The market of symbolic goods

Abstract

This article attemps to set forth some general properties of the cultural field and to explain the symbolic struggles waged within it. Far from being a simple aggregate of isolated agents, the cultural field consists of a set of systems of interrelated agents and institutions functionally defined by their role in the division of labour (of production, reproduction and diffusion of cultural goods). Besides being a commodity that has a commercial value, any cultural object is also a symbolic good, having a specifically cultural value. Depending on whether symbolic or economic considerations come first, the field of cultural production — as market symbolic goods — can be schematically divided into two sectors: The field of restricted production (FRP) and the field of large-scale cultural production (FLP).

In FRP properly economic profit is secondary to enhancement of the product's symbolic value and to (long-term) accumulation and gestation of symbolic capital by producers and consumers alike. Producers who seek to take a position within FRP should keep clear of the suspicion that they submit to external demands, as is the case in FLP. The output of FLP is hardly rated at all on the scale of symbolic values; its products are rather short-lived, managed as they are like ordinary economic goods. They are destined for consumers who, in contrast with those of FRP, are nonproducers and noncompetitors.

The FRP is fairly closed on itself and enjoys a high degree of autonomy; this is evident from the power it has to develop its own criteria for the production and evaluation of its products. But even the producer within FRP has to define himself in relation to the public meaning of his work. This meaning orginates in the process of circulation and consumption through which the work achieves cultural recognition. This process is dominated by agents and institutions of consecration, such as criticism and the educational system. Members of theseinstitutions are authorized (or rather compete for the authority) to endow works with certain properties and thus to rank them on a scale of legitimacy. Along different lines, they also ensure the reproduction not only of consecrating agents and of producers of a determinate type of cultural goods, but also of consumers capable of adopting the posture socially designated as specifically aesthetic, by providing them with the instruments required for the appropriation of these legitimized symbolic goods. The latter owe their cultural rarity in no small degree to the very scarcity of these instruments. As a matter of fact, the extent to which consumption of symbolic goods depends upon the educational level of consumers markedly varies from one sector to the other.

Whichever properties are assigned to a cultural good, they cannot be assimilated to intrinsic properties. The point is that the properties involved are positional ones: They derive their nature and weight from the relative positions held by agents who, urged on by fairy different (and partly semi-conscious) interests, participate in this dynamic field. Hence, in constructing this field, the sociology of culture should not disregard the fact that the two modes of production, as opposed as they are, coexist so as to be definable only in terms of their hierarchic and objectively hierarchized relations with each other.