Governing cultural fields

How is it possible to combine Bourdieu’s account of the cultural field with a focus on practices that can be described, after Foucault, as “governmental”? Despite the radical incompatibility of the two approaches, there are indeed several major studies that have done just this. Rather than lament such methodological pluralism, this chapter suggests that recent moves within cultural sociology to problematise and revise Bourdieu’s key terms are favourable to such a project. Such critiques call for a return to “practice theory”, one that might admit the integrity of practice assemblages in relation to fields. Such an approach permits a more modest account of the role of fields in organising cultural practices and a more sociologically plausible account of the “governmental” conception of culture.