Modification of Bourdieu’s model

In dance studies, Bourdieu’s work is generally employed in such a way as to relate the concept of habitus to the idea of the body or bodily movement, as well as to examine an artist’s position within the cultural field in reference to particular forms of capital.

For instance, Gay Morris (2001), in analysing Martha Graham’s Night Journey (1947), applies Bourdieu’s theory in two ways. Firstly, she shows how the body is central to Bourdieu’s idea of habitus (likewise with Wainwright et al., 2007), while further developing the concept with reference to Susan Foster’s work to argue that bodies, in and through their habitus, can generate socially constructed ideas just as they are capable of producing bodily intelligence (like writing). Secondly, she highlights the inextricable connection between the concepts of habitus and field, arguing that an agent’s position-taking within the cultural field is a struggle for status and domination, often through the various forms of capital which he or she possesses. In doing so, Morris provides an examination of Graham’s position in the cultural field of America at the time of the creating of Night Journey, and analyses her choreography in relation to the symbolic capital of that period to demonstrate how she has avoided social ageing as well as reinforced her position as a vanguard leader. In ‘Balanchine’s bodies’

(2005), Morris also analyses George Balanchine’s work, The Four Temperaments (1946), in light of the changing symbolic capital in America after the Second World War, particularly as shown through the writing of dance critics and with reference to the idea of national identity.

To an extent, this thesis also applies Bourdieu’s theories in this fashion – for instance, by referencing the bodily dispositions structured into an agent’s habitus in developing the idea of movement style (Chapter 3.4), and by isolating the KNB’s position-taking

within the ballet field (Chapter 6), with an emphasis on analysing the symbolic capital given or possessed by the groups that provide artistic sanction. Morris’s study (2007) is useful here, as the relationship between symbolic capital and the idea of national identity, as well as how the KNB’s works possess or exhibit this capital, are also key topics of this thesis. Still further employment of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is shown through the focus on the strategic schema of the KNB, with the aim of identifying the strategic habitus of the company as that which produces both its administrative and artistic trajectory. More significantly, emphasising the company’s strategic habitus as a social construction, this research uses Bourdieu’s work to examine how the KNB’s position-taking within the ballet field references the other fields within which it is situated, particularly the field of power, and which can mediate its economic, social, symbolic, and cultural capital, and in the process redefine the possibilities and limits of its position-taking. In sum, then, the thesis draws extensively on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field (and in particular, the cultural field vis-à-vis other fields) to develop a theoretical framework suitable for the historical analyses. At the same time, the specific subject matter of the thesis demands certain modifications of Bourdieu’s work, which must now be explicated.

In ‘The Market of Symbolic Goods’, Bourdieu argues extensively for the importance of identifying the social function of the artist’s strategies, as his/her position-taking in the cultural field is always in relation to other fields (particularly power and class). In this sense, each cultural position-taking requires a dual interpretation: first, in relation to the cultural field, and second, in relation to homologous (class) or oppositional (power) fields. Bourdieu (1993, 139) refers to the latter fields as the ‘referential space’

where the artist’s position-taking can be defined in different ways; hence he argues for a fruitful ‘sociological analysis of the social functions at the basis of the structure and functioning of any symbolic system’ (1993, 140). His concept of double reading is explicitly shown through the structure of the historical analysis portion of this investigation: specifically, Chapter 5 focuses on the KNB’s position-takings in relation to the referential fields in order to evaluate the social meaning and function of its strategies through sociological analysis, while Chapter 6 analyses the different directors’ strategies in relation to the ballet/dance field.

Bourdieu argues that

the public meaning of a work in relation to which the author must define himself originates in the process of circulation and consumption dominated by the objective relations between the institutions and agents implicated in the process. The social relations which produce this public meaning are determined by the relative position these agents occupy in the structure of the field of restricted production. These relations, e.g. between author and publisher, publisher and critic, author and critic, are revealed as the ensemble of relations attendant on the ‘publication’ of the work, that is its becoming a public object. In each of these relations, each of these agents engages not only his own image of other factors in the relationship…which depends on his relative position within the field, but also his image of the other factor’s image of himself, i.e. of the social definition of his objective position in the field.

Bourdieu, 1993, 118-119

In short, the public meaning of the cultural product is generated in the course of its distribution and consumption, or in the case of the KNB, the process through which its repertoire also becomes a public entity. While Bourdieu’s focus here is clearly on the work of particular authors, inasmuch as the present topic is the KNB as a unitary group of artists, this approach must be employed to analyse the public meaning of the company (as an institution) and of its repertoire. Following Bourdieu, it is important to recognise that the KNB is a national arts organisation – this serves as its social definition – funded by the nation-state. In this sense, the relations that generate the public meaning of the KNB involve not only the choreographers, directors and critics, but also the state, which enacts rules and conventions (through cultural policy) and provides financial support, acting analogously to a publisher in Bourdieu’s examples.

Bourdieu’s model of the cultural field provides a useful framework for analysing the degree of the KNB’s artistic autonomy vis-à-vis external forces, above all the source of symbolic sanction and the company’s obeisance to the market laws of symbolic goods. However, in explaining the field of power, his heteronomous principle places a stronger focus on economic rather than political power. This is one of the limitations of Bourdieu’s theory when applied to the present research, as I stress the social position of the KNB as a national organisation monitored by the state. In this sense, the KNB can be seen as an arts institution for whom compliance with state policy and

rules is necessary to ensure its culturally privileged position and to secure its financial capital (the potential influence of state authority on the KNB was also examined in Chapters 2 and 3 in the discussion of Gilroy’s work).

Thus, I present a modified version of his model of the field of cultural production (Figure Three), locating the social position of the KNB (3) within the field of state power (2). Considering its status as a state-funded national organisation, the KNB occupies the dominant position (at the positive pole) in the field of state power, which is itself located at the dominant pole of the field of class relations in Korea (1).

Chapter 5 assesses this status and situation of the KNB more closely, using Figure Three as a means of examining its shifting position-takings between the positive and negative poles of the field of state power. In particular, Chapter 5 evaluates the KNB’s trajectory and social function in relation to the socio-political history of Korea, focusing particularly on the relationship between the strategies of different directors and the shifts in Korea’s political regimes.

Figure Three. The KNB’s position within the field of state power and the field of class relations in Korea

To measure the KNB’s degree of autonomy vis-à-vis state power, I have developed a modified version of Bourdieu’s subdivisions of the field of production: the autonomous pole of the field of independent production and the heteronomous pole of the field of state-controlled production (Figure Four). The field of independent production is characterised by the ‘freedom’ of artists possessing complete control over artistic choices or decisions, whereas the field of state-controlled production is defined by obedience to state policy and direction. However, although Figure Four can be misleadingly read as a simple binary framework, it should be emphasised, as Bourdieu also argues, that this model demonstrates how the degree of autonomy of the KNB’s repertoire can only be analysed in relation to the heteronomous principles of state power and vice versa.

Figure Four. Subdivision of the field of the KNB’s production

Here it is necessary to review Bourdieu discussion of the role of the state in general.

This entails drawing on the explanation of the role of the educational system, Johnson (1993, 23) glosses Bourdieu’s work in the sociology of education, arguing that, for Bourdieu, ‘the educational system tends to create a transferable cultural disposition to appreciate academically sanctioned works of art and an equally transferable aptitude for artistic classification’, which over time generates a particular aesthetic taste and familiarly to specific social or academic groups. By gathering people according to educational level, Bourdieu argues that the educational system fortifies social differences, and that the freedom of the educational system to distribute cultural capital unequally allows for a further granting of cultural capital to certain groups, reproducing the hierarchy of social classes. Thus cultural productions and practices act as a crucial variable in reinforcing status quo social distinctions and class hierarchy. In articulating the relation between the educational system and the field of cultural production, Bourdieu notes the influential role of the state by asserting that while insubordinate artists’ practices can be constrained by the moral and political values instilled through a bourgeois education, petty bourgeois artists and scholars, on

the other hand, are more directly monitored by the state. He further argues (1993, 125) that ‘the state, after all, has the power to orient intellectual production by means of subsidies, commissions…honorific posts…all of which are for speaking or keeping silent, for compromise or abstention’. In this sense, the state plays a vital role in controlling both the educational system and cultural practices, and therefore in structuring social classes and orders according to its own interests.

According to Bourdieu, the field of cultural production is a site of struggle for a monopolisation of power to confirm the authority and consecration of the artist. In this struggle, artists who follow the laws of the field and who are most concerned with their own autonomy are undermined by their competitors, who seek to take a dominant position in the field with the support of temporary external powers. These competitors launch their assault by making the dominant agents within the field of power hostile to the artists most interested in their autonomy. Hence, ‘in endeavouring to discredit every attempt to impose an autonomous principle of hierarchization, and thus serving their own interests, they serve the interests of the dominant fractions of the dominant class, who obviously have an interest in there being only one hierarchy’

(Bourdieu, 1993, 41). Here, considering the generally accepted understanding of the ballet genre as high art, as well as the KNB’s proclaimed position as Korea’s leading ballet organisation, it is evident that the company is always potentially involved in a struggle to occupy and maintain its high artistic status through possession of cultural and symbolic capital which itself is always open to monitoring and shaping by state policy. In the KNB’s case, the most prominent and influential agent of such external support is the state, as it is the government that assigns economic and cultural capital, as well as lends a degree of symbolic credit, to the company.