Intellectual field and creative project

In order that the sociology of intellectual and artistic creation be assigned its proper object and at the same time its limits, the principle must be perceived and stated that the relationship between a creative artist and his work, and therefore his work itself is affected by the system of social relations within which creation as an act of communication takes place, or to be more precise, by the position of the creative artist in the structure of the intellectual field (which is itself, in part at any rate, a function of his past work and the reception it has met with). The intellectual field, which cannot be reduced to a simple aggregate of isolated agents or to the sum of elements merely juxtaposed, is, like a magnetic field, made up of a system of power lines. In other words, the constituting agents or systems of agents may be described as so many forces which by their existence, opposition or combination, determine its specific structure at a given moment in time. In return, each of these is defined by its particular position within this field from which it derives positional properties which cannot be assimilated to intrinsic properties and more especially, a specific type of participation in the cultural field taken as a system of relations between themes and problems, and thus a determined type of cultural unconscious, while at the same time it intrinsically possesses what could be called a functional weight, because its own &dquo;mass&dquo;, that is, its power (or better, its authority) in the field cannot be defined independently of its position within it. Obviously this approach can only be justified in so far as the object to which it is applied, that is the intellectual field (and thus the cultural field) possesses the relative autonomy which authorizes the methodological autonomization operated by the structural method when it treats the intellectual field as a system which is governed by its own laws. It is possible to see, from the history of Western intellectual and artistic life, how the intellectual field