Putting a Glitch in the Field: Bourdieu, Actor Network Theory and Contemporary Music
Identifieur interne : 000193 ( Istex/Corpus ); précédent : 000192; suivant : 000194Putting a Glitch in the Field: Bourdieu, Actor Network Theory and Contemporary Music
Auteurs : Nick PriorSource :
- Cultural sociology [ 1749-9755 ] ; 2008-11.
English descriptors
- Teeft :
- Actor network theorists, Actor network theory, Bourdieu, British journal, Cascone, Contemporary music, Contemporary style, Critical orientation, Cultural capital, Cultural field, Cultural fields, Cultural production, Cultural sociology volume, Electronic music, Field concept, Genre, Glitch, Glitch music, Glitch musicians, Greater sensitization, Habitus, Hennion, Independent labels performance, John cage, John wiley, Kegan paul, Laptop, Laptop performance, Latour, Mille plateaux, Music production, Music style, November, Objective relations, Other hand, Other words, Oxford university press, Pierre bourdieu, Polity, Popular music, Productive activity, Protagonist, Reflexive sociology, Research sector, Rock music, Same time, Social distinction, Social relations, Social world, Sociologist, Software, Sonic, Sonic experimentation, Sonic fragments, Technological mediators, Wesleyan university press.
Abstract
Bourdieu's cultural sociology has become increasingly attractive to sociologists of music looking to account for the complex interrelations between industry, institution and practice. There remains, however, a tendency in such work to reduce the complexity and scope of Bourdieu's ideas. This paper attempts to apply Bourdieu's field theory to music, but does so with a critical orientation. The focus of the paper is the fin de millénaire music style called glitch, a style characterized by sonic fragments of technological error. While we learn a lot about the social trajectories of glitch from greater sensitization to its position in a structured setting of socio-economic relations, it becomes difficult to account for the centrality of technological mediators to this contemporary style of music using Bourdieu's categories alone. The paper pursues the possibility of supplementing or combining a Bourdieusian approach with actor network theory.
Url:
DOI: 10.1177/1749975508095614
Links to Exploration step
ISTEX:0D95752C9C95CB93795307D24D2B2C89476B2C89Le document en format XML
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Putting
a Glitch in the Field: Bourdieu, Actor Network Theory and Contemporary Music
SAGE Publications, Inc.200810.1177/1749975508095614
NickPrior
University of Edinburgh, UK, n.prior@ed.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
Bourdieu's cultural sociology
has become increasingly attractive to sociologists of music looking to account
for the complex interrelations between industry, institution and practice.
There remains, however, a tendency in such work to reduce the complexity
and scope of Bourdieu's ideas. This paper attempts to apply Bourdieu's field
theory to music, but does so with a critical orientation. The focus of the
paper is the fin de millénaire music style called glitch, a style
characterized by sonic fragments of technological error. While we learn a
lot about the social trajectories of glitch from greater sensitization to
its position in a structured setting of socio-economic relations, it becomes
difficult to account for the centrality of technological mediators to this
contemporary style of music using Bourdieu's categories alone. The paper
pursues the possibility of supplementing or combining a Bourdieusian approach
with actor network theory.
actor network theory
Bourdieu
field
glitch
Latour
sociology of music
sociology of technology
KEYWORDS
Introduction
What can the sociologist bring to the study of contemporary popular music?
This is, of course, not a straightforward question. Indeed, it less begets
a single answer than invites a series of further questions concern- ing what
`music' consists of, as well as when `contemporary' begins and how one defines
`popular'. As the questions proliferate, certainty over terms gives
302
way
to a more guarded attention to the boundaries of the terrain, its contours
and defining shapes. The terms lose their substantiality and become contingent
accomplishments of actors and groups of actors engaged in interpretative strug-
gles. Indeed, perhaps this is one of sociology's key contributions: it serves
as a watchdog for uncritical and unreflective assumptions about the discourses
of music itself. In other words, it sensitizes us to the constitutive and
relational, the conflictual and performative, thereby widening the focus of
analysis beyond the musician and the cultural work in order to situate the
latter in its proper social context. This, at least, has been a recognizable
thread in much sociological writing on music. From industry-specific patterns
of ownership and control (Negus, 1999) and the role of gatekeepers in decision-making
chains (Ryan and Peterson, 1982) to technological mediators (Hennion, 1997)
and the everyday experiences of listeners (DeNora, 2000), sociologists have
oriented to the ways in which music is imbricated with the social. Here, music
is understood to be produced by an increasingly globalized culture industry
predicated on the exchange of music as a `basket of rights' (Frith, 1987:
57), its status as a text dependent both on the meaning-making dynamics of
media forms (videos, images, songs, lyrics) and on the negotiations of stratified
audiences with par- ticular subcultural affiliations or strategies of consumption
(Longhurst, 1995; Thornton, 1995). As for genre, the active constitution of
labels attached to loose conglomerations of style, people and practice speaks
of the extraordinary social effort needed to crystallize such constellations
into something tangible and productive: categories in record shops, subcultural
accoutrements, music reviews, encyclopaedia entries, and so on (Frith, 1996; Negus, 1999). Indeed, it has been an insight of sociologists of culture to
show how a complex social net- work of institutional forces and actors is
central to the attribution of artistic labels, where such labels often tell
us more about the organizational context than any stylistic uniformity among
the cultural workers themselves (Becker, 1982; White and White, 1965). This
is all well and good, but it still begs the broader question of what holds
these different levels of analysis together. What exactly is the social? Where
is music's place within the nebulous entity called `society' and how might
we understand the ways in which macro, meso and micro levels of the music-society
problematic fit together? If one does, indeed, wish to move beyond the antinomies
of structural(ist) and individualist accounts of music, some options present
themselves. A radically interdisciplinary approach in which insights from
ethnomusicology, economics, psychology, sociology and aesthetics are applied,
does reveal music to be multi-faceted but risks over- eclecticism. A critical
rejuvenation of Adorno's `grand approach', on the other hand, recognizes the
need to attend to music as a fulcrum for social consciousness and social structure
(DeNora, 2000) but carries with it the weight of cultural mandarinism. Meanwhile,
Giddens' (1984) structuration theory in which actors are presented as reflexively
making and remaking their social life provides some interesting inroads into
the problem, but it is
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rarely
employed in the sociology of music, partly because its formulation remains
obdurately conceptual and abstract. In comparison, the work of Pierre Bourdieu,
much of whose writings is ded- icated to overcoming subjectivist and objectivist
accounts of the social world, has become an increasingly attractive alternative
for sociologists of music (see Clayton et al., 2003; Negus, 1999; Regev, 1989; Sterne, 2003; Théberge, 1997; Thornton, 1995). This is not surprising given
Bourdieu's centrality to recent debates about culture, action and power, as
well as the relative ease with which one can put his concepts to work in empirical
settings. Yet, despite his obvious popularity, there remains a tendency to
reduce Bourdieu's complex oeuvre to a few phrases and to tack on `Bourdieu-isms'
in rather simplistic and partial ways. This leads to two outcomes: 1) a failure
to capture the full range of phenomena covered under Bourdieu's ideas – for instance, wielding the twin concepts of `taste' and `cultural cap- ital'
without returning to the force-field of relations that frame patterns of consumption; 2) a largely uncritical acceptance of Bourdieu's concepts and an unwillingness
to test their boundaries and inadequacies. This article adds to the attempt
to apply Bourdieu's ideas to music, but does so with a critical orientation.
That is, while it recognizes the need to get inside some of Bourdieu's ideas,
it also aims to reveal their limits. The focus of the article is the fin de
millénaire music style called `glitch' and asks to what extent one of Bourdieu's
meta-concepts, the field (champ), is able to shed light on its emergence and
trajectory. Glitch has become an influential presence in music since the late
1990s and has gained credence as a contemporary form of sonic experimentation
based on computer-generated clusters of rhythmic pulses, skips, clicks and
scratches. Its development out of commercially-restricted scenes into more
mainstream musical environments follows a logic present in Bourdieu's analysis
of the chiasmatic structure of cultural fields, where the position-taking
of artists is meaningful only in relation to a dynamic space of social relations
governed by the twin poles of economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1996).
In this sense, it will be argued, we learn a lot about the social dynamics
of stylistic practice from greater sensitization to its position in a structured
setting of socio-economic relations partly defined by the social characteristics
and posi- tion-takings of the musicians themselves. Bourdieu's cultural sociology
pits itself very effectively against aesthetic writings on glitch, precisely
because it refuses to cut analysis off at the stylistic boundaries of the
work. But there are some outstanding questions, one of which is addressed
towards the end of the article. In a context that cries out for attention
to a range of agents involved in cultural production, to what extent is there
room for a sufficiently complex treatment of technology under Bourdieu's corpus
of ideas? At best, it will be argued, the problem of technology does not feature
highly enough in Bourdieu's
304
work
to give it the strategic status it deserves; at worst its inclusion stretches
his arguments to the limits of credibility. The issue then becomes to what
extent it needs to be supplemented with other approaches and concepts for
it to be prop- erly useful to contemporary music sociology. One possible supplementary
posi- tion comes from actor network theory, a theory that treats the realm
of technologies as bound to the human world in ways other than that of instru-
ments, tools or social weapons. When technology is considered a true form
of mediation, it will be argued, it is possible to extend the range of objects
in Bourdieu's fields to include those devices, techniques and artefacts that
permit the solidification and transformation of field relations. Despite some
conceptual incommensurability, rubbing these two traditions against each other
sheds light on the complex human/non-human entanglements and field trajectories
of con- temporary styles such as glitch. The Properties of Fields Bourdieu's
concept of field has received a great deal less attention than his other concepts:
cultural capital and habitus. Indeed, most commentators on Bourdieu are quick
to treat habitus as the keystone to Bourdieu's work. This is under- standable
given the weight of explanation Bourdieu himself places on the habi- tus concept
as a way of moving beyond dichotomies such as individual/society. Yet, Bourdieu
himself always stressed the importance of the field concept as a way of reading
the objective relations that define the social space within which habitus
functions. Its significance is reaffirmed by the attention Bourdieu gave it
in his later works, particularly The Rules of Art (1996), which in some respects
is a better reflection of the maturity of Bourdieu's theoretical position
than Distinction (1984). What Bourdieu provides is a heuristic for the analysis
of `historically con- stituted areas of activity with their specific institutions
and their own laws of functioning' (Bourdieu, 1990: 87). These fields consist
of sets of historical rela- tions between positions grounded in specific forms
of power or capital. Conceptually, the field is an immediate invitation to
think relationally about the actions of social agents who, propelled by their
habituses, compete for particu- lar values specific to that field (Bourdieu
and Wacquant, 1992). It is the inter- actions and conflicts between these
agents over the prizes available that define the precise contours of the field,
particularly the limits of what is found to be acceptable as the stakes in
the field. In which case, the field is also a space of competition, the analogy
being a game of chess where players enter the game and position themselves
according to the powers and moves available to them. This is why habitus and
field are intertwined, for transposable dispositions incline the agent towards
acting and reacting to the game in particular ways. In Bourdieu's hands, then,
the field becomes a network of objective rela- tions between agents, but also
larger groupings and institutions distributed within a space of possible positions.
Its function is not merely to describe a logic
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of struggle
between agents, but also a grander attempt to examine how modern societies
are themselves defined by an architecture of overlapping spheres such as artistic
fields, economic fields and scientific fields. In fact, it is the relation-
ship that particular fields have to what Bourdieu calls the `field of power',
the broader political field, that defines their ability to resist the penetrations
of out- side forces such as the market. In the case of the cultural field,
autonomy is dependent on the increasingly dualistic structure of a space defined
by two log- ics of capital, economic and cultural. It is these species of
capital that internally divide the cultural field into two sub-fields: on
the one hand, the `de-limited' sub-field of production and, on the other,
the `large-scale' or `heteronomous' field of production. While the delimited
field is defined by its distance from commercial mass markets and its appeal
to specialized audiences, the large- scale field is defined by its proximity
to the broader field of power and eco- nomic determinants (Bourdieu, 1990:
145). Here, we might recognize the conventional opposition between `high'
and `low' culture, and the symbolic positions occupied by avant-garde artists
and commercial producers in the cultural field. What I want to do in the following,
then, is examine how these general fea- tures might illuminate certain characteristics
of glitch as a form of contempo- rary music. What kind of analytical leverage
do Bourdieu's ideas afford when they confront a particular case in music?
What happens when the field concept is applied to the emergence of a contemporary
musical style? What happens, in short, when a glitch is put in the field?
This follows a brief description of glitch music and the work of some of its
practitioners and protagonists. Glitch:A Short History Glitch a. A surge of
current or a spurious electrical signal; also, in extended use, a sudden short-lived
irregularity in behaviour. b. Astronauts' slang. A hitch or snag; a malfunction.
(Oxford English Dictionary) In popular usage, the word `glitch' has negative
connotations. It refers to mechanical error or a rogue signal present within
an electronic system and is conventionally seen as a problem. While its derivation
from the Yiddish `glit- shn', to slip, slide or glide, suggests a physical
movement, it is commonly used to describe errors in computer-based systems
that result in a short electrical pulse. This meaning can be traced back to
its usage by astronauts describing electrical malfunctions during the first
US manned space-flight in 1962. Glitchy systems are systems prone to errors,
the outcomes of which are often discern- able as small audio spikes. It is
these sounds of error and related secondary audio phenomena such as static
and interference that have become used as source material for musicians
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associated
with the music style known as glitch. From the late 1980s, a cluster of bands
such as Pan Sonic, Matmos and Oval, as well as a vast array of `sound hackers'
from Germany, Japan, the USA and elsewhere, turned to glitch as a way of creating
and performing music. Drawing on the technological artefacts of error, as
well as a rich history of avant-garde experimentation associated with elektronische
musik and musique concrète, these musicians compose music as a series of micro
incidents – bleeps, cuts, clicks and pulses – rendered by digital
techniques and tools. Not the modernist celebration of technological achievement,
then, but what Cascone (2000) has termed an `aesthetics of failure', glitch
explores the digital interruptions of machines commonly used only to omit
mistakes or improve sound. At one level, it is what happens when the idea
of human pres- ence is almost totally subordinated to the machine, when music
becomes pure programming. At another, it comprises the digital music of a
technophilic gen- eration negotiating its relationship to the history of electronic
music. Japanese-American sound artist Yasunao Toné is reported to be one of
the first musicians to exploit the internal interruptions of the CD player
as a digi- tal machine by cutting the surfaces of CDs with razor blades in
the late 1980s. Toné drew the resulting sonic fragments into compositions
such as Solo for Wounded CD, based on the glitches produced by one of his
own previous CDs. Many of the first compositions of German band Oval, similarly,
were achieved by painting small images on the undersides of CDs to make them
skip. The 1994 album Systemisch was entirely based on a CD version of Aphex
Twin's Selected Ambient Works vol. II which had been glitched by the doodlings
of a felt-tipped pen. In both cases, the sounds of technological failure had
become an inherent part of the arrangement, re-aligning a malfunction (a machinic
dis- turbance, an annoyance) with a creative gesture (a human expression,
a joy). It was during the 1990s that glitch really took off, however, as a
steady increase in the amount of music produced under the category was matched
by a visible expansion in the networks, discourses and accoutrements of glitch-
related phenomena. Not only did glitch extend the sources of error to include
computer-based system crashes, clipping and distortion, but the `scene' had
developed enough of a following and presence to warrant specialist CD compi-
lations as well as a network of independent record labels based in Germany,
France and the UK. Key support personnel such as critics gravitated to the
cat- egory as the latest in a long line of (post)modern sonic interventions
with counter-cultural connotations. Indeed, its intellectual appropriation
as avant- digital deconstruction lent it the kind of leftfield gravitas so
central to electronic arts festivals and specialist academic journals, two
of which – Parachute and Contemporary Music Review – ran special
issues on glitch and laptop music in the early 2000s. While glitch's origins
in experimental art music are significant, however, its more recent dalliance
with less restricted domains is also noteworthy. Just as electronica itself
has become relatively normalized through channels of popular and consumer
culture, so glitch has seeped into the mainstream via electronic
307
and
dance music festivals, film scores, radio airplay, as well as the odd car
and mobile phone advert. Moreover, glitch bands such as Matmos, Autechre and
Aphex Twin have attained a degree of popular (albeit far from superstar) appeal
and coverage, and the style has very quickly crystallized into an estab- lished
genre with recognizable gigs, stylistic signatures and labels – Mego,
Touch, Thrill Jockey and Mille Plateaux to name just a few. Autechre, for
instance, are signed to the popular dance-based label, Warp, and, along with
Aphex Twin, are as close to `electronic pop stars' as one gets (Davis, 2002).
The former's music involves the intricate manipulation of audio files and
the meticulous programming of digital rhythms and pulses. Sometimes called
`sound mangling' or `crunching', this technique is reliant on specialist software
programmes with names such as Cloud Generator, Reaktor and Max/MSP to generate
what Curtis Roads calls `microsound' (Roads, 2004). This is sound lasting
less than one-tenth of a second, decomposed into con- stituent particles and
presented, often during laptop performances, as sonic grainlets. With Aphex
Twin, on the other hand, digital transformations are set upon both synthesized
noises and sampled sounds from everyday scenes and locations. Richard D. James
of Aphex Twin is seen as one of the pioneers of `intelligent techno' and many
of his tracks comprise warped, bit-reduced or time-stretched vocals, multi-layered
harmonics and microtones. Like Autechre, the emphasis is on complex sonic
transformation and shredded beats `aimed as much, if not more, at the head
as at the limbs', to quote one influential music critic (Stubbs, 2003: 5).
This emphasis on the cerebral provocations of glitch is common in con- temporary
writings and directly maps onto the relatively small gap between musicians,
critics and audiences. In most cases, glitch's support writers are themselves
directly involved in the unfolding of the style, and their interventions are
either internalist in content – fulfilling aesthetic, formalist or
stylistic crite- ria – or posit glitch as somehow outside the field
through the maintenance of a cool distance from pop. From the perspective
of evolutionary formalism, for instance, the stylistic fundaments of glitch
are aligned to internalist mutations driving the history of music, the latest
in a series of socio-biological progres- sions dependent on imperfection (Sangild,
2004). From the perspective of the- oreticism, on the other hand, glitch is
a musico-philosophical intervention possessing a certain quality of alterity
onto which are piled avant-garde aspira- tions towards cultural critique,
shock and deconstruction (Cascone, 2000; Vanhanen, 2001). Glitch and the Field
of Music Production Powerful as these writings are, what is lost are the sets
of social relations that make glitch-based interventions possible, as well
as the broader socio-economic webs and networks that traverse them. Indeed,
it is precisely because descriptive histories of glitch move us towards describing
the style from within
308
Figure
1 Glitch and the field of music production (adapted from Bourdieu, 1996) that
we need to add the kinds of critical insights that Bourdieu's cultural sociology
brings. Prima facie, glitch fits Bourdieu's model rather well, its rules of
engagement mappable according to five key elements in Bourdieu's schema above.
First, while it is stretched between the two poles of production, glitch's
aes- thetic orientations are skewed towards the principles of the restricted
sub-field. This is evident in glitch's connections with, and origins in, a
rarefied world of academic computer music and audio research. In its `pure'
form, in fact, this kind of computer music stretches the limits of the possible
forms of productive activity itself: that is, the limits of the field and
therefore the limits of music, as it bleeds into `sound', `noise', `research',
and so on. Even in its less restricted forms, glitch music is aligned by critics
and musicians to a kind of `scientific approach' that yields experiments in
form (Young, 1997). This is not to assume that it is somehow self-referential
or `outside', but that it owes its experimental dispositions to certain structural
pre-conditions operative in the field itself. Second, then, glitch's protagonists
comprise a culturally-privileged fraction of specialists. My own (albeit informal)
encounters with musicians and atten- dance at glitch-related events suggest
high participation rates amongst gradu- ates with humanities, music technology
or sound design degrees, committed to innovation and autonomy. This commitment
is made possible by the accumu- lated history of the field itself, including
the positions occupied by previous electro-acoustic musicians – Pierre
Schaeffer, Iannis Xenakis and John Cage being notable figures. Glitch audiences,
on the other hand, tend to be drawn from a similarly restricted group of young
educated technophiles and aficiona- dos with a preference for experimental
art music. This includes a restricted number of other musicians who share,
as with Bourdieu's symbolist poets, a
309
structural
affinity towards autonomy. While key electronic sites of discussion such as
web-sites and discussion forums serve as semi-public means for dissem- inating
glitch-related projects and ideas (www.microsound.org is a particularly influential
staging post), bigger and wider audiences are less important than the social
quality of the audience and the production of belief regarding total cre-
ative freedom. Third, revered as the most recent example of sonic experimentation,
glitch's aesthetic credentials are regularly defended with respect to both
avant- garde practice and high theory, to the extent that critics and fans
are as likely to evoke the work of Deleuze and Guattari and describe the genre
as `rhi- zomatic' (Vanhanen, 2001: 8) as they are to place it in the pantheon
of dance music. That one of the most renowned labels of glitch is named after
Deleuze and Guattari's Mille Plateaux is a clear indication of the homologies
between educational and cultural capital, here. Transposable inclinations
between edu- cation and experimental music are revealed in a mastery of words
and concepts around discourses of glitch. Here, the importance of the consecrating
actions of influential critics is essential to the positioning of glitch as
relationally distinct from mainstream pop. Writers such as Kim Cascone, himself
a formally-trained musician and con- tributor to high-brow music magazines
such as The Wire, are significant agents in the socio-genesis and impact of
the style. Like the dense explanations accom- panying contemporary art, writings
on glitch are essential to its symbolic legit- imacy. Liner notes, in particular,
are a key site of its discursive presence, with a typical compilation bearing
a dense accompaniment of essays packed with Deleuzian allusions. Notwithstanding
the question of whether anyone reads these notes, their mere presence is testament
to a belief among those equipped with the esoteric codes that glitch is distinct.
This is why criticism is the site of an `objective connivance' (Bourdieu,
1993: 94) between readers and critics, as the homology between the two is
also a structural correspondence between the intellectual field and the readership's
location within a dominant class field.1 Through such homologies, glitch has
come to take on the symbolic credi- bility reserved for those who make a value
out of disinterestedness in a restricted position in the field. Like esoteric
forms of modernism, we might find it difficult to listen to its protagonists,
but that is partly the point. It disrupts, it `interrupts, it grabs us and
forces us outside of our habitual territory' (Vanhanen, 2001: 2). It is non-tone
as opposed to tone, particle as opposed to rhythm, middles rather than beginnings
and endings, nomadic as opposed to hierarchical. In short, while still part
of an ever fragmenting music industry, glitch is closer to what Bourdieu calls
a `research sector' (Bourdieu, 1996: 120), its position secured by an opposition
to the incumbents of more commercial styles of music dubbed as `easy' or `formulaic'.
Even the physical sites of some glitch performances are telling, many becoming
the staple diet of classical con- cert halls and avant-garde galleries. A
recent performance by Ryoji Ikeda at the Sage at Gateshead (in northern England),
for instance, had all the trappings of a classical sojourn for the refined
cultural intelligentsia, the purpose-built
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concert
hall graced by an audience that would not have looked out of place at a Schönberg
concert. Boundaries between sub-fields are not impermeable, however. Indeed,
as Bourdieu himself states: `one must be wary of establishing a clear boundary,
since they are merely two poles, defined in and by their antagonistic relation-
ship, of the same space' (Bourdieu, 1996: 120). Fourth, then, an interesting
recent development has been the way glitch as a technique and style has migrated
into more commercial forms of music. Both Björk and Radiohead have appropriated
glitchy sounds for their own works with some degree of commercial success.
In the case of her 2001 album, Vespertine, Björk even went so far as to call
in the specialist glitch band Matmos for programming duties on three of her
tracks, while Madonna's hit `Don't Tell Me' (2000) contains an array of glitchy
interruptions. Unsurprisingly, mainstream artists and produc- ers have picked
up on the fact that glitch carries with it bleeding-edge connota- tions. Just
as `cool', `edge' and `risk' have become commodified offshoots of the domestication
of the avant-garde, so glitch is becoming one of the latest targets in a long
succession of outré styles considered fair game for appropriation. Indeed,
a host of software companies are already coding glitch-making `plug- ins'
that automatically produce the sounds of computer error to order, without
the musician having to slice their CDs or tinker with the insides of computers.
This accommodation and commercialization reprises the historical trajectory
of vinyl scratch (itself once considered radical and annoying) from the likes
of Grandmaster Flash and Christian Marclay into the pop mainstream. As Bourdieu
notes, however, these ongoing struggles over classification, practice and
use are the very stuff of cultural fields. Indeed, logics of consecra- tion,
succession and subversion are essential to the positioning of cultural agents
as the game moves on. Under such conditions, glitch protagonists are regularly
forced into a position of distantiation and defence, calling for contin- uous
experimentation to stave off the risk of becoming an orthodoxy. It `must find
itself new challenges', as one critic puts it (Finney, 2001), a contemporary
manifestation of which is the formation of new sub-styles within glitch such
as `click-hop', as well as struggles between critics over the nomenclature
and clas- sifying principles of older styles such as `oceanic glitch' and
`minimal click' (Sangild, 2004). Nevertheless, despite the possibility that
it will itself be over- taken by a successive intervention as newcomers enter
the field with their own innovations in techniques of production, for the
time being glitch remains a sonic signifier of experimentation, and its defence
is felt by protagonists to be a matter of cultural purity: `Autechre's approach
is strictly antithetical to most popular music', states David Stubbs (2003,
emphasis added). Finally, there is the question of performance. Ethnomusicologists
and soci- ologists have identified the significance of live performance for
the idea of `authenticity' in rock music. While the idea of unmediated contact
with one's heroes is belied by the actual complex forms of mediation that
allow it to hap- pen – from mixing desks to pitch correction tools – there nevertheless remains a residual affirmation of a metaphysics of presence
in rock music. To witness
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the
live performance is to assume privileged access to an originary and un-automated
materiality – Benjamin's `aura', if you like, or what Antoine Hennion
calls the `primitive scene' (Hennion, 1997: 428). Music made and performed
with lap- top computers, on the other hand, is characterized by an attenuation
of the signs of humanity and presence (Prior, 2006). Typically, the laptop
performer will rely on a single computer, a mixer, a MIDI controller and a
handful of small digital boxes. The spectacle of rock is thereby replaced
by a more ascetic performance of the computer and an affirmation of the automated.
This releases a set of anxieties over who is producing what – musician
or machine. `This is clearly not rock and roll', complains Erik Davis (2002:
4). In fact, many laptop musicians maintain their symbolic distance from com-
mercial pop by playing in complete darkness, hiding their laptops in pizza
boxes or taping over their Apple logos (Toop, 2004). Thus a Bourdieusian dou-
bling is evident: what is already an icon of symbolic creativity among cultural
capital-rich producers (the Mac) is further obliterated to give added distance
from both Microsoft and corporate culture in general. Here is Cascone describ-
ing just such a distance: `The resulting difficulty most people have with
laptop performance is exacerbated by the fact that most people today arrive
at elec- tronic music through the cultural framework (and hence expectations)
of pop culture' (Cascone, 2001: 2). For Cascone, laptop performance belongs,
instead, to the live experiments of avant-garde composers such as John Cage,
its dis- tance from the spectacle of rock enforced by a kind of performed
alienation and deferment of presence. Bourdieu's Hits We can begin to see,
then, how the field concept can `sociologize' spheres of cul- tural practice
in important ways. As an overall map of the terrain of culture and its dialogues
with power, the field orients us to positional co-ordinates and their logics.
It shows us how alliances and differentiations really matter in the mak- ing
of movements, genres and styles – yet also how manoeuvres between and
within such styles still end up reinforcing a collective adherence to the
value of playing it, Bourdieu's illusio. It finesses our approach to the music
world by describing how the cultural field is internally configured according
to a series of associations and schisms between genres, institutions and associated
personnel. It also makes good sociological sense of the pre-conditions of
autonomy, mov- ing us away from statements that affirm the cultural `independence'
of musi- cians without reflecting on how this independence is actually a profound
dependence on the joint histories of habitus and field. As for broader, contextual
issues, the field concept gives us analytical pur- chase on the mechanism
by which spheres of practice like music re-translate the incursions of economic
and political forces. I do not have the space to develop this, but a more
substantive article would need to ask, as scholars like Paul Théberge have
done, how the take-up of music technologies feeds off global
312
circuits
of the commodity and the structure of the contemporary music instru- ment
industry (Théberge, 1997). It is no accident, after all, that a geographical
shift in the consumer electronics industry to East and Southeast Asia – led by companies such as Sony, Panasonic, Roland, Korg and Yamaha – mirrored the take-off of the Pacific `bubble economy' during the 1970s and
1980s and changes in global patterns of productive activity and trade (Chandler,
2005; Gregory, 1985). Again, the precise effects of these global forces depend
on the intermediaries of specific forces and forms of the field, but they
are forces nonetheless. If pushed a little further, Bourdieu's ideas might
even be able to make sense of the gendered conditions under which glitch functions:
not perhaps the rhetorical emergence of post-gendered cyborgs a la Donna Haraway
or Deleuze's `Body without Organs', but the re-entrenchment of the Mensch-
Maschine of male electronic bands and macho technophilia. Although women are
making electronic music, they are still constrained to a large degree by ide-
ologies of technical incompetence, sexualization and subjectification (Friz,
2004). Bourdieu's attempts to incorporate gender into his analysis have not
always been well received by feminists. Nevertheless, the relative lack of
women in the glitch scene, particularly compared to rock and pop, might be
sighted through the concepts of habitus and `symbolic violence' in a field
whose net- working mechanisms and rules are inclined towards male games. This
is even more important given the uncritical celebration of glitch by high
theorists and academics who, at one and the same time, laud the style as a
line of flight from convention but disavow the privileged social origins of
the protagonists. Bourdieu's Glitches And yet for all these benefits, there
is still something missing. No concept, of course, is perfect, but cracks
are beginning to show in Bourdieu's ideas. Recent attacks on him for ignoring
the sensuous specificities of art, getting Kant wrong, and over-sociologizing
the aesthetic encounter are mounting up, even among sociologists, while the
claim that he fails to adequately explain social or cultural transformation
is well known (Hennion, 2007; Jenkins, 1992). I want to leave these questions
aside, for now, to concentrate on another problem to do with technology. Bourdieu
rarely addresses technology. Even the article `Men and Machines', which one
might reasonably assume to be Bourdieu's big statement on the topic, is concerned
with organizational structures such as bureaucracies (Bourdieu, 1981). In
later works such as On Television and Journalism (1998) Bourdieu opts for
a diatribe against the industrialization of popular media, without once reflecting
on the different forms that media tech- nologies themselves take and the consequences – intended and unintended – of their existence.2 Bourdieu's collaborative
study, Photography (1990), contains a few scattered comments regarding how
different camera groups either embrace or reject photographic technologies
depending on their social class
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origins,
but it is telling that these comments belong to the chapters written by Bourdieu's
collaborators. Equally telling is the alarmingly thin analysis of the sociology
of technology in the posthumous work Science of Science and Reflexivity (2004),
where Bourdieu largely ignores the contribution made by science and technology
studies (STS). Well, perhaps these are just missing details and oversights.
After all, Bourdieu cannot be expected to cover everything. Indeed, it is
entirely possible to construct a Bourdieu-inspired take on technology without
too much diffi- culty. Jonathan Sterne, for instance, has argued that Bourdieu's
sociology `allows us to consider the domain of struggle over what is and what
is not “technological''' and to wrestle with technology as a `little
crystallized set of operations incorporated into the habitus' (Sterne, 2003:
370, 372). This con- nects with the ways the body incorporates the social
as a memory, but also with how different social groups use and consume technologies
in different ways. In the case of glitch, for instance, we could quite easily
plot how hierarchies of capital correspond to different choices and uses made
of particular technologies such as software applications.3 This would follow
a logic whereby the more popular an application is, the less likely it will
be adopted in good faith by avant-gardistes. We could also examine how techniques
of authoring highlight dispositional consumption practices and aesthetic investments
in the field: does the musician use samples from mass-produced CDs or generate
their own audio material in the field? Do they use preset sounds bundled with
software appli- cations or programme their own sounds and patches? Do they
use a Mac – the sine qua non of the `culturally enlightened' – or a PC? These are all lines of inquiry befitting a field approach. Still,
if we keep ask- ing these questions, we are left continuously rehearsing the
mantra of technol- ogy as an instrumental `badge' or a `thing' that secures
and reproduces. Technologies rarely open up, they close down; they are technical
and symbolic resources, extra weapons in the game. What is missing here, I
would suggest, is the texture of technology, not just in relation to the more
phenomenological aspects of tweaking and twiddling but also to the multifarious
modifications and translations that technologies afford, to their efficacy
beyond reproduction, to what they make possible. ANTs to the Rescue? It has
been an insight of actor network theorists (ANTs) such as Latour and Callon
to explain the importance of non-human actors in the social world. Actors
like chemicals, airbags and door knobs impose their presence in all sorts
of ways that make them partners in interaction. This means that action is
no longer perceived as the sole realm of the human actor, but also the realm
of the non-human actor, including the technological artefact. For their presence,
the world is not exactly as it was before, a positivity has been made that
changes the course of events. This position adds to Becker's (1982) notion
of an `art
314
world'
as collective activity the important understanding that techniques, set- tings
and devices exchange their properties with humans. These entities com- prise
a cluster of elements – inanimate and animate – that might at
any point add their identities and relationships into the collective (Callon,
1987). When one opens action up like this, the points of articulation and
influence between a range of entities are enlarged such that `production'
becomes a full and expansive concept. It also allows for a degree of slippage
between the pre- scriptions encoded in the manufacture of artefacts, implying
what Latour calls the `inscribed reader' (Latour, 1988: 307) and the unforeseen
uses that these technologies end up affording through breakdown, error and
misuse. Indeed, the history of music bulges with cases that point to the unpredictable,
produc- tive and unstable: turntables as DJ instruments, monophonic bassline
genera- tors such as the Roland TB303 mis-programmed to beget acid house,
telephone bandwidth-saving technologies turned into vocoders. Perhaps the
computer itself might be a case where digital audio flexibility and the increasing
availability of music software sends all sorts of forces into the practices
of music making and the inevitability of new forms and genres. After all,
glitch is glitch (and not grunge, hip hop, trip hop or drum and bass) not
just because of its field position as conventionally understood by Bourdieu; not just because of the habitus-derived uses its protagonists have made of
hard- ware and software; but also because of these technologies themselves.
That is to say, the gathering of digital objects around glitch changes not
only how the music is made, but also what the music `is'. The codes, the coding,
the graphic user interface, the CDs, the various hardware interfaces and their
design – these all make a difference. They do not determine the style
alone, but neither are they merely a backdrop to, or weapon for, the purposeful
action of the acquis- itive human actor. They are objects essential to the
relay of social relations in the formation of glitch to the same extent as
non-human objects are in the for- mation of all styles and genres. We might,
indeed, speculate that Bourdieu fails to tackle non-human objects head on
precisely because they introduce elements of presence, uncertainty and deviation
into fields in a way that poses a series of problems to Bourdieu's own schema.
One does violence to the intricacies of the social world when technology is
framed as a passive recipient, tool or `subset' of the habitus enacted in
fields (Sterne, 2003: 370) and not also an active force in those fields. Adequacy
can only be attained in the sociology of music if enough space is given to
how machines produce as well as get produced, enable as well as constrain,
act as well as react. This recognition is important in a contemporary context
where musicians enter into increasingly immersive relations with their instruments
and form increasingly complex machine-body assemblages. Yet, throughout music
history, as Hennion has shown, material devices such as scores, concert staging,
acoustic treatments and musical texts have always formed an `interconnected
series of mediations … creating an irreversible movement which none
of them alone would have been able to achieve' (Hennion, 1997: 424).
315
Do
these devices have independent agency? Of course not. In fact, warning bells
should start to ring at the point at which technology is claimed to possess
a radically autonomous `life of its own'. Among other flaws, this accepts
the terms of reference of the computer music industry itself where the `revolutionary
quali- ties' of each successive device feeds a belief in its transformative
power and sepa- ration from social settings. One needs to be guarded against
work that claims a self-organized, machinic evolution and genesis of technology
independent of its uses and meanings amidst social spheres of practice. This
is precisely the reason why the best work in actor network theory alerts us
to how the technical and the social are inextricably linked, in turn sensitizing
us to the fact that instruments and associated devices are not passive intermediaries
but active mediators. Such a position gets us beyond the tendency shared by
certain traditions in the sociology of art, particularly prevalent among `production
of culture' scholars, to separate `distribution' as a self-contained set of
organizational practices and locate tech- nology as a separate mediating process
or infrastructure. It is just not possible, during the process of what Small
(1998) calls `musicking', to distinguish between discrete logics belonging
to the technical, the aesthetic and the sociological. And it is certainly
not the case in music production that sociological questions are more relevant
at the point at which the product finds its way through distribution pro-
cesses, leaving the creative process itself to aesthetics or musicology. Conclusion:Temporary
Alliances So, a series of questions present themselves. Is it possible to
keep the field concept intact while allowing for a more agential approach
to technology? Should we drop the field completely as too clotted and static,
or work with it but twist it in the pro- cess of application? More generally,
to what extent can Bourdieu's ideas be used alongside those of actor network
theorists without conceptual negation? After all, theorists like Callon (1987)
have explicitly positioned themselves against Bourdieu in some of their writings,
claiming that power is not merely a stock of capital (however one differentiates
it), but is composed and performed by networks com- prising heterogeneous
associations between `traditional' social actors and non- human entities.
Latour's invocation of a `flat' conception of the social, on the other hand,
is also a critique of conceptions of society like Bourdieu's which attempt
some compromise between actor and system-led explanations. The trick, Latour
claims, is not to find some sophisticated balance `between the two clichés
of social science' (Latour, 2005: 170) but to redraw the map of the social
such that `action is always dislocated, articulated, delegated, translated'
(p. 166). Yet, a logic of differentiation afflicts social theorists as much
as musicians and we would be remiss to simply cast aside points of contact
without taking stock of how one set of theories might supplement, reinforce
or solidify the other. From this exercise in mutual engagement, sharper and
more relevant tools may be forged or modifications to pre-existing concepts
suggested.
316
Indeed,
Latour himself states that while Bourdieu's emphasis on social distinc- tion
and Goffman's interactionist accounts are `not wrong', they remain only basic
starting points in approaches to bundles of action, including the `many entanglements
of human and non-humans' (Latour, 2005: 84). Here, one could conceive of theoretically-grounded
empirical studies of music that, at one and the same time, look for dynamic
relations between musicians, genres and bands à la Bourdieu, but do not discount
how these relations are also joined by other types of materials coming into
play. This would adhere to Latour's call to increase `the type of actors at
work' (Latour, 2005: 64) at the same time as rec- ognizing the historically-developed
space of relations in which actors struggle. To return to the case of glitch,
then, one needs to hold together objects, tra- jectories and materials without
losing sight of its socially organized formation in successive phases of attachment
and opposition. The field clearly does set cer- tain limits, particularly
in how specific modes of operation and intervention among glitch musicians
are played out, but glitch is also held together by an array of other objects
which populate these relations and without which the style becomes unthinkable:
transistors, electrical pulses, keyboards, software, graphic user interfaces,
laptops, CDs, digital signal processing tools, the inter- net. It is the latter,
for instance, that has been the proliferating condition of knowledge under
which glitch musicians have learned the tricks of the trade, including how
to use and abuse particular forms of software; it is an earlier breakdown
in the material properties of technologies such as the CD and CD player that
gave glitch its source materials; and it is the visual streams and blocks
of MIDI data in applications such as Ableton Live, Max/MSP and AudioMulch
that have enjoined the glitch musician in new modes of working. If we say
that these objects are not merely badges of social distinction, then it follows
that we need to examine their properties and attachments in greater depth
than is conventional in the sociology of music, necessitating a more char-
itable orientation to the performative and integrating ability of things to
fix and hold the social. Indeed, what better way of making sense of the way
glitch rep- resents an inter-meshing of humans and technologies at one and
the same time as it has accreted symbolic validity in a field of relations
than to strategically deploy insights from both Bourdieu and ANTs. One only
has to see (or be the victim of) a spectacular laptop failure in a live gig
situation to see how impor- tant technologies are in stabilizing the order
of things, even while recovery may be a product of the glitch musician's `feel
for the game', turning unexpected glitches into new sources of the glitch.
In any case, such a commitment to glitch's materiality is not to ignore the
position-takings of the musicians, critics and labels themselves, but to examine
human and non-human materials as co- producers of the field, as heterogeneous
assemblages on-goingly exchanging their properties in relatively structured
settings: to open the black box of tech- nology as well as the well-regulated
ballet of the field. While it remains the case that the field is one of the
most sophisticated frameworks we have, it should not be wielded uncritically
without articulations (Prior, 2005). Only when applied with caveats and supplemented
with
317
additional
interventions can it be usefully put to work. It is not watertight, but if
tweaked to allow for moments of disruption and the unscripted, for the non-
human and the transformative, it might be able to confront the challenges
posed by the emergence of genres such as glitch. To invoke the metaphor of
the prism, sighting the actor network through the field and vice versa might
give us some valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of both.
This would be to create temporary intellectual adjunctions between two of
the most advanced tools available, not necessarily to synthesize them, but
to create points of fric- tion in a spirit of mutual critical practice. In
this process, we do not disavow the blind spots within contemporary theories,
but rather deploy them in pro- ductive ways to reveal how the blanks might
be filled. Only through this move- ment will a theoretically-advanced sociology
of music be able to tackle the intricacies of contemporary style, form and
practice. Acknowledgements I am grateful to discussants of previous incarnations
of this article and to the many musicians whose practices I have been observing
during its writing.
Notes
1 A single exchange reveals
these homologies. In 1995 a journalist from the British classical radio station,
BBC Radio 3, took it upon himself to send avant-garde composer Karlheinz
Stockhausen a selection of works from bands such as Aphex Twin and Scanner.
The ensuing commentary follows a typically Bourdieusian logic of conservation,
succession and `social ageing', as Stockhausen moves to recognize the experimental
credentials of the newcomers but distances himself from their naivety and
repetition (Cox and Warner, 2004).
2 Including the possibility
of Bourdieu's own appearance on television where On Television and Journalism
was first aired.
3 With respect to software
programmes, there is a clear symbolic hierarchy homologous to degrees of autonomy
within the field. Towards the autonomous pole are highly-specialized programmes
such as Max/MSP. This programme is commonly used in music departments in
universities and among experimental musicians. Towards the middle are more
popular studio emulation programmes such as Cubase, Logic and Reason that
map onto a more diffuse middle market of amateurs and musicians. Towards the
commercial pole are a series of entertainment-based packages more suited to
Karaoke and computer gaming, such as E-jay.
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Nick
Prior Nick Prior is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh
and author of Museums and Modernity (Berg, 2002) as well as numerous articles
in the sociology of art, culture and urban sociology. His most recent articles
are `A Question of Perception: Bourdieu, Art and the Postmodern', British
Journal of Sociology (2005) and `Postmodern Restructurings', in Companion
to Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald (2006). He is currently undertaking
research in the sociology of music, particularly the impact of digital technologies
on music production. Address: Sociology, SPSS, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh,
EH8 9LL, UK. Email: n.prior@ed.ac.uk</meta-value></custom-meta></custom-meta-wrap></article-meta></front><back><notes><p><list list-type="order"><list-item><p>1 A single exchange reveals these homologies. In 1995 a journalist from the British classical radio station, BBC Radio 3, took it upon himself to send avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen a selection of works from bands such as Aphex Twin and Scanner. The ensuing commentary follows a typically Bourdieusian logic of conservation, succession and `social ageing', as Stockhausen moves to recognize the experimental credentials of the newcomers but distances himself from their naivety and repetition (Cox and Warner, 2004).</p></list-item><list-item><p>2 Including the possibility of Bourdieu's own appearance on television where <italic>On Television and Journalism</italic> was first aired.</p></list-item><list-item><p>3 With respect to software programmes, there is a clear symbolic hierarchy homologous to degrees of autonomy within the field. Towards the autonomous pole are highly-specialized programmes such as Max/MSP. This programme is commonly used in music departments in universities and among experimental musicians. Towards the middle are more popular studio emulation programmes such as Cubase, Logic and Reason that map onto a more diffuse middle market of amateurs and musicians. Towards the commercial pole are a series of entertainment-based packages more suited to Karaoke and computer gaming, such as E-jay.</p></list-item></list></p></notes><ref-list><ref><citation citation-type="book" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Becker, H.</surname></name> (<year>1982</year>) <source>Art Worlds</source>. <publisher-loc>Berkeley</publisher-loc>: <publisher-name>University of California Press</publisher-name>.</citation></ref><ref><citation citation-type="book" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Bourdieu, P.</surname></name> (<year>1981</year>) <source>`Men and Machines'</source>, in <name name-style="western"><surname>K. Knorr-Cetina</surname></name> and <name name-style="western"><surname>A.V. Cicourel</surname></name> (eds) <source>Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies</source>, pp. <fpage>305</fpage>-<lpage>15</lpage>. <publisher-loc>Boston, MA</publisher-loc>.: <publisher-name>Routledge and Kegan Paul</publisher-name>.</citation></ref><ref><citation citation-type="book" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Bourdieu, P.</surname></name> (<year>1984</year>) <source>Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste</source>. <publisher-loc>London</publisher-loc>: <publisher-name>Routledge and Kegan Paul</publisher-name>.</citation></ref><ref><citation citation-type="book" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Bourdieu, P.</surname></name> (<year>1990</year>) In <source>Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology</source> . <publisher-loc>Cambridge</publisher-loc>: <publisher-name>Polity</publisher-name>.</citation></ref><ref><citation citation-type="book" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Bourdieu, P.</surname></name> (<year>1993</year>) <source>The Field of Cultural Production</source>. <publisher-loc>Cambridge</publisher-loc>: <publisher-name>Polity</publisher-name>.</citation></ref><ref><citation citation-type="book" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Bourdieu, P.</surname></name> (<year>1996</year>) <source>The Rules of Art</source>. <publisher-loc>Cambridge</publisher-loc> : <publisher-name>Polity</publisher-name>.</citation></ref><ref><citation citation-type="book" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Bourdieu, P.</surname></name> (<year>1998</year>) <source>On Television and Journalism</source>. <publisher-loc>London</publisher-loc>: <publisher-name>Pluto</publisher-name>.</citation></ref><ref><citation citation-type="book" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Bourdieu, P.</surname></name> (<year>2004</year>) <source>Science of Science and Reflexivity</source>. <publisher-loc>Cambridge</publisher-loc>: <publisher-name>Polity</publisher-name>.</citation></ref><ref><citation citation-type="book" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Bourdieu, P.</surname></name> and <name name-style="western"><surname>Wacquant, L.</surname></name> (<year>1992</year>) <source>An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology</source>. <publisher-loc>Cambridge</publisher-loc>: <publisher-name>Polity</publisher-name>.</citation></ref><ref><citation citation-type="book" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Bourdieu, P.</surname></name> et al. (<year>1990</year>) <source>Photography: A Middle-Brow Art</source>. <publisher-loc>Cambridge</publisher-loc>: <publisher-name>Polity</publisher-name>.</citation></ref><ref><citation citation-type="book" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Callon, M.</surname></name> (<year>1987</year>) <source>`Society in the Making: The Study of Technology as a Tool for Sociological Analysis'</source>, in <name name-style="western"><surname>W.E. Bijker</surname></name> et al. 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URL (consulted 12 July 2008): <uri xlink:type="simple">http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/29/</uri></citation></ref></ref-list></back></article></istex:document></istex:metadataXml><mods version="3.6"><titleInfo lang="en"><title>Putting a Glitch in the Field: Bourdieu, Actor Network Theory and Contemporary Music</title></titleInfo><titleInfo type="alternative" lang="en" contentType="CDATA"><title>Putting a Glitch in the Field: Bourdieu, Actor Network Theory and Contemporary Music</title></titleInfo><name type="personal"><namePart type="given">Nick</namePart><namePart type="family">Prior</namePart><affiliation>University of Edinburgh, UK,</affiliation><affiliation>E-mail: n.prior@ed.ac.uk</affiliation></name><typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource><genre type="research-article" displayLabel="research-article" authority="ISTEX" authorityURI="https://content-type.data.istex.fr" valueURI="https://content-type.data.istex.fr/ark:/67375/XTP-1JC4F85T-7">research-article</genre><originInfo><publisher>SAGE Publications</publisher><place><placeTerm type="text">Sage UK: London, England</placeTerm></place><dateIssued encoding="w3cdtf">2008-11</dateIssued><copyrightDate encoding="w3cdtf">2008</copyrightDate></originInfo><language><languageTerm type="code" authority="iso639-2b">eng</languageTerm><languageTerm type="code" authority="rfc3066">en</languageTerm></language><abstract lang="en">Bourdieu's cultural sociology has become increasingly attractive to sociologists of music looking to account for the complex interrelations between industry, institution and practice. There remains, however, a tendency in such work to reduce the complexity and scope of Bourdieu's ideas. This paper attempts to apply Bourdieu's field theory to music, but does so with a critical orientation. The focus of the paper is the fin de millénaire music style called glitch, a style characterized by sonic fragments of technological error. While we learn a lot about the social trajectories of glitch from greater sensitization to its position in a structured setting of socio-economic relations, it becomes difficult to account for the centrality of technological mediators to this contemporary style of music using Bourdieu's categories alone. The paper pursues the possibility of supplementing or combining a Bourdieusian approach with actor network theory.</abstract><subject><genre>keywords</genre><topic>actor network theory Bourdieu</topic><topic>field</topic><topic>glitch</topic><topic>Latour</topic><topic>sociology of music</topic><topic>sociology of technology</topic></subject><relatedItem type="host"><titleInfo><title>Cultural sociology</title></titleInfo><genre type="journal" authority="ISTEX" authorityURI="https://publication-type.data.istex.fr" valueURI="https://publication-type.data.istex.fr/ark:/67375/JMC-0GLKJH51-B">journal</genre><identifier type="ISSN">1749-9755</identifier><identifier type="eISSN">1749-9763</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID">CUS</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID-hwp">spcus</identifier><part><date>2008</date><detail type="volume"><caption>vol.</caption><number>2</number></detail><detail type="issue"><caption>no.</caption><number>3</number></detail><extent unit="pages"><start>301</start><end>319</end></extent></part></relatedItem><identifier type="istex">0D95752C9C95CB93795307D24D2B2C89476B2C89</identifier><identifier type="ark">ark:/67375/M70-PV2FN9GG-D</identifier><identifier type="DOI">10.1177/1749975508095614</identifier><identifier type="ArticleID">10.1177_1749975508095614</identifier><recordInfo><recordContentSource authority="ISTEX" authorityURI="https://loaded-corpus.data.istex.fr" valueURI="https://loaded-corpus.data.istex.fr/ark:/67375/XBH-0J1N7DQT-B">sage</recordContentSource></recordInfo></mods><json:item><extension>json</extension><original>false</original><mimetype>application/json</mimetype><uri>https://api.istex.fr/document/0D95752C9C95CB93795307D24D2B2C89476B2C89/metadata/json</uri></json:item></metadata><serie></serie></istex></record>Pour manipuler ce document sous Unix (Dilib)
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