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A Field Of Forces Within The Field

Decent Essays

As Bourdieu pointed out, “no cultural product exists by itself, i.e., outside the relations of interdependence which link it to other products” (Bourdieu, 1993: p. 32). These goods are also produced under specific conditions, not in a vacuum. This assumption is valid to art, literature, but also to journalism as a massive cultural production, like Bourdieu and other authors had demonstrated (Benson & Neveu, 2005; Benson, 2006; Bourdieu, 1994; English, 2015; Marlière, 1998; Murrell, 2015; Schultz, 2007). Thus, cultural products are entangled in a net knitted by different players, with diverse –even opposite- interests, forces, and strategies struggling to dominate what Bourdieu had called the field.

Bourdieu defines it as “a field of forces within which the agents occupy positions that statistically determine the positions they take with respect to the field, these positions-taking being aimed either at conserving or transforming the structure of relations of forces that is constitutive of the field… it is the site of actions and reactions performed by social agents endowed with permanent dispositions, partly acquired in their experience of these social fields” (Bourdieu, 2005: 30). So, the field is the space in which the actors, both individual and collective, deploy their forces, struggling to reform/preserve the rules of the game.

The concept of “field” allows inquiring the complex interplays between larger social and political structures and the schemes of human

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