Adapting the Cultural Production Approach for the Study of the Cultural Field in Authoritarian Regimes

When studying cultural production under authoritarian regimes, the question is: what theory to use? Most of the dominant social theories have emerged in the "free" (also known as Western or global North) world, characterised by relatively democratic political regimes. Theories of cultural production are thus constructed for a space where two forces are dominant: the market and the aesthetic struggle (Becker, Bourdieu, Peterson). However, in the case of authoritarian regimes, there is another force that may be stronger than these two. This is the state's control of the market and its control of symbolic production. Cultural consumption in non-democratic conditions in the USSR has been conceptualised by Yurchak (2005); interventions of different political regimes in the economic and symbolic production of culture have also been much studied empirically, but rarely conceptualised and adapted into theories that would also apply to non-democratic societies. Bourdieu and other cultural production approaches assume that social space is a series of relatively autonomous fields, and that the field of cultural production is the same. In it, the outcome of production is determined by the capitals of individual agents, organisations and instrastructures. However, under a non-democratic regime, each of these systems, which ensure the production, distribution, evaluation, teaching, preservation of cultural products (Peterson 2001) and even each individual (through self-censorship) is interwoven and controlled in different ways by authoritarian power. This leads the theory to highlight the institutional component alongside the micro- and organisational levels of sociology, assuming that the controlling power of an all-intersecting regime operates as a super-force above economic relations and aesthetic competition. Progress in the study of culture results from explicitly comparative institutional analyses of the same cultural fields in different places and at different times, and among different realms of cultural production, as Richard Peterson (1976) has long pointed out.