Abstract
This paper introduces the French sociology of art to English-speaking scholars. Its story begins with a shift from the humanities to social sciences through the use of empirical methods, and a change in focus from artworks to the social conditions of their production, mediation, and reception. This meant, initially, a positivist turn, relying on a strong explanatory and determinist paradigm using social origins, positions in a “field,” hidden interests or types of “capitals” as basic and unquestioned tools. Then an interactionist turn appeared, based on the observation of actual interactions between various actors within “art worlds” or “artistic fields.” Then an interpretivist turn happened, addressing the collective representations of art and artists, the values according to which people valuate artworks, and the hierarchy and classifications of artistic genres. Finally, a pragmatic turn introduced a general sociological trend investigating the actual processes owing to which artworks circulate, how things become endowed with the status of an artwork, as well as the conditions and meaning of artistic recognition. Because such issues cannot be fully addressed through the lens of a standard explanatory sociology, this article calls for a descriptive, pragmatic, qualitative, interpretivist, and value-neutral turn, inducing a new French sociology of art.
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Introduction
Seen from British and American campuses, the French sociology of art probably appears as a rather mysterious and impenetrable continent. The main reason is the serious lack of translations available to English-speaking colleagues—the asymmetry in terms of language skills turning to the clear advantage of Francophones who, if they often write and speak English too poorly, at least can read it. This has led to some misunderstandings between Anglophone and Francophone sociologists, particularly in the field of the "sociology of culture" which, in France, continues to be primarily a subcategory of the "sociology of art," since “culture” tends to be understood not in its anthropological meaning but as the relationship to art, and “art” as artworks (Heinich 2010). The aim of this article is to help dispel such misunderstandings, while clarifying the rise, development, and present situation of the French sociology of art after three generations. It presents a personal take on the discipline, and calls for an interpretivist and pragmatic turn.
It will thus describe the birth of an empirically grounded sociology of art, owing to Pierre Bourdieu and Raymonde Moulin; its shift from a focus on artworks to a triple focus on art audiences or consumers, producers, and intermediaries; the rise of new trends aiming at a more global perspective based on interactions between those various actors; then, in the young generation, the renewal of the discipline through less legitimate objects as well as through various theoretical schools, including the shift from a positivist sociology to a sociology of representations and from explanation to comprehension; and finally, the recent emergence of a pragmatic sociology of art, based on a specifically French use of pragmatism.
This description of the French sociology of art and its evolution will also evidence the important influence of some English-speaking authors, such as Howard Becker, Tia De Nora, John Dewey, Alfred Gell, James Gibson, Richard Peterson, or H. and C. White.
The birth of the sociology of art
Sixty years ago, the sociology of art did not yet exist in France, at least in a properly sociological form: it was still but a marginal extension of the history of art or literature, pertaining either to "sociological aesthetics" or to "social history of art." It mainly consisted in analyzing artworks as "reflections" or expressions of the society in which they had been produced (Francastel 1951, 1956, 1970; Duvignaud 1967), often from a Marxist perspective (Goldman 1959, 1964; Hadjnicolaou 1973), or in providing a historical description of the social, economic, and cultural context in which they appeared. This pre-literal “sociology of art” therefore aimed at relating art and society, as with sociological aesthetics, or at considering art in society, as with the social history of art (Heinich 2001).
While such attempts could be seen as an intellectual progress compared to the traditional history of art, from a sociological point of view they suffered from major flaws: a pre-sociological conception of "society," considered as a global entity or, at best, as an addition of social classes; a focus on artworks as the only relevant dimension of the phenomenon named “art”; a naive belief in the capacity of an artwork to express realities which do not belong to the realm of art; and, most importantly, the lack of empirical surveys.
This latter point will bring about the main epistemological rupture, thanks to which a genuine sociology of art, conceived as a branch of the sociological discipline, will appear in the 1960’s. Pierre Bourdieu and his team applied to museums’ attendance the methods that had been tested on consumption or voting behavior and imported into France from the United States: questionnaire surveys and statistical processing of data, thus inaugurating a properly sociological sociology of art (Bourdieu et al. 1966). At the same time, Raymonde Moulin—a historian converted to sociology under the direction of Raymond Aron (who had been Bourdieu's mentor)—was preparing her PhD through a field survey on "the art market in France" (Moulin 1967). Both are essential figures in the first generation of the French sociology of art.
In so doing, they paved the way for an application of the pioneering program outlined in 1945—but in a purely theoretical way—by the sociologist and anthropologist Roger Bastide, born a generation before them: relying on empirical surveys, sticking to description without making value judgements, refraining from normatively importing this or that conception of art, avoiding any substantiation of "the social" or "society," focusing on the art producers, institutions, and amateurs (Bastide 1945). According to such a program, the issue is no longer to consider art and society, nor art in society, but to consider art as society, that is to say, as implementing the whole actions, representations, institutions, etc. that form what Norbert Elias called a "configuration" (Elias 1987).
From then on, the relevant division will no longer be a division between chronological periods or between artistic schools, but a division between the main issues imported from sociology as an autonomous discipline: the sociology of artworks, the sociology of reception or audiences, the sociology of institutions or intermediaries, the sociology of producers. It is indeed this division that will be followed in the big conference organized in Marseilles by Raymonde Moulin in 1984—a touchstone in the institutionalization of the French "sociology of the arts" (Moulin 1986).
Artworks, audiences, producers, intermediaries
While the first of these issues—the sociology of artworks—has been widely discussed regarding its possibility and/or relevance (Passeron 1986; Hennion and Latour 1993; Péquignot 2007), it has not elicited much significant work. Here again, Bourdieu had innovated in 1967 in his afterword to Erwin Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholastic Thought, translated into French in the collection he had founded at the Minuit publishing house: by proposing the concept of homology, or structural identity, to qualify the relationship between a formal system and a cognitive representations system (Bourdieu 1967), he had opened up a much more subtle approach to the relationship between "art" and "society" than that of sociological aesthetics. But this short text remained programmatic, and the rare proposals to analyze artworks as documents on the state of a social group (Lévy 1998; Dubois 2000) or of an entire society (Todorov 1993 and 2011) have remained isolated and without much resonance. This is a clear indication that the issue of artworks, directly imported from art history, is no longer relevant once the definition of "art" is extended to the conditions of production, mediation, and reception of artworks, all the more when these issues are dealt with on the basis of empirical investigations (Heinich 1997a).
Much more extensive and influential work has been devoted to the reception of artworks: there the French sociology of art has been most prominent, in the continuity of Bourdieu's seminal survey on museum attendance, which revealed the huge inequalities of access to “culture” (i.e., artworks) according to one’s position in social space (Bourdieu et al. 1966). This was indeed a political challenge that the Ministry of Culture attempted to take up from the 1970s onwards by providing institutional resources in order to encourage surveys on cultural participation and museum attendance, aiming at "democratizing" culture. Within the Ministry, a major survey was launched and periodically repeated on "French people’ cultural practices" (Donnat 1994), later supplemented by a similar survey of amateur practices (Donnat 1996). Thus, the French sociology of art has mostly developed around the numerous surveys in the "sociology of culture," i.e., devoted to measuring and describing museum attendance, performance audiences, and readers (Heinich 1986; Fleury 2016).
Quantitative methods, using questionnaires on large samples and statistical processing of the responses, have been heavily used in such sociological productions, and have even contributed to their renewal, for example, with the use of factorial data analysis in another of Bourdieu's books that has left its mark on the sociology of artistic tastes and cultural practices: La Distinction (Bourdieu 1979). This seminal work gave rise to a large number of extensions: some are resolutely critical, questioning the definition of "legitimate practices" and the risk of canceling popular culture (Grignon and Passeron 1989), or questioning Bourdieu's confusion between "distinction" and "differentiation" (Glevarec 2009, 2019); others tend to relativize or update the model, highlighting new "omnivorist" trends—after an article by American sociologist Richard Peterson (Peterson 1992)—or much more "plural" or "eclectic" practices than in Bourdieu’s analysis (Lahire 2004; Coulangeon 2011).
But the main methodological innovations brought by the sociology of reception came from qualitative methods: interviews with readers highlighting the plurality of interpretations (Leenhardt 1982; Mauger 1999), description and typology of the visitors’ movements into an exhibition (Veron and Levasseur 1983), measurement of the time spent in front of the paintings during a visit to the museum (Passeron and Pedler 1991), analysis of the criticisms left by visitors in the guest books of exhibitions or in letters sent to museums exhibiting contemporary art (Heinich 1998, 2000a), in-depth interviews with music lovers (Hennion et al. 2001), description of the different types of relationship to opera (Pedler 2003), etc.
A third field of the sociology of art has developed in parallel to the previous one, albeit in a less proliferating way, probably because it is more academic than institutional: the sociology of artistic production, or of art producers. The seminal work in this field is American, although its object is French: sociologists Harrison and Cynthia White’s book on the careers of nineteenth century French painters (White and White 1965) could only be read in English until its French translation in 1991. Bourdieu was an enthusiastic reader of this book, the echo of which can be found in what has probably been his most influential work in the sociology of art, Les Règles de l'art, where he applied his theory of "fields" to the situation of authors and their productions, describing the internal structuring of a professional milieu according to the specific relations of domination at stake given the "relative autonomy" of the field in front of other fields of activity (Bourdieu 1992). In a more classic way, Raymonde Moulin and her team offered the morphological description of the profession of visual artists based on a statistical survey (Moulin 1985); similarly, her collaborator at the "Centre de sociologie des arts" of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales or EHESS, Pierre-Michel Menger, conducted a survey on actors’ profession (Menger 1997). He will then develop original pieces, inspired by economic sociology, on artistic activity considered through the issue of labor (Menger 1989, 2009). Alain Viala, coming from literary studies, adopted a genealogical perspective to reconstruct "the birth of the writer" (Viala 1985), while Nathalie Heinich, in a book based on the thesis she had defended under the direction of Pierre Bourdieu, analyzed the status of 17th century painters according to the sociology of professions and categorizations (Heinich 1993a, 1996). She then investigated—owing to in-depth interviews with authors—the collective representations of writers’ identity and the conditions under which the writing activity can be transformed into a status, be it professional or vocational (Heinich 2000b). After her, and from a perspective more directly inspired by Bourdieu's sociology of domination, Bernard Lahire will offer a survey on writers’ condition (Lahire 2006) and, more specifically, an analysis of Franz Kafka's relationship to writing (Lahire 2010). Dancers’ relationship to their art has also been investigated by Pierre-Emmanuel Sorignet (Sorignet 2010).
Finally, the fourth field is that concerning institutions and, more generally, the intermediaries of art: those without whom the production of artists could not give rise to its reception by the public. Apart from a few pioneering attempts (Escarpit 1958), this field was the last to develop, essentially from the 1990s onwards, no doubt due to the lower social visibility of the concerned bodies compared to artworks, audiences, and artists. Nevertheless, it elicited innovative investigations and theoretical insights. The sociology of art intermediaries made it possible to discover the role of professionals in the records market (Hennion 1981), that of painting experts (Moulin and Quemin 1993), that of institutional officials involved in the construction of an opera house (Urfalino 1990), that of exhibition curators (Heinich and Pollak 1989; Heinich 1995), that of art critics solicited to advise on the purchase of works (Urfalino and Vilkas 1995) or the awarding of grants to artists (Heinich 2009a), that of art dealers (Lizé et al. 2011), that of all the intermediaries through whom artistic reputation is built (Quemin 2013) or thanks to whom the “cultural industries” exist (Jeanpierre and Roueff 2014), that of the film critics (Alexandre 2018), or more generally, that of those who implement state "cultural policy" (Urfalino 1996; Dubois 2013). On a theoretical level, Antoine Hennion—one of Bruno Latour's collaborators at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation de l'Ecole des Mines—proposed a global theory, based on the case of music, of "mediation" as a constitutive element of the relationship to the production and reception of art works (Hennion 1993).
This specialization of the sociology of art into fields of activity testifies to its professionalization and empowerment, allowing it to be definitively inscribed as a branch of sociology and no longer, as in the time of sociological aesthetics or the social history of art, as a development of art history or cultural history. From then on, the references favored by art sociologists borrow above all from other and more classical branches of sociology: sociology of consumption and leisure (Bourdieu et al. 1966); sociology of professions (Heinich 1993, 2000b; Menger 2009); sociology of work (Heinich and Pollak 1989; Ravet 2015), or sociology of organizations (Urfalino 1990, 1996; Fleury 2016).
In the early 1990s, this new discipline will be given an institutional form by the creation of the journal Sociologie de l'art, initially issued by the Association Internationale des Sociologues de Langue Française (AISLF), on the initiative of André Ducret for Switzerland, Daniel Vandergucht for Belgium, and Nathalie Heinich for France. In addition, still in the 1990s, a colloquium devoted to the sociology of art will bring together in Grenoble, every two years, the main actors of the discipline.
From renewal through objects to renewal through theoretical schools
An important renewal of the discipline happened through the focus on minor cultural objects, with investigations opening up to artistic or cultural objects that are less traditionally "legitimate" than painting, consecrated literature, or music (Fabiani 2007). This process of opening responded to both epistemic objectives—extension of the limits of the discipline, detachment from art history—and political objectives—anti-elitist demands for a "democratization" of art by taking into account "dominated" practices.
Here, again, Bourdieu led the way with a pioneering investigation into the practice of photography (Bourdieu et al. 1965). Ten years later, he would return to the study of minor cultural objects by investigating the world of « haute couture » (Bourdieu and Delsaut 1975). Since then, minor cultural objects have been explored according to various problematics (professionalization, consumption, mediation); e.g., the profession of architect (Moulin 1973; Champy 2001); romance literature (Péquignot 1991); jazz (Fabiani 1986; Coulangeon 1999; Roueff 2013); and rock musicians (Guibert 2006).
The realm of “industries culturelles” (or entertainment) has also been explored, with studies on cinema, whose relevance for sociological analysis had been outlined by Pierre Sorlin (Sorlin 1977) and will be developed a generation later (Darré 2000; Ethis 2005; Alexandre 2018); television (Chalvon-Demersay 1994; Pasquier 1995, 1999) and especially, from 2010 onwards, TV series (Esquenazi 2010; Glevarec 2012; Mathieu 2013), as well as radio (Glevarec and Pinet 2009), or art on the Internet (Fourmentraux 2005). The attachment to entertainment celebrities has also been a focus of sociological analysis (Le Guern 2002; Segré 2003; Heinich 2012), as well as “amateur” practices, belonging either to high arts or to “popular culture” (Donnat 1996; Dubois et al. 2009).
But more complex renewal has considerably modified the very content of the sociology of art beyond the divisions between objects or between sociological issues: that is, the renewal by the theoretical schools inside the sociological discipline—a phenomenon that goes far beyond the sociology of art alone.
In fact, the latter has but indirectly or implicitly integrated the theoretical debates that have agitated French sociology: neither the canonical opposition between holism and individualism, nor that between structuralism and interactionism, nor that between determinism and actors’ agentivity—all very divisive oppositions in the French sociology of the last generation, notably through the opposition between Pierre Bourdieu and Raymond Boudon (Boudon 1979)—would make it possible to construct a clear typology of the various productions in the sociology of art. Indeed, as we have seen, the main controversy proper to the French sociology of art has been that of the relevance and possibility of a sociological analysis of artworks, which mostly concerns the autonomisation of the sociology of art from the history of art and, correlatively, its professionalization through the use of empirical survey methods.
The interactionist turn: towards a more global perspective
Indeed, a division by fields of activity or by branches of sociology is unable to account for all that has been produced by the sociology of art since its inception in the 1960s. Rather, certain approaches proceed by highlighting the relationships between the different actors or instances that make up a "field": relationships in the form of domination, according to Bourdieu's model (Bourdieu 1992); or in the form of interactions specific to "art worlds," according to the perspective adopted by Howard Becker in a book coming from the interactionist tradition (Becker 1982). Art worlds was indeed a landmark in the French sociology of art, competing with Bourdieu’s field theory: one can find its influence in Pierre-Michel Menger's work on the world of contemporary music (Menger 1983) or in Raymonde Moulin's work on the world of contemporary art (Moulin 1992).
Heinich, also working on contemporary art, developed this interactionist program by analyzing through quasi-ethnographic case studies the interactions between the artworks proposed by artists (production), public reactions to them (reception), and the integrating role of intermediaries (mediation); however, she adopted a dynamic perspective by highlighting the interdependencies between these different instances (Heinich 1998b), thus relying less on Becker's interactionism than on the sociology of interdependencies proposed by Norbert Elias with his theory of "configurations" (Elias 1987).
This issue of interdependency is also at the heart of the theory of recognition developed by German philosopher Axel Honneth (Honneth 1992): Heinich used it to analyze the effects on writers of their recognition through literary prizes (Heinich 1999). Recognition processes and access to notoriety had already been the core of her first book devoted to Vincent Van Gogh’s posthumous life, The Glory of Van Gogh (Heinich 1991).
In those sociological investigations based on the observation of interactions and even interdependencies, what is mostly at stake is not the distinct entities organizing the sociological approach (artists, intermediaries, audiences...) but rather the way in which they co-act, interfere, and mutually modify each other. It is thus a second generation of sociology that is being set up, parallel to new trends inside the entire sociological discipline.
From positivist sociology to the sociology of representations: the interpretivist turn
Whether inspired by the interactionist tradition or by the Eliasian heritage, this globalizing perspective is only one aspect of the renewal that has occurred in the French sociology of art since the first generation of pioneers.
As soon as empirical sociology became established, another explicit dividing line appeared, even if it did not necessarily take the form of a controversy: that is, the opposition between quantitative and qualitative methods of inquiry. The former are largely borrowed from the sociology of consumption and electoral sociology, whereas the latter bring the sociology of art closer to history, in the case of recourse to archives, or to ethnology, in the case of pre-existing corpuses of analysis or field observation.
Now, this methodological cleavage refers to a fundamental opposition—even if hardly made explicit among art sociologists—between a positivist sociology, aiming at the description and explanation of objective behaviors, and a more interpretative sociology, focused on actors’ mental representations. While, on the one hand, positivist sociology (well exemplified by the work of Raymonde Moulin) immediately found its legitimacy as a standpoint for an autonomous and professionalized sociology of art, producing necessary and indisputable knowledge, the sociology of representations, on the other hand, was from the outset confronted with a double problem. First, it had to prove that its anti-positivism did not mean a return to the "sociological aesthetics" prior to the emergence of an empirically grounded sociology: it was for this reason that “artworks” were rejected as a focus for analysis in favor of investigating the mental categories allowing the conceptualization of what a creator or a work is or must be—this was a necessary condition for this qualitative sociology to appear innovative. Second, the qualitative sociology of art also had to distance oneself from critical approaches, which focused on actors’ representations only to disqualify them as "illusions" or "ideologies" that would disguise reality: here it was no longer sociological aesthetics but the Marxist tradition that had to be abandoned, including its modernized version (Bourdieu); on the contrary, these representations had to be considered not as distorted reflections of reality but as specific phenomena, with their own logics, deserving to be analyzed as such (Heinich 1998c).
This empirical, qualitative, and neutral sociology of collective representations has a small number of historical precedents: in particular, the fundamental work—which will not be translated into French until 1993—devoted by Austrian sociologist Edgar Zilsel to the history of the representations of genius (Zilsel 1926); or the books on the image of the artist by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz as well as by Rudolf and Margot Wittkower (Kris and Kurz 1934; Wittkower 1963). Here again, Bourdieu had opened up this path in the sociology of art by focusing on changes in the artists’ status in the course of the nineteenth century, through his seminal analysis of a novel by Gustave Flaubert as a homologous representation of the changes that occurred in the social structure of the time (Bourdieu 1975): a theme that would be taken up again in Les Règles de l'art nearly twenty years later, and whose echoes can also be found in the book on Edouard Manet that Bourdieu sketched out in his seminar at the Collège de France but which he did not have time to publish (Bourdieu 2013). Raymonde Moulin had also paved the way with an article on the importance of the value of rarity in art history (Moulin 1978).
In 1991, the French translation of Norbert Elias' unfinished little book on Mozart will provide another remarkable example of what a historical sociology of representations of artists’ status can produce, including their internal contradictions and the way these contradictions can affect artists themselves (Elias 1991). The same year, Nathalie Heinich proposed her analysis of the collective representations of Van Gogh, the construction of his posthumous reputation and the psychic reasons for its massive expansion, independently of any search for external causalities as well as of any critical aim (Heinich 1991). Part of this epistemological program can also be found in Fauquet and Hennion's work on the history of love for Bach's music (Fauquet and Hennion 2000), following Tia De Nora’s book on Beethoven, translated into French in 1998 (De Nora 1995).
This same research position will then be applied to various objects: the history of representations of the status of painters and sculptors from craftsman to professional and then to artist (Heinich 1993a); the personifying treatment of artworks through the concept of “objet-personne” (“person object”), including relics, fetishes, and artworks(Heinich 1993b); the typology of the modalities of art valuation according to whether they focus on the artwork or the person of the artist (Heinich 1997b); the mutations of the modern status of creators among new post-revolutionary elites, when artists take in a certain way the place of previous aristocrats (Heinich 2005); the rise of performing artists (actors, musicians...) through the boom in image technologies in the 20th century (Heinich 2012); or the wide range of axiological representations—or values—of art, among which beauty is far from central (Heinich et al. 2014). The theoretical bases of this program have been displayed in a short epistemological essay proposing a conversion of the sociology of art to an empirical, qualitative, comprehensive, and neutral approach (Heinich 1998c).
However, this opposition between quantitative and qualitative methods, and between positivist sociology and the comprehensive sociology of representations, while especially relevant and strong during the first generation, tends to be blurred nowadays through the common use of mixed methods and approaches. As a consequence, it is hardly an issue in current discussions about the discipline.
From explanation to interpretation
This theoretical cleavage between the study of actual behaviors and the study of representations partly overlaps the properly methodological one between quantitative and qualitative surveys, as well as the more epistemological one between explanatory and interpretivist sociology.
Indeed, the statistical method—collecting answers to questions asked to a representative sample and then cross-referencing these answers with the socio-demographic parameters of the respondents—is typically part of the explanatory paradigm, since it involves explaining behaviors by social origin, age, gender, level of education, etc. On the other hand, the typological method borrowed from Max Weber (Weber 1951) is clearly part of the interpretivist paradigm: it consists in relating the cases observed in real situations to “ideal types” and thus constructing a typology that makes it possible to reconstruct the space of possibilities offered to actors. The aim here is to make explicit—and not to explain—the actors’ accessible resources, constraints, norms, and, more generally, their mental representations and "reasons," so as to restore the meaning of their behaviors (Schnapper 1999).
As for the first of these two perspectives—the explanatory paradigm—it has been remarkably exemplified in the sociology of art by Bourdieu's work, whether it be explaining cultural practices (Bourdieu et al. 1965, 1966), tastes (Bourdieu 1979), editorial strategies (Bourdieu 1977), or the distribution of readership (Bourdieu 1992). His followers also fall within this line: Annie Verger on artistic avant-gardes (Verger 1991), Pascale Casanova on the space of literary positions (Casanova 1998), or Gisèle Sapiro on the field of writers during the Second World War (Sapiro 1999) and on the field of translations in France according to the globalization of cultural production (Sapiro 2009; Sapiro et al. 2015).
Yet this explanatory paradigm is intimately linked to a critical perspective, centered on the concept of domination envisaged not from a descriptive and analytical point of view, as with Weber, but from a normative and, more precisely, critical point of view: here, the critique of the actors' "belief" in the natural or substantial character of categories and values goes hand in hand with the critique of hierarchies and the domination effects. Here again, Bourdieu's Distinction is the reference text, echoed in some articles on the "belief" in artistic value (Bourdieu 1977) or on creators’ mode of existence (Bourdieu 1984), or else in a dialog with a contemporary artist who himself practices a kind of criticism of artistic institutions (Bourdieu and Haacke 1994). This critical perspective can also be found among its more or less faithful followers, for example, regarding the way capitalism integrates the valuation of creators (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999), or on the way the art world uses valuation through authenticity in order to induce domination (Lahire 2015), or on the moral responsibility of writers (Sapiro 2011), or on the notion of talent (Menger 2018).
To this explanatory/critical paradigm, the sociology of representations presents both an interpretive and value-neutral counterpoint: the aim is no longer to explain by external causes, but to make explicit the actors‘ motivations, reasons, and resources; and it is no longer to dismiss actors' illusions, but to identify the origins, uses, and functions of their representations of the world. From then on, admiration for Van Gogh is no longer a "social construction" based on the "belief" in the "ideology of gift or talent," but it becomes a behavior to be explored in order to understand its motivations; arts participation is no longer a "strategy of distinction" aiming at establishing the "domination" of the privileged, but it is one modality among others in a choice of behaviors whose meaning can vary according to the context; and access to the status of artist is no longer an enterprise of "legitimization" aimed at acquiring or retaining "privileges" and exercising "domination," but it is the result of a complex set of actions, decisions, and aspirations whose meticulous description makes it possible to understand how actors actually go about achieving recognition .
Thus, part of the French sociology of art has moved away from its origins, that is, from the "sociology of domination" or "critical sociology" embodied by Bourdieu: broadening methods beyond the traditional statistical data analysis; broadening perspectives beyond the explanatory paradigm based on the intersection with socio-demographic characteristics; descriptive rather than deconstructive use of historical relativization (surveys on the genealogy of notions) and cultural relativization (surveys on the diversity of practices and conceptions according to cultures); focusing less on determinations than on interactions and on actors’ and objects’ agency; relativizing the prism of domination in favor of the prism of interdependency; and, finally, increasing attention to the contextual dimension.
These last two shifts—toward interdependency and toward contextuality—directly borrow from Norbert Elias' sociology and, in particular, from his fundamental concept of "configuration." This concept makes it possible both to integrate into the analysis the space of relevance specific to the object under study, from the most micro to the most macro level; and to shift attention from objects to the processes by which they evolve and interact according to changes in configuration (Elias 1987). Paying close attention to actions in their contexts: this is the fundamental basis of a trend that has considerably developed in French sociology since the 1990s, opening new avenues for those who were no longer satisfied with the Bourdieusian paradigm: that is, pragmatic sociology.
The pragmatic turn
What can be called the "pragmatic turn" of French sociology comes from two schools that are very close to each other: on the one hand, that of Bruno Latour and his disciples, aiming at replacing the « macro », explanatory and deterministic paradigm by a "micro" paradigm, descriptive and anchored in actors' and objects’ agency (Akrich et al. 2006); and, on the other hand, that of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot and their followers, aiming to move "from critical sociology to the sociology of criticism" (Boltanski 1990) by taking seriously the justifications for actions issued by actors (Boltanski and Thévenot 1991) as well as their effective relationship to objects (Thévenot 2006). Both developed from the 1990s.
Beyond their differences, these two schools both claim to belong to "pragmatism," be it in its philosophical (Dewey 1939), linguistic (Austin 1962), or anthropological (Gell 1998) versions. They now connect with the new sociological trend of “valuation studies” (Heinich 2017, 2020b, 2021). And they also have in common their reliance on the fundamental notion of "épreuve" (test), which anchors sociological investigation in the situations actually experienced by actors (Lemieux 2018); their double aim of empirical investigations and theoretical problematizations; and, finally, their orientation towards an acritical and more comprehensive approach to actions, attachments, and representations.
Applied to the sociology of art, this new pragmatic approach was developed, on the side of the Latour school, by Antoine Hennion, regarding either the uses of design (Hennion and Dubuisson 1996) or the ways of appreciating music (Hennion et al. 2001; Hennion 2004). Soon introduced into the anglophone academic world due to his proximity with Latour and ANT, Hennion’s work has been influential through his investigations on “attachments” and the pragmatic analysis of taste. Young researchers have followed this path, very much inspired by American ethnomethodology, by producing fine descriptions of the relationship to rock music (Brandl 2005; Hein 2006), of the production of architecture (Yaneva 2009) or of contemporary art (Yaneva 2003, 2011), or else of the work of museum curators (Kreplak 2017).
As for researchers closer to Boltanski and Thévenot, a pioneer of pragmatic sociology applied to the relationship to art was Francis Chateauraynaud: together with economist Christian Bessy, he proposed as early as 1995 an ambitious theory based on a meticulous field survey about the way experts seize an object to determine its nature and evaluate its authenticity (Bessy and Chateauraynaud 1995), using in particular the notion of "affordance" introduced by American psychologist James Gibson (Gibson 1979). Heinich then implemented this approach by observing the work of heritage specialists when inventorying buildings and objects: she precisely described their resources, both material and cognitive, and the obstacles they encounter, so as to make explicit the axiological representations—or values—that underlie their decisions (Heinich 2009b). She also applied this pragmatic approach, together with sociologist Roberta Shapiro, to an unprecedented conceptual issue: that of the process of "artification" (as a change of category rather than as a mere process of “legitimization”), thanks to the collective acts of categorizing that transform certain activities into "art" and certain actors into "artists" (Shapiro and Heinich 2012; Heinich and Shapiro 2014). Heinich’s perspective is now oriented towards the sociology of values rather than the sociology of art, so that art is used as a research field rather than as a research object: surveys on heritage, contemporary art, or “artification" processes serve as data providers for inquiries into valuation processes, regarding not only things (such as artworks) but also persons (artists, collectors…), actions, or states of the world (Heinich 2017, 2020a, 2020b, 2021a). In this perspective, ”pragmatism” is mostly a matter of methods, while the scope of investigation focuses on collective representations, including “axiological” representations, that is the value system shared by actors.
Conclusion: a new dividing line
Specialization and professionalization, expansion of its objects beyond the traditional domains of art history, development of a variety of investigation methods, importation of new trends in sociology (interactionism, ethnomethodology, interpretive analysis of representations, pragmatism, valuation studies…): since its emergence two generations ago, the French sociology of art has been offering not only a profusion of various productions, but also a mirror of some major tendencies and debates proper to general sociology, connected with (but not always reducible to) major Anglo-American trends.
Among these, the most powerful today obviously comes from the various interdisciplinary fields of scholarship called “studies,” and in particular gender studies (Buscatto 2007; Ravet 2011) and intersectionality, which updated Bourdieu’s “domination” and Foucault’s “power” paradigms. But here one comes to a triple limit of the very domain of the sociology of art: first, the re-organization of academic activities and resources is no longer around a specific discipline (sociology) but instead centers on a social category defined by a collective identity (women), taking those productions away from sociology as such; second, because this new object (gender differences) tends to replace “art” (even when broadly defined) as research focus, so that the latter becomes no more than a ground for “gender studies” fieldwork; and third, the activist aim which is at the basis of the “studies”—that is, fighting against discriminations and inequalities—tends to lead them away from the strictly epistemic definition of academic productions, at least for those who consider that there should be a clear distinction between the academic and the political arena (Heinich 2021b).
But here lies a dividing line not only between the various trends inside the sociology of art, and between the French and the Anglo-American situations of the humanities and social sciences, but also between strongly opposed positions inside the French academic world. Indeed, this dividing line between two ways to conceive and practice sociology has become a bone of contention in French campuses, far beyond the mere domain of the sociology of art. However, few debates actually occur between scholars advocating those two trends, at least on the most epistemological level, a fault of common venues such as journals or conferences. Why not hope that the appearance of this article in a foreign journal might help to provoke such a debate within French sociology?
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Heinich, N. The three generations of the French sociology of art. Am J Cult Sociol 10, 337–353 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-021-00139-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-021-00139-w