The Influence of the 'Field' on Literary Production

Two readings in the Sociology of Literature for today. The first is one an article by Frank de Glas entitled "Authors' oeuvres as the backbone of publishers' lists: Studying the literary publishing house after Bourdieu" published in the journal Poetics (Volume 25: 1998). The second, an article by Jeanne Barker-Nunn and Gary Alan Fine entitled "The vortex of creation: Literary politics and the demise of Herman Melville's reputation" was also published in Poetics (Volume 26: 1998). Both make arguments regarding the influence of Bourdieu's concept of the 'literary field' on the production of authors. Both, I think, fall short of proving their intended point, or if they have succeeded, the point they prove seems rather trite.

de Glas examines more closely a pair of publishing houses in order to draw conclusions about the influence they have in the production of their authors. He is interested in qualifying what he sees as an oversimplification in Bourdieu's own analysis of the publishing house:

A further question mark set against Bourdieu's analysis of publishing houses concerns the rather abstract level of aggregation of this analysis. Bourdieu divided publishing houses "according to the distribution of their commitments between risky, long-term investments (Godot) and safe, short-term investments, and by the same token, according to the proportion of their authors who are long-term or short-term writers"....Bourdieu was characterizing publishers' lists in only a general fashion, but what is lacking is any further study of particular sections of an author's body of works within a list. (p. 382, quoted text from Bourdieu, "The Production of Belief" [1993])

de Glas summarizes the work of Boschetti on two French publishing houses that were established around the time of the first world war, those of Bernard Grasset and Gaston Gallimard. The eventual success of Gallimard's Nouvelle Review Francaise over Grasset, despite Grasset's implimentation of "modern methods of recruiting authors and promoting literary books," is attributed largely to Gallimard's ability to unify his publishing house around a certain, younger, literary cadre, with an interest (because they were not well known) in defining themselves against the prevailing avant garde of the "fashionable salons" and "the 'rive droite'" as well as the Academie Francaise (383). Boschetti posits this process of "social renewal" that accompanies the new, younger avat garde , can be explained as a very specific 'position-taking' by the younger writers within a field of positions that is largely established. She gives a further example in the Surrealists, who, several years later, define themselves against the very set of avant garde artists ushered in by the NRF.

Young authors define themselves against older authors, in the hope of creating their own 'new thing.' This all makes perfect sense, and (to me at least) really doesn't need the sort flogging that it seems to get in the Sociology of Literature. The problem is that both de Glas and Boschetti (and Bourdieu, for that matter) seem to see this adolescent rebeliousness, this resistant position-taking, as sufficient explanation for the Surrealist project itself:

On this point, both Bourdieu and Boschetti criticize the approach of traditional 'literary studies' which have mainly approached the development of an author's oeuvre as the realization of an original authorial project. In reality, according to both, the reverse is the case. It is the structure of the literary field which determines the possible positions of authors (and, according to Boschetti, of publishers), not the other way around. (384)

Two things: First of all, the second half of the statement above is in no way the reverse of the first half, as de Glas states. Indeed, it is hard to see how the conclusion he draws at the end of the statement relates in any way to an author's oeuvre or to their authorial project. Indeed, that the structure of a literary field determines the possible positions of authors (both established and new) makes perfect sense. However, in the end, this seems to say little more than "you can't be Proust, we've already got a Proust." More importantly however, is the assumption on de Glas's part of the size of the role position-taking plays in the production of the actual literary work. This is the sort of reductive determinism of which Bourdieu makes me ever more suspicious.

de Glas qualifies the arguments of Bourdieu and Boschetti, and then states his thesis:

My central thesis is that the publishing house...is not merely a gatekeeper, certainly not the mere gate-keeper it is alleged to be [what horrible writing!]. It's involvement goes much further. From the very beginning and in various ways the publishing house decisively influences the creativity of the author. (386)

He goes on to examine the publishing list of the Dutch publishing house W.L & J. Brusse, and shows (rather conclusively, I think) that it is a combination of long-term authors and new and emerging authors that make a publishing house successful. What he doesn't do, however, is prove his thesis, that these trends have any effect on the work of authors themselves. It seems clear from his analysis that authors creative production influences the long-term success of the company, but how (or if) this process works in reverse (the point he sets out to prove) is not even touched upon.

The second article, by Barker-Nunn and Fine, examines the role of Melville's contemporary critical establishment in destroying his reputation. The authors paint a picture of a young and rather culturally naive Melville who, after the publication of his first novel, was taken up as the spokesman for Young America, a democratic critical faction in New York. Melville took the theoretical underpinnings of Young America, which emphasize independence and formal risk taking, so to heart that he ended up isolating himself from the establishment. Near the end of his literary career, Melville found himself with very few critical or popular fans.

This again seems rather trite. A circular argument, even: Melville was critically unpopular because critics didn't like his work. The more ambitious claim in this article, perhaps, and one which mirrors that of de Glas, is that this critical atmosphere had a significant impact on the way that Melville wrote, as well as the things he wrote about. Barker-Nunn and Fine say things like "The content and form of Melville's work was affected not only by his being a Young American writer but by his being a New York writer as well..." (88), but they never actually tell us how it is that Melville's form reflects the influence of the Young Americans. Certainly, he had taken from them parts of his writing philosophy. He had probably taken also from any number of people, and not least of all the crew of the whaler that inspired Typee in the first place, but the crew of the whaler doesn't fit into anyone's concept of a 'literary field.' It seems more clear though, from their growing displeasure with his writing, that Melville was less inclined to 'toe the line' than the Young Americans would have liked. That he ended his career in relative obscurity suggests that whatever formal approach he was employing, people in the mid-19th century just didn't get it. Whatever it was, they thought it was bad.

And so we are back to our facile Bourdieuian mantra: Melville as avant garde can be explained in his position-taking as resistant to the 'main line' of literary production, as represented both in the Young Americans and in the New England poets. I fail to see the profundity. Nor can I understand how this helps us understand anything about Moby Dick, any more than I can understand how the fact that the Surrealists were young and resistant to traditional production avenues helps us understand the motivations for Un Chien Andalou. An author might easily define himself against the 'main current' in literature: he might simple produce utter nonsense, words and phrases and sentences that don't seem to fit together at all (Dada, anyone?), and we could make the same arguments about his position-taking that seems continually to be made in Bordieu-inspired Sociology of Culture. It just seems reductive, or banal, or both, and needlessly so. Surely, there are ways of accounting for a broader understanding of networks of influence than that put forward here.

Reflection

Reflection – December 13, 2010

This course has been hugely beneficial. One of the reasons I came back to school was that I, as I was teaching Language Arts, found myself increasingly unsure about my own convictions with regards to art in general, including the arts both of teaching and of language. This course has given me a language with which to interrogate my understanding of art, and a language with which to teach it. It has also, along with the other courses I took this semester, effected an expansion of the concept of art beyond the realm of individual objects or production to include a broad complex of both ideas and behaviors.

It is perhaps telling of the influence of this course that those theorists who we studied early form a foundation for my understanding, and those we approached near the end of the course are the ones with which I feel and ongoing engagement. I am ever drawn back to Kant and Hegel for the theoretical underpinnings of modernity. It feels as though Kant offered an ideal rationalization for art, that Hegel grounded it in a method. The importance for both of these is necessarily ongoing, but there is a certain strain of the mythological in later theorists, a certain suggestion that some new turn in human consciousness is upon us, that I just can’t help being attracted by. Ironically, my ongoing interaction with these later theorists, my uncertainty and interrogation of their ideas at a level more immediate to my own interests, has translated into a relative dearth of address in these journals. Whether this is due more to the mounting responsibilities in other classes later in the semester, or to my ongoing uncertainty and curiosity with regards to these theories, I can’t say (though I’d be willing to bet it’s a bit of both). In this final journal entry, therefore, I’ll attempt to address some of these later theories briefly, and with an eye to the ongoing influence they are having on my own theories.

Kristeva looks below language for rhythm, and understands rhythm as a truly organic phenomenon. It is thus through the chora, the “discrete quantities of energy” which move through the pre-oedipal subject who is “always already involved in a semiotic process” that language arises (2071-2). The chora is the “essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral states” (2072). Kristeva’s theory effectively does away with the issues of “incitement” that arose in Freud and were preserved in Lacan. Kristeva understands that the subject needs no incitement because it is always already involved in meaning-formation, and that Saussure’s langue, vocal language systems, are just a product of the “various constraints imposed on this body…by family and social structures” (2072). Kristeva seems to suggest a potentially biological underpinning to notions of the self when she traces the development of our perceptive apparatus back to the mother, the biological well-spring of our very material existence. She follows systems of meaning all the way to the genetic level, suggesting that “genetic programmings are necessarily semiotic: they include the primary processes such as displacement and condensation, absorption and repulsion, rejection and stasis” (2076). The place where these deep codes are communicated is “enigmatic and feminine,” “rhythmic, unfettered,…musical, anterior to judgment” (2076). It seems like Kristeva’s description of pre-linguistic meaning could be equally applied to pre-linguistic man. The poet who can channel the chora is one who communicates the depth of being, the mythical source of humanity.

Barthes makes no excuses for his Mythologies, which come to seem like a telling of the story we tell each other when we might not seem to be telling each other anything. In this way he relates to Bourdieu, who wants to demonstrate the power of these untold stories to shape our ideas about the world, and Michel de Certeau also suggests that the smallest actions constitute an entire mythological system which works below reason and intellectual action.

I was convinced, even after the short readings that were assigned in class, that I would find myself inevitably involved in an ongoing relationship with Frederic Jameson and Michel Foucault. I added their books to my Amazon wishlist even before I had decided on my courses for next semester. Jameson’s Marxism seems to offer a wonderful mode of ongoing historical interaction and politically conscious critique. And while Jameson himself criticizes Foucault for the ‘no-way-out’ paradox of his system of knowledge, I can’t help but agree with Jameson also that the post-structuralist project is a product of its own historical moment, and this moment seems crucial in the development of Western thought. If we can understand Kant in relationship to his ‘author-function’, that his philosophy was inevitably a product of his historical moment, little more than a vocalization of things which were, by the time he wrote, on the very tips of everyone’s tongues, We might understand Foucault’s work and that of the late Marxists (I’m thinking also of Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment which, though I have not read it, I understand to be negative in its treatment of Enlightenment philosophy since Kant) to be equally a product of some ‘new era’. The very fact that Foucault can put his theory into words, as Donna Haraway suggested, may signal its own obsolescence. I am inclined to take Jameson at his ‘word’: we are ‘post-modern’ also in the sense that many of the structures of human thought and social interaction, structures which presented themselves in the phantasmagoria of modernity as inevitable and timeless, have fractured under the weight of their own responsibility. This is perhaps the ‘awakening’ that Benjamin seemed so interested in effecting, and that it is an ongoing crisis in contemporary history surely might speak to his resurgence in critical interest. Foucault does seem to lock us into a mode, but he cannot account for the ways that just our knowledge of being locked in might suddenly burst the lock, in a lightning-flash insight. Nor does he seem, at least so far as what I have read, to realize the power-relationships moving in the opposite direction. I have been reading a little Michel de Certeau, who seems to understand that, although we may live within a system of power and discourse which is largely beyond our individual control, we do control it, even if at the most ‘negligible’ scale, with our very habitual existence. The ways in which individuals interact with the Foucault’s web invariably shifts the balances of power, if ever so slightly. In creating an inescapable web, Foucault also offers us the tools which we might use to shape the web more ideally.

Indeed, it seems at times when Foucault uses words like “discourse” and “power,” he is simply substituting more menacing-sounding terms for earlier notions of “language” and “culture”. He is interested in highlighting the ways that our ‘language’ plays into the established power-structures. In this way, his project would seem to accord with that of Jameson and other Marxists, since it demonstrates the ways in which our system is organized in order to perpetuate itself. We might understand language from a Saussurian perspective to be just such a system, and Hayles ideas about information are likewise structured. If we drew a line from N. Katherine Hayles to Julia Kristeva, we could conceive of the ways that, in a very strictly biological sense, communication has always been a matter of information systems. Kristeva’s chora derive from genetic and biological systems, which have the potential of quantification in the same terms of electric impulses that we use to describe computer systems. Of course, this is all beyond current science to demonstrate concretely, but it is within the capacity of the system itself. Perhaps the way out of the system, as Derrida might suggest, is to plumb its depths. Science seems in some ways to epitomize the system of knowledge that Foucault understands as our web of power and discourse.

Indeed, it might be from this perspective that we approach the work of Hayles and Haraway. It is through technology that science vocalizes itself in our everyday existence. Our interactions with technology create what Benjamin casts as our perceptive unconscious, the ever-changing mode of perception through which we evaluate our surroundings. To this end, science fiction contains a mythologizing impulse; it is a mythologizing of the future, but of a future which is also ever present.

I might even be inclined to argue for the presence of a mythology in Jameson’s concept of the ‘postmodern’. Could we conceive of pastiche as a mythology which has been driven by the increased speed of modern change to address ever more contemporary moments in social memory? When our entire mode of perception is being acted upon at an ever-increasing rate, the temporal depth of our relationship with the world around us must decrease, if only because we find ever fewer connections in times which seem increasingly far away. For pre-historic and classical man, lengths of time between significant change were long, and so epic myth attempted to encompass a global depth, explaining in its origin stories the existence of contemporary phenomenon. For post-modern man, our origin seems rooted ever more contemporaneously, and so when we look for our foundations, we can’t help but look not to ancient history but still to the earliest moment which seems to accord with our own. That these images of history don’t necessarily look anything like real historical circumstances speaks to their power as ‘myth’, even as it seems to call for their examination in light of dialectical history or the history of the seats of power.

As I hope is evident in this collection of journals, this course has given me both a theoretical framework in which to work and an (at least initial, if still rather vague) understanding of the ways my own ideas, about art as much as about contemporary existence generally, fit into and grow out of this broader framework. As far as a course with which to begin my graduate study, I can’t imagine one that would have been more helpful.