‘spirit’ or ‘sense’ (‘philosophical’, ‘liter ary’, ‘artistic’, ete.), which is practically never set out or imposed in ' For an analysis of the contributions inthis issue of Actes dela recherche en sciences sociales, see Gouanvie (forthcoming) 1 am not familiar with all contributions of the authors examined above, despite my efforts to take into account al the articles published on the subject. What I write about ‘these contributions is no doubt partial given the buoyant state ofthe field of translation Jean-Mare Gouanvie 151 an explicit way. Because it takes place insensibly, in other words sradually, progressively and impercepsibly, the conversion of the origi- nal habitus, a more or less radical process (depending on the distance), which is required by entry into the game and acquisition ofthe spe cific habitus, passes forthe most part unnoticed. (Bourdieu 2000:11) ‘The fundamental concept of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory is that of field. Every- thing (habitus, capital, illusio) revolves around this heuristic notion that Bourdieu defines as follows by presenting the case of the literary field (1990:143) | would say that the literary field is a force-field as well as a field of struggles which aim at transforming or maintaining the established relation of forces: each of the agents commits the force (the capital) that he has acquired through previous struggles to the strategies that depend for their general direction on his position in the power strug- gle, that is, on his specific capital. What factors have determined the formation of the French and, also, of the American literary field? How do we describe the fields? In the case of Henry Miller, {will analyze the legal question (it would be better to say ‘judiciary") ‘and in particular the prohibitions that are imposed upon the literary field from outside the field, and the legal question of signed contracts between editors and authors. I will then examine how translations are inserted into the literary space in a specialized series. At the same time, I will look at how certain authors (Cooper, Hawthome, H. B. Stowe, London and Dos Passos) ‘managed to have their works published in the literary space. The formation of the French literary field, which emerged in the second half of the 19th century through the contributions of Flaubert and Baudelaire, is characterized by a veritable revolution — the autonomization of everyi related to literature according to the principle of the economic world ‘re- versed’ (Bourdieu 1983), against the subjection of the literary universe to other spaces, in particular the economic space and the political and judiciary spaces.’ From the moment when the literary seeks to impose itself in stug- les, which can be quite violent‘ as the sole criterion for aruling on everything ‘This does not in the least prevent other spaces from attempting to exercise their eule ‘over the literary field, as we will see. See the very numerous prohibitions to which litera- ture will be subjected after 1939, * See Paul Olagnier(1934:51-52; my translation: “Flaubert was tried for Madame Bovary ‘and acquitted; but Baudelaire was charged a fine of 300 francs for les Fleurs du Mal in 1857, and Jean Richepin was condemned to one month in prison and a 500 rane fine for Chanson des Guewx”. A law oassed in 1946 later ‘rehahilitated” Randelaie's Ine Flowre152 A Bourdieusian Theory of Translation that concems it, authors acquire a freedom vis-2-vis the social space for their ‘work; they acquire a (relative) freedom to write what they want, shifting the risks of censorship from social structures towards the literary field as it is being formed. Without the authors always being conscious of it, this leads to the literary field acquiring the right to exercise a (self)censorship of the au- thor and the work, in addition to the censorship imposed by judiciary sources. 2.1. The restricted field of American literature in Paris between 1920 and 1939 ‘The restricted field of American literature in Paris between 1920 and 1939 developed at the same time as the American literary field was formed in the United States. By restricted field, Bourdieu means the following (1971:54- 55; emphasis in original; my translati ‘The field of production as such owes its structure to the opposition, mote of less clear cut in different domains of intellectual and artistic life, between, on the one hand, she field of restricted production as & system producing the symbolic goods (and instruments of appropris- tion ofthese goods) objectively destined (at least in the short term) to public of symbolic goods producers, themselves producing for pro- ducers of symbolic goods, and on the other hand, the field of large-scale symbolic production specifically organized with a view to the production of symbolic goods destined for non-producers (“the wider public”) which can be recruited either in non-intellectual seg- ments of the dominant class (“the cultivated public”), or in the other social classes, Differing from the system of large production which ‘obeys the law of competition for the conquest of as vast a market as possible, the field of restricted production tends to produce its own norms of production and the evaluative criteria of its products and ‘obeys the fundamental law of competition for strictly cultural recog- nition granted to the group of peers, who are both privileged clients and competitors. Authors and Anglo-American editors, the latter amounting to a dozen or so between 1920 and 1939, form a field of restricted production that is gov- emed by the fierce desire to be freed from all censorship external to the field. The ban on the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses by The Little Review in the US defined the boundaries that the American authorities did not want to cross in literary editions. This experience is shaped by Edward Titus, editor of Ludwig Lewisohn’s The Case of Mr. Crump, published by the Parisian house ‘At the Sign of the Black Manikin’. The book was re- jected by the American mail services because it violated Section 211 of the Jean-Mare Gouanvie 153 want to be published in either England or the US because of the legal re- strictions on the rights ofthe author. He said he would like, a literary director of The Three Mountains Press, “to free prose writers from the necessity of presenting their work in the stock-size volume of commerce” (cited in Ford 1975:99-100), ‘The case of Henry Miller — and the expatriates generally —is highly illus- trative in this regard, Expatriates Hemingway, Dos Passos, e.e. cummings, ‘T'S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Henry Miller emigrated to Paris in the interwar period to write their works, finding a sort of extrateritoriality® there, pre- cisely because the realist American literary field was not yet autonomous, existing only in an embryonic state, and because literature was entirely sub- {ject to the dictates of the economy and of politics, as evident in the ban on the distribution of their works in the US.* ‘The publication of Miller's works in translation began in 1945, with Tropic of Cancer edited by les éditions Denoél and Tropic of Capricorn in 1946 by les éditions du Chéne. Legal proceedings were immediately initiated against the two Tropics by le Cartel d'action sociale et morale (the Social and Moral Action Cartel). The charge provoked a strong reaction in the French literary field. Maurice Nadeau formed a support committee in defence of Miller. The ministry of justice stepped back and allowed this affair to drag on as it awaited a vote on an amnesty law in August 1947. The case was eventually withdrawn in June 1950 (Poulain 1998:565). Even though the case of the two translated Tropics was withdrawn, the attacks on Miller’s works by the Cartel d’action sociale et morale provoked a strong response in the literary field, thus helping to reinforce the field as the sole structure entitled to rule on what is or is not publishable. On the one hand, this made it more difficult for institutions that do not belong to the literary field (legal, Political, religious, social, etc.) to impose censorship on it, and on the other * This extraterritoriality lies first in the fact tha the works were writen and published in English in the French culture and second in that “the book ... could not be tried for ‘offending good bchaviour between 1882 and 1939" (Poulain 1998:n.5, 557; my transla- tion). In 1882 a revision of article 8 of the 1881 law had excluded books from trials in ‘correctional court. On the other hand, adecree issued on 6 May 1939 forbade “the circu lation, distribution or sale” on French soil of any foreign work containing an offense to the President ofthe Republic, propagating false news, or reproducing “fabricated infor- ‘ation, falsified or falsely atributed to third parties” (cited in Poulain 1998:557; my \tanslation). Moreover, a decree passed on 29 July 1939 “condemn(ed] the crime of ‘oss indecency” (ibid: my translation), instituting a special Commission for books to adjudicate the affair in question ‘ Authors who wrote and published their works in the US in effect had to play the socio cultural game in the American social space, treating themes and discourses that conformed {othe ambient doxa. Their talent consisted of being able to find innovative ways around154 A Bourdiewsian Theory of Translation it continually undermined the coercive moves of the Powers that be. None- theless, bans on sales to minors, the use of posters and publicity continued to be enforced, first against Boris Vian (as in the case of J'irai cracker sur vos tomibes, published under the pseudonym of Vernon Sullivan by les &ditions du Scorpion in 1947), then against Maurice Girodias’ Editions Ol- ympia Press, with 49 bans on sales to minors and the use of posters’ according to by-laws in effect between 1954 and 1963, and against works published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Eric Losfeld and Régine Desforges, among others. In. the debates over what was to be censored, the aesthetic and literary argu- ment was decisive: what is not good literature is susceptible to censorship. This was the argument used in the case of J'irai cracher sur vos tombes, condemned by its opponents as a novel of the Série Noire and (presumably) “The American-style detective novel would be the site of literary mediocrity, and, worse, of encouragement of sexual licentious- ness, of immorality, and mainly of violence” (ibid. :561; my translation). Soon after the Second World War came to an end, France began to resist Ameri- mn, caught as it was between its liberator and the cold war climate that was becoming established. The important difference between French censorship and American censorship, where the latter forced American au- thors to ex-patriate themselves to French censorship on French soil, i that American censorship rejected outright all works that were considered inde- cent, while French censorship mainly restricted the distribution of works by enforcing ‘bans on sales to minors, use of posters and publicity’ 2.2 The emergence of an autonomous French literary field ‘The existence of a literary field in which foreign literary works can circulate in translation isa key element ofthe ‘translation’ (in the mathematical sense) of these works. This is already apparent in the creation by twentieth-century editors of specialized series of foreign literature, as opposed to the 19th cen- tury where translations were integrated into non-specific series of general or popular literature.* The situation of authors and works translated in the French literary field in the 20th century is different from that in the 19th century, since the French literary field did not yet exist at that stage. To demonstrate this, I will briefly analyze the case of French editions of works by American authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet " The 49 titles published in English included Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. * Publishing translations in special series has the effect of putting translations at a dis tance, as though in a gesture of respect. Once discovered by the national literary field, thew nee then inteorated into seneral series and assimilated inthe literary field (Gouanvic, Jean-Mare Gouanvie 155 Beecher Stowe, and, in the 20th century, Jack London and John Dos Passos; | will also examine the lessons to be drawn from translated editions of these authors for the formation of the French literary field. C. Gosselin, the first to publish translations of Cooper (I’Espion in 1822, translated by A.-I.-B, Defauconpret) launched his complete works as gen- eral, mainstream literature. A first edition of twenty-four novels was followed by a second edition of ten novels. Next, a ‘new translation’ (complete works, in fact, of ten volumes) was published between 1827 and 1835 by Gosselin, Mame et Delaunay. Between 1830 and 1834 Furne published 13 volumes of Cooper’s work.’ Numerous adaptations of these same stories were to be pub- lished by different adaptors, in particular versions addressed to young people, but also versions considered ‘popular’ for a wider public. The decisive facts are that, on the one hand, this abundance of translations was not governed by any strict respect for authorship rights; publishers could simply appropri- ate the work of a foreign author without restriction and have her or his work translated, even from a pirate edition. On the other hand, with one excep- tion, none of these translations addressed to a general public was published in specialized series reserved for translations. By contrast, Hawthorne's major work, The Scarlet Letter, was published in E. D. Forgues’ translation under the title la Lettre rouge in 1865 in a special series of L. Hachette, ‘Bibliothéque des meilleurs romans étrangers’ (Library of Best Foreign Novels). This was a reissue of the first edition of 1853 by G. De Gonet in a translation by Old Nick (pseudonym of E. D. Forgues). The series was to continue into the 20th century, but without the title ‘Library’, as can be seen in Hachette’s publication of Curwood’s entire work."? Harriet Beecher Stowe’ s case is similar to Cooper's. Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in Boston in 1852, was translated and published by La Librairie Nouvelle, Perrotin, Delahaye, V. Lecou, Michel Lévy Fréres, Charpentier ‘and several other publishers, including Hachette. None of these translations ‘was published in a special series of foreign literature (such series did not exist), except in the case of Hachette, which published the series ‘Littératures anciennes et étrangéres’ (Ancient and Foreign Literature) in the “Bibliothéques des chemins de fer’ and ‘Bibliothéque des meilleurs romans étrangers’, as we have seen in the discussion of Hawthome. ° Fourtoen works were published between 1835 and 1837, then thiny in 1852, twenty {wo works between 1859 and 1864, etc. G. Barba published eleven titles in his series ‘le Cabinet linéraire’ bewween 1838 and 1841, All these translations are by Defauconpret and are translations rather than adaptations, Numerous translations by different transla tors were also published: B. Laroche, P. Louisy. E. de la Bédolligre. "© Curwood was first published by Editions G. Crés outside any series, and then by156 A Bourdieusian Theory of Translation ‘The first editions of translations of Jack London were published by G. Cris, Hachette, la Renaissance du livre, Juven and a few others. But the editors of London remained Crés and Hachette. Crés published the Ameri- can author outside any special series of foreign novels between 1922 and 1930, while Hachette began publishing London in 1931, when Editions G. Crés ceased to publish him. Predictably, London’s works appeared in Hachette’s ‘Les meilleurs romans étrangers’ series; works taken from the Editions Cres list were re-edited. What this demonstrates with respect to the autonomy of fields of literature published in France — whether literature for young people, popular literature, or highbrow literature —is that in Jack Lon- don’s case," the translations were subject to contracts that were respected by the editors, thus avoiding fierce competition among editors publishing pirate editions and those publishing authorized editions. In terms of rela- tions among book publishers from different nations, we see a tendency towards autonomy in literary fields as compared with other national fields. This is not sufficient, however, to confirm the autonomy of a national liter- ary field." Translations of John Dos Passos’ work were published under contract by Editions P. Rieder (which published !'Initiation d’un homme, the first of his novels, in 1925 in the series ‘Prosateurs étrangers modernes’/Modern For- cign Prose Writers), Bernard Grasset (which published 42e parallale in the series ‘Les écrits’/Writings under the direction of Jean Gughenno in 1933), but mainly by Gallimard (principally after the Second World War, with the ‘exception of Manhattan Transfer in 1928, reedited in the series ‘Du monde entier'/From the World Over, founded in 1931) and in small publishing houses: les Fditions de Flore, Editions du Pavois, La Jeune Parque and Amiot- Dumont. What has been said about Jack London applied to all publishers of Dos Passos, especially with respect to publication rights in the literary field, afield that had already stabilized in the interwar period and after. ‘These examples demonstrate that on the one hand translations of Cooper and Stowe were published widely in the French literary space. This means that almost all translations of their works were carried out and published "Without assuming thatthe same is true of other contemporary authors, of cours. "©The firs international accord regulating the publishing field, notably the rights of the author and of the translator, isthe Bem Convention of 8 September 1886, to which all European countries gradually adhered, except Russia. This convention, however, was ‘only concerned with the protection of pecuniary rights, without considering moral rights (lagnier 1934: 2, 43). The protection of moral rights was adopted after the “Iast see tion’ of this convention, The Paris Act, was ratified on 24 July 1971. The United States id not sign up to the Bern Convention until 1 March 1989, until which time it diste- garded the obligation forall foreign works to be registered with the Copyright Office Jean-Marc Gouanvie 157 ‘without any contractual agreement with the publisher (or a fortiori with the author)." On the other hand, these numerous translations were not published in special series at the time, when the literary field was not yet formed. The existence of special series of translated foreign novels is one of the charac- teristics of the French literary field, as far as translation is concerned. Hachette, which was established in 1826, is a real pioneer in this domain; it founded a series of foreign novels entitled “Bibliothéque des meilleurs romans étrangers’ in which Hawthome'’s la Lettre rouge was published from 1865 onwards, But this is the only editor that published translations in a series, Not until the tum of the century, when, for example, Mercure de France published its ‘Collee- tion d’auteurs étrangers’ (Series of Foreign Authors) did we see the phenomenon of series having an impact on the realist novel.* ‘These facts of publication (contracts, trials for gross indecency, exist- cence of special series) point to the autonomization of the French literary field. They are indicators essentially of power struggles that took place in the literary field atthe end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The fact that the fields were becoming autonomous was evident ‘above all in the extent to which they became the site for struggles for exclu- sive appropriation of authors and their works, whether translated or original, in the form of a monopoly for the acquisition of maximum symbolic capital, as we will see below. 3. The habitus" of the translator Translation as a practice has little to do with conforming to norms through the deliberate use of specific strategies: in other words, itis not a question of, consciously choosing from a panoply of available solutions. Norms do not Publishers and translators very occasionally obtained the ‘right’ 10 translate and to publish thie translated version ofthe original ext. For example, the transation by Louise ‘Swanton Belloc of Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1853 by Charpentier, caries the note: “Translated atthe author's request, by Mrs. L. Sw. Belloc” (my translation). As with Contes choisis by Mark Twain, published from 1900 onwards in Mercure de France's ‘Collection d'auteurs éirangers” (Series of Foreign Authors). It should also be ‘noted that books for children were commonly published in special series directly aimed at children (or their parents) as early asthe beginning of the 19% century, and maybe leven earlier. This, however, does not weaken my argument; quite the opposite, since the secondary effect produced by the existence of special series was notably to exclude these ‘books from the category of legitimate productions. "= Icis not possible in the space of this essay to analyze the notion of habitus in depth. I assume that this notion, which I have adapted to translation, is familiar. Briefly, how= ‘ever, habitus is a deeply embodied phenomenon that structures afield and atthe same time is structured by the field. See, for example, Bourdieu’s ‘The Dialectic of Positions ‘and Dispositions’ (2000:155-59). See also my previous articles and book on the subject158 A Bourdieusian Theory of Translation explain the more or less subjective and random choices made by translators who are free to translate or not to translate, to follow or not to follow the original closely. Ifa translator imposes a rhythm upon the text, a lexicon or a syntax that does not originate in the source text and thus substitutes his or her voice for that of the author, this is essentially not a conscious strategic choice but an effect of his or her specific habitus, as acquired in the target literary field. ‘The translator is not, and cannot be, @ writer, even though the borderline between the two activities is blurred when writers use translation to compose their own works (Berman 1984), and despite the fact that national laws tend to subsume translators under the category of writers."* Writer-translators un- derstand this well once they actively engage in producing a translation and find that they lose themselves in the movement between source and target text, ultimately pushing themselves as writers to the background. This is true of Marguerite Yourcenar, translator of Henry James (What Maisie Knew). Yourcenar succeeds admirably in her translations of James because she ap- plies to the activity of translating a certain centrifugal empathetic movement that carries her outside of her own themes and discourse as a writer, and towards the themes and discoutses of the foreign author. If a writer in a given society has the capacity to “[make] public things which everyone felt in a confused sort of way”, the capacity of “publishing the implicit, the tacit” (Bourdieu 1990:81-82), the translator places him- or herself at the service of the writer to make this capacity manifest in the tar- get language and culture, In so doing, the translator becomes the agent of the writer, transferring the writer's discourse into the target culture."” This discourse proceeds from the actualization of the writer’s habitus in the liter- ary field. The evolution of the source society expresses a universal image of the human being scen through the prism of the specifics of a history, and this small history produces an image of the greater History. Literature, the shaping of aesthetics, is as much the producer of meaning as is the explicit, text of the story that is being recounted, and maybe more so in certain genres and in certain works ~ those that have reached the status of classics. ‘What is the effect of the existence of a realist French literary field for translations? This is what I will now examine in broaching the subject of the habitus of several translators. Bourdieu writes that “[tJhe habitus, which is the generative principle of responses more or less well adapted to the de- mands of a certain field, is the product of an individual history, but also, through the formative experiences of earliest infancy, of the whole collec- "© This is how a French law passed on 11 March 1957 deals with translators. "The transfer of the writer's discourse by the translator into the target literary Field is not self-evident. For an examination ofthis question, and in particular the relation of Jean-Mare Gouanvie 159 tive history of family and class” (1990:91). How, then, is the habitus of translation invested in the literary field? To clarify this, it is necessary to analyze the habitus of translators as it has actualized itself in the translation of specific works in a given epoch. Three translators of American literature distinguish themselves in the French literary space between 1920 and 1960: Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, Marcel Duhamel and Boris Vian. Coindreau trans- lated American realist literature from the south of the US and is responsible for discovering"* William Faulkner. Marcel Duhamel is the founder of the Série Noire and translator of the novels of the same series (Série Noire). Boris Vian introduced American science fiction and promoted a specific field of science fiction literature in France. These three translators had very different social trajectories that determined their literary tastes when they ‘began to translate. Coindreau was an agrégé” of Spanish; Marcel Duhamel was self-taught and, in his twenties, was already managing his uncle's hotels; Boris Vian was an engineer who graduated from the Centralé school.” Coindreau originally came from Vendée; this is important, as we will see shortly. After the First World War, he moved to Madrid, where he studied to prepare for the agrégation of Spanish. Here, he met Dos Passos, whose book, ‘Manhattan Transfer, he published in 1928 with Gallimard, having completed the translation after his emigration to the US. Once in the US, Coindreau discovered the literature of the south, to which he devoted the rest of his life, In his personal Pantheon, the three greats of American literature are Faul- kner, Goyen and O'Connor. Why the fascination with these three southern ‘writers? What, in his habinus, pushed him towards these authors? In his biog- raphy Mémoires dun traducteur (1974), Coindreau offers one explanation: Faulkner, he tells us, was not unaware of “some of the convulsions of the past, even in a foreign land” (Coindreau 1974:18; my translation). Faulkner alludes to the events of the Chouannerie, according to Coindreau. And Coindreau adds: “I can even assure you that this bloody history didn’t have any secrets for him. In the first place, he was a great reader of Balzac, and when by chance in conversation I told him that, having been born in La Roche-sur-Yon, I was descended on my mother’s side from an old Vendean family, he lt slip the comment: "Yours too have gone through this?” (ibid.:19; my translation). Coindreau equated the failure of the counter-revolution of "The issue of how William Faulkner was discovered in France is beyond the scope of this article, The role played by Maurice-Edgar Coindreau and of R-N. Raimbault in this respect is currently being examined by Annick Chapdelaine from MeGill University (Montréa). "Until recently, the agrégation was the highest French competitive examination, espe- cially designed for university professors. ™ T have already dealt with the topic of this translator's habitus in “Ethos, Ethies and160 A Bourdieusian Theory of Translation the Chouannerie with the failure of the southern Secession, and it is this equation that explains his literary taste and priorities. He even stated that had he possessed the talent of a writer he would undoubtedly have written a novel set in the South of the United States (as William Humphrey did in Proud Flesh), “a story of Renshaw [from Proud Flesh] all perfumed with a lovely odor of Chouannerie” (ibid.:103; my translation). Marcel Duhamel (1972), on the other hand, was not an academic at all. Coming from a very modest background and having barely gone further than primary school, he followed his sister to Manchester in 1915, where a small job in the Midland Hotel awaited her. Within a few months, without ever having taken an English class at school, he was speaking the language of Shakespeare. Upon his return to France, he did his military service in Tur- key, where he met Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy. The three moved in the early 1920s to a small apartment on rue du Chateau that became a kind of phalanstery or commune, and was to survive in literary history as one of the high places of surrealism. Duhamel managed his uncle's hotels and then tried his hand at translation: of Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer), Raoul Whitfield (Green Ice) and W. R. Burnett (Little Caesar). The latter, pub- lished by France-Soir, earned him a reputation as a translator. He was soon hired by Tobis Klangfilm, where he worked on dubbing bad-boy American films. In 1944, he was hired by the publisher Gallimard and later became ‘one of the right-hand men of Gaston Gallimard himself (he travelled to Eng- land in 1944 to negotiate translation rights for English and American authors). In 1945, he founded the Série Noire (the title is from Jacques Prévert), a series consisting of superb translations whose quality distinguished them from the run-of-the-mill translations of detective novels. The translations were particularly brilliant in their use of the vernacular, not a common fea- ture of French literature, either original or translated, at the time. An entire team of accredited translators worked on translating detective novels for the ‘Série Noire: they came to be known as the ‘gang of translators’."' In 1944, Duhamel met Hemingway, as a liberator of Paris. He translated several of Hemingway's books and novels and, among others, those of Steinbeck, Caldwell and MacCoy. Boris Vian worked for Duhamel’s Série Noire and translated Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. But he is best known for acting as an agent in promoting American science fiction in France from 1950 onwards. He was a distinguished agent in importing science fiction in several regards, contributing to the emergence of an autonomous field of science fiction by (a) participating in meetings of fans, with Raymond Queneau and Michel *" The ‘gang of translators’ consisted mainly of Robert Scipion, Janine Hérisson, Albert Jean-Mare Gouanvic 161 Pilotin (the latter's pseudonym was Stephen Spriel) (b) publishing critiques in Jean-Paul Sartre’s les Temps modernes as well as Arts, a Parisienne and I’Ecran, and (c) publishing translations/adaptations in France-Dimanche, les Temps modemnes, le Mercure de France and in the newly created series “le Rayon fantastique’, launched by Hachette/Gallimard in 1951. In terms of how he approached his work as translator, his approach was somewhat simi- lar to Marguerite Yourcenar’s, the translator of Henry James. Vian enhanced the rhetoric of American authors while bringing out the particular poetics of the texts. This is most evident in his translation of The World of Null-A by Alfred E. van Vogt, translated as le Monde des non-A and published in 1953. Boris Vian, the engineer, performed the function of agent of science fiction in France because his habitus led him to appreciate particular texts that thematized scientific and technological plots, this genre of work estranged from our realist universe. Owing to his habitus, he was not aftaid of mixing science and technology with literature. Moreover, he actively promoted imagination in science and technology by creating the conditions for the formation of a specialized field of science fiction, which was very much at odds with the traditional conception of literature. ‘These three translators, as we have seen, have very different social tra- jectories. But the most decisive difference lies in the type of literature they favoured, Each type of literature, or literary genre, has a correspondent struc- ture into which it inserts itself ~ this being a relatively autonomous field. ‘The most obvious example of the existence of autonomous fields is the emer- gence of science fiction after 1950, which developed in parallel to the realist, field that had been in existence since the second half of the 19th century, as suggested earlier. But Marcel Duhamel’s Série Noire also came to be inte- {grated into a specific field, that of detective literature.” 4, Symbolic capital and translation Symbolic capital is not acquired — in the case of the writer ~ essentially by heritage but by recognition, which must be constantly regained through new works published in the literary field. But symbolic capital becomes estab- lished and stable once the work of an author achieves the status of a classic; at this point, the author and his or her work acquire enduring, stable symbolic capital that is not susceptible to being questioned over time. This is not the same for the translator. The translator benefits from the symbolic capital 2 In ths brief article Icannot offer an extended analysis ofthe way in which the respec: tive habitus of Coindreau, Duhamel and Vian led them to translate in the way they did, using concrete examples of translations. For a contrastive study of source and target texts, see Gouanvie (1999) for Boris Vian and Gouanvic (forthcoming) for Coindreau