Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A B S T R AC T
This article attempts to clarify some misunderstandings between English-speaking
and French-speaking scholars in the field of the sociology of arts and culture. In
addition to a number of ambiguities in the definition of what ‘culture’, ‘ar ts’ and
‘sociology’ mean within the French and the Anglo-American academic traditions,
the very words ‘culture’, ‘cultural sociology’ and ‘cultural studies’ exhibit important
differences between each other as they are understood within each linguistic con-
text. Seen from a French point of view, so-called ‘French theory’ appears as a typ-
ically Anglo-American category, along with ‘post-modernism’, while French debates
among sociologists of art seem to have few echoes abroad. The linguistic dissym-
metry between French and Anglo-American academic cultures should be taken into
account in order better to understand the nature of these misunderstandings.
K E Y WO R D S
cultural sociology / cultural studies / French theory / post-modernism / sociology
of art / sociology of arts / sociology of culture
Introduction
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258 Cultural Sociology Volume 4 ■ Number 2 ■ July 2010
The problem is that a great deal of what Anglophones mean by ‘sociology of art’
refers to what the French would rather call ‘cultural history’ (histoire culturelle),
‘aesthetic sociology’ (esthétique sociologique) or ‘social history of art’ (histoire
sociale de l’art). All three terms focus on art works and belong to the humani-
ties: they do not actually need the central concepts of sociology (e.g. ‘social strat-
ification’, ‘professionalization’, ‘interaction’, ‘frame’, ‘anomie’, ‘rationalization’,
‘civilizing process’, ‘configuration’, ‘field’, etc., etc.), or its methods (e.g. statistical
surveys, representative samples, in-depth interviews, observations, typologies,
and so on).3
Cultural history is a global description of the collective set of representations
governing relationships to art in a certain society (e.g. Burckhardt, Panofsky);
aesthetic sociology is a more or less theoretical reflection on the way ‘art’
reflects ‘society’ (e.g. Adorno, Hauser, Francastel); social history of art is a more
empirical inquiry into the actual contexts in which art works were produced
and appreciated (e.g. Antal, Baxandall, Haskell). For a presentation of these
trends, see Wolff (1981) and Zolberg (1990).
Rather than with reference to these three historical tendencies, present-day
French academia tends to associate the term ‘sociology of art’ with empirical
surveys – be they grounded in quantitative or qualitative methods – on the
reception of art (cultural practices, categories of aesthetic perception and taste,
modes of valuation, private collecting, etc.), on artistic production (the economic,
social and juridical status of creators, artists’ careers and curricula, role of age,
gender, training, social origins etc. in the relationship to creation, collective rep-
resentations of creators and creation, and suchlike), and on art mediation
(circles of recognition, the roles of gate-keepers such as publishers, gallery-owners,
curators, critics, agents, and so on).
These three main topics of the ‘sociology of art’ have been dramatically
developed by the most recent generation of French researchers, following the
paths opened up first by Pierre Bourdieu (1965, 1968, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1975,
1979, 1992; Bourdieu and Darbel, 1966) and then after him by Raymonde
Moulin (1967, 1985, 1992).
However, in the USA and in the UK, the equivalent areas do not seem to
have produced very major pieces of research. Howard Becker’s Art Worlds (1982)
remains the most famous, the aforementioned ‘sociology of the arts’ being just
one section of the much wider field of ‘sociology of culture’. Here lies another risk
of mutual misunderstanding between Francophones and Anglophones.
Three Anecdotes
As far as I can see, on American campuses ‘cultural studies’ belongs to the lit-
erature departments, together with what the French term ‘philosophy’ (but we
used to restrict it to recent continental philosophy – Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze,
etc. – merely including analytical philosophy as a small component). Literature
departments in France teach the history of literature, and sometimes (more
marginally) sociologie de la littérature, which is mostly an application of Jauss’s
theory of reception or of Bourdieu’s field theory.
The items covered by the term ‘cultural studies’ seem to be finding a place
in French campuses today, but presented within and through a variety of top-
ics, in sociology, anthropology, history, political science, philosophy, and litera-
ture. They are closely akin to what some of us call Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’
(sociologie critique), since they share the same will to demonstrate that every-
thing is ‘socially constructed’, and that the sociologist’s task is mainly to dismiss
the actors’ ‘illusions’, their belief that the world is natural, universal and
unchangeable. However, it is difficult to assimilate sociologie critique and ‘cultural
studies’ – not only because Bourdieu’s fans use neither of these two terms, but
also because Bourdieu himself never considered himself either a ‘cultural studies’
or a ‘post-modern’ scholar (he even strongly refused such a categorization), no
more than he saw himself as a philosopher, always being very eager to demon-
strate the superiority of sociology over philosophy (see Heinich, 2007).
(As an aside, I should say that ‘post-modernism’ used to be a fashionable
trend in French philosophy a generation ago, after Lyotard’s interventions. But
today it seems quite outdated. While it may still be used in art theory, it is
almost absent in the human and social sciences. When one hears ‘post-modernism’
in France, one immediately thinks ‘American’, just as in the cases of ‘MacDo’
and ‘Coca-Cola’).
French scholars are always astonished when hearing that Bourdieu is
included in the pantheon of so-called ‘French theory’. A thing called ‘French
theory’ does not actually exist in France. We know the structuralist trend of the
1960s, developed by the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, the psychoanalyst Lacan,
the philosopher Foucault. We also know Derrida’s deconstruction and Deleuze’s
post-Bergsonism. We also know Bourdieu’s sociologie de la domination or soci-
ologie des champs. But we do not know something called ‘French theory’ – in
spite of some recent efforts to import it from the USA (see Cusset, 2003).
The authors included in this strange category are either dead or very old
(Lévi-Strauss has just died at the age of 100). Their major works appeared
more than 40 years ago. For French researchers in the present day, this is the
past. So many new things and innovative authors have appeared in the various
social science disciplines over the last four decades. Should we ignore these
new and exciting ideas, in order to confine ourselves to authors that we used
to read so long ago, when we were students? No – our debates are not in those
terrains any more.
I will ask a final question: what are the present debates in both the Francophone
and Anglophone worlds, concerning the sociology of art(s) and/or culture?
Seen from France, the main debate on the Anglo-American scene appears
to be that between post-modernism and positivist science, dramatically illus-
trated by the so-called ‘Sokal case’ (affaire Sokal). It partly pertains to the oppo-
sition between ‘theory’ on one side, and empirical fact-finding (e.g. through
survey research) on the other.
In France, the latter issue is rather addressed as an opposition between
‘humanities’ and ‘social sciences’; within sociology, between qualitative and
quantitative methods; and even sometimes between (using very broad terms)
‘explicative’ and ‘comprehensive’ sociologies.
Another quite lively form of opposition among French sociologists is that
between those who practice and foster a politically involved social science
(following in the path of Bourdieu), and those who plead in favour of Max Weber’s
As for the present state of the sociology of art, there appears to be a certain dis-
symmetry between France and the Anglo-Saxon world. The French seem to
know a little more about the Anglo-Americans than the latter know about us
(even if we may mistake or misunderstand a lot of things, as some readers of
the present article may be thinking). How could it be different, since we are
forced to read and write in English (as I am trying to do now – please forgive
me – so clumsily) whereas Anglo-Americans can rely on their native English
without having to practise our language?
But the problem is not so much a matter of dissymmetry as a matter of tem-
poral discrepancy, due to the delay in translations. Let us take a well-known
example: nowadays, no Anglo-American bibliography in our disciplines (be it
sociology of art, sociology of culture, cultural sociology, cultural studies, etc.)
ignores the name of Pierre Bourdieu. But he is quoted and discussed as if he
were a contemporary author, embodying the avant-garde of French intellectual
production, whereas his major contributions to the field occurred between
30 and 40 years ago. Among all the publications coming out of the younger
generation of French scholars, whether supportive or critical of Bourdieu, very
few have yet been translated into English. Bourdieu himself was translated into
English long after his work was translated into many other languages. Except
for one small book published at the beginning of the 1960s, major English
translations of his writings started during the 1980s and exploded in the 1990s,
one whole generation after he began to publish. Most of his books and articles
were translated into German, Spanish, Italian and other languages long before
they were published in English.
This last remark provides an interesting but somehow ironic contribution
to the sociology of domination: to be dominant may become a handicap in that
it can involve avoiding the effort to go and see what happens among the dom-
inated. Once such a process happens along the temporal dimension, it may gen-
erate a major problem in intellectual worlds, namely the problem of delayed
information. That problem above all may be at the root of some of our many
inter-cultural misunderstandings in the world of scholarly debate today.
Notes
1 The first noticeable occurrence of this use can be found in the title of the inter-
national conference organized in Marseilles: cf. Raymonde Moulin (1986).
2 For a discussion and commented results of the surveys on ‘cultural practices’,
see Olivier Donnat (1994).
3 I tried to define and present the traditions of ‘cultural history’, ‘aesthetic sociology,
‘social history’ and ‘survey sociology’ in La sociologie de l’art (Heinich, 2002).
4 On the difference between ‘implicit culture’ (the broader and mostly Anglo-
American sense) and ‘explicit culture’ (the restricted and mostly French sense),
see for instance Robert Wuthnow and Marsha Witten (1988).
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Nathalie Heinich