The Ideologized Field of Cultural Production? Art Versus Commerce Versus Politics, or: The Artistic World Reversed

Scholars have redeveloped Bourdieusian field theory, originally developed on the basis of 19th century and late 20th century societies, to account for globalization and transnationalization (cf Buchholz, 2016), in arts and culture but also in other fields. Yet Bourdieusian field theory has not been updated for another major transformation: the climate crisis. Touching all spheres of society and threatening the survival of our ecological and social systems, the climate crisis draws political attention to fields, like the cultural field and challenges these fields’ relative autonomy. Both in Bourdieusian and post-Bourdieusian analyses of the cultural field, the focus is on culture as the negation of the economy (Bourdieu, 1993). However, the climate crisis foregrounds another negation: of the political-ideological.

Our paper takes the case of the cultural field of fashion to demonstrate how the climate crisis enforces political engagement and makes ideology salient into relatively autonomous cultural fields. Our analysis of fashion legislation, magazines, journalists, and digital intermediaries shows how political actors, from activists to lawmakers, enter the field to form coalitions and spread ideologies that challenge or defend the status quo of a cultural field predicated on ecologically destructive practices. This ‘ideologization’ ultimately leads to the introduction of a second heteronomous pole, next to the heteronomous pole of the market, changing the logic of the field from a bipolar opposition of (high status) aesthetics versus (low status) commerce, to a threefold logic opposing aesthetics vs politics vs commerce. This threefold logic reshapes the doxa of the field, leading to new op/positions in the field, and causing the players in the field to develop new strategies to (not) deal with the climate crisis. We thus offer a redevelopment of field theory for the unique of the climate crisis to not only cultural fields, but more broadly to the contemporary fielded societies.