The Politics of Interfield Antagonisms

Abstract

Bourdieu’s field theory has been used to analyse the internal dynamics of the journalistic field, and to compare journalistic fields in different national contexts. However, studies of the power relations between the journalistic field and other social fields have been less common, despite the theory’s general assumptions about “the media’s” capacity to shape the coordinates and subjectivities of agents elsewhere. This article explores the interfield antagonisms between the journalistic field and visual arts field that followed the nomination of the artist collective “et al.” as New Zealand’s representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale. We focus on a particular journalistic interview where the different subjectivities of both fields encountered each other directly. Using conversation and discourse analysis as methodological supplements, we highlight how the journalist’s rhetorical strategies enacted a logic of symbolic domination which decried the perceived unwillingness of the artists to render themselves accountable to the New Zealand “public”. At the same time, we show how et al.’s counter-response politicized journalistic conventions normally taken for granted, and enabled an expression of artistic autonomy against the symbolic violence and naturalized authority of the journalistic field.

KEYWORDS:

• antagonism
• conversation analysis
• cultural politics
• field theory
• interview
• New Zealand journalism
• visual arts

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. By field, we mean the “objective relations” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 97) that structure the practices of those occupying similar social and institutional spaces.

2. The historical relationship between journalism and the visual arts—in New Zealand and elsewhere—has been uneasy. Szántó (2001, 183) suggests when art becomes “hard” news, it is easily “hijacked by those with non-art agendas”.

3. After a popular art historian described the 2004 et al. exhibit, rapture, as “the donkey in the dunny” in the first television report, the donkey became a dominant motif in media discourse, though it had nothing to do with the Venice exhibit. The descriptor obscured the conceptual richness of the rapture exhibit, which referenced the 1996 underground nuclear tests carried out by the French government in the Pacific.

4. Our understanding of discourse analysis draws on Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) and Laclau and Mouffe (2001); explicating the differences between approaches is not our concern here. We see discourse as more than a linguistic phenomenon; it signifies forms of meaning-making that structure the links between linguistic and extra-linguistic practices.

5. Bourdieu (1990, 56) defines habitus as an “embodied history” of the dispositions that have structured an agent’s social subjectivity.

6. We refer to et al. by their plural, collective identity, consistent with the artists’ own practice. As is well-known within New Zealand art circles, the individual artists that comprise et al. are pseudonyms for artist Merylyn Tweedie.

7. Laclau and Mouffe (2001) conceptualize identities as constituted through their antagonistic relation to that which they are not—to an “other” that stands outside, or at the limits, of a social identity or formation.

8. The Labour government in power during the controversy embraced the concepts of the “creative industries” and “cultural economy”, replicating the “third way” cultural policy discourses circulating elsewhere (Hesmondhalgh 2002). Creative New Zealand’s funding grew progressively during Labour’s tenure. Supporting the participation of New Zealand artists at Venice Biennale therefore coincided with government policy objectives.

9. Our analysis was affirmed in a brief e-mail interview between et al. and the main author. In response to a question about media “misrepresentation” of their work, the artist collective replied: “summed up superbly and correctly” (et al., personal communication, July 30, 2009).