Page 122 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURAL FRONTS

system of different ‘we’s’ and ‘others’, of selfness and otherness. All these
symbolic universes are constantly created and recreated with tremendous
invested human energy. They are moving forces going in di fferent directions.
Their equilibria are precarious. Human behavior of all types is always linked
with, and constructed in relation to, the material dimensions of these symbolic
spaces which we can refer to as cultural fields:

In analytic terms, a field may be defined as a network, or configuration,
of objective relations between positions. These positions are object-
ively defined, in their existence and in the determinations they impose
upon their occupants, agents or institutions, by their present and poten-
tial situation (situs) in the structure of distribution of species of power
(or capital) whose possession commands access to the specific profits
that are at stake in the field, as well as by their objective relation to
other positions (domination, subordination, homology, etc.).
(Bourdieu 1993: 97)

The cultural fields are wide; they must be understood as complex structures
of relations connecting institutions, agents, and practices that have been
divided into varieties of specialized discursive formations coinciding with the
structured social division of labor.
The cultural fields always evolve into crucial dynamics with social networks
in which non-ideological specialists – families, folk, common people – read,
interpret, interact with, and negotiate any specialized discursive production.
Furthermore, the resulting symbolic universes are always constructed in a
dialogical way; specialized valenced vectors intercross with the discursive con-
ditions of everyday life. For example, churches, schools, hospitals, museums,
restaurants, dance halls, broadcasting organizations, and many other institutions
play a strong role in shaping our very selves from birth. All these institutions
operate not only as vectors in the construction of ‘our selves’ but also in the
construction of ‘our differences’ with others. This increasingly complex world
of subjective differences also becomes a site where plural identities are perpetu-
ally constructed as systems of classification, and where attendant social practices
take form.
But how can those very different and contradictory systems of classification
be solidified, articulated, and merged? They can be shared only through com-
munication. Since the beginning of the modern world, but especially since the
advent of technologically mediated communication (Thompson 1995), cul-
tural fields have been intertwined in a very specific kind of metasymbolic work.
This process can be understood as a second-order, specialized, discursive, societal
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elaboration of pre-elaborated meanings. It is only through symbolic work and
elaboration that elementally human events (birth, death, feeding, healing,
believing, expressing, amusing, learning, consuming, and so on) are labeled,
narrated, and metabolized – symbolically ‘centralized’ from a socio-historical

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