Genre and Autonomy in Cultural Production: The case of travel guidebook production

Alačovska, Ana Doctoral Thesis Genre and Autonomy in Cultural Production: The case of travel guidebook production PhD Series, No. 21.2013 Provided in Cooperation with: Copenhagen Business School (CBS) Suggested Citation: Alačovska, Ana (2013) : Genre and Autonomy in Cultural Production: The case of travel guidebook production, PhD Series, No. 21.2013, ISBN 9788792977557, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Frederiksberg, https://hdl.handle.net/10398/8703 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/208856 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Ana Ala č ovska PhD Series 21.2013 PhD Series 21.2013 Genre and Autonomy in Cultural Production copenhagen business school handelshøjskolen solbjerg plads 3 dk-2000 frederiksberg danmark www.cbs.dk ISSN 0906-6934 Print ISBN: 978-87-92977-54-0 Online ISBN: 978-87-92977-55-7 Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies Genre and Autonomy in Cultural Production The case of travel guidebook production COPENHAGEN BUSINESS SCHOOL GENRE AND AUTONOMY IN CULTURAL PRODUCTION THE CASE OF TRAVEL GUIDEBOOK PRODUCTION Ana Alacovska 3/14/2013 Ana Alačovska Genre and Autonomy in Cultural Production The case of travel guidebook production 1st edition 2013 PhD Series 21.2013 © The Author ISSN 0906-6934 Print ISBN: 978-87-92977-54-0 Online ISBN: 978-87-92977-55-7 The Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies (OMS) is an interdisciplinary research environment at Copenhagen Business School for PhD students working on theoretical and empirical themes related to the organisation and management of private, public and voluntary organizations. All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...................................................................................................................................... 5 PRELUDE ............................................................................................................................................................ 7 The story of a rogue travel guidebook writer .................................................................................................... 7 Travel guidebooks: a lowly genre and hack writers .................................................................................... 12 Travel guidebooks: reference publishing .................................................................................................... 13 In the wake of the scandal of the factual genre .......................................................................................... 14 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................... 16 The place and role of genres in cultural production: an intellectual Odyssey ............................................ 16 Hermeneutics: genres as production categories that mediate authorial action .................................... 18 Reception studies: genre-bound productivity of reception .................................................................... 28 ‘Cultural industries approach’: the study of creative labour (and genres) ............................................. 33 Sociology of culture/cultural sociology: the shifting causality of genres ................................................ 38 From ‘a hermeneutic sociology of art’ and ‘sociological hermeneutics’ to ‘structuralist hermeneutics’ 46 Genres matter: the interpretive approach to media production ............................................................ 63 Conclusion: genres as an analytical category .......................................................................................... 72 Methodological approach ........................................................................................................................... 76 Formal properties: identifying genre dominants .................................................................................... 76 Life story interviews ................................................................................................................................ 77 ‘Fieldwork on foot’ while ‘thinking aloud’ ............................................................................................... 79 Paratextual analysis ................................................................................................................................. 82 CHAPTER 1 ....................................................................................................................................................... 83 CULTURAL PRODUCTION: THREE PARADIGMS ................................................................................................ 83 The ‘grand tradition’ of cultural production ............................................................................................... 83 Sociological paradigm of cultural production: fields and art worlds........................................................... 86 ‘A good player’ and ‘good work’: practical mastery ................................................................................ 90 Negligence of the cultural object ............................................................................................................ 96 Anthropological paradigm of cultural production ..................................................................................... 100 Empirical study of genres ...................................................................................................................... 104 Socio-cultural analysis: generative legacy of Adorno and Williams .......................................................... 108 Adorno: musico-technical approach ..................................................................................................... 108 Williams: social formalism and cultural materialism............................................................................. 111 Adorno-Williams: ‘positive mediation’ .................................................................................................. 113 3 CHAPTER 2 ..................................................................................................................................................... 116 GENRE IN ACTION .......................................................................................................................................... 116 The idea of culture as a ‘tool-kit’ for action .............................................................................................. 116 The genre takes the lead ........................................................................................................................... 120 Effectiveness of genres: genres as an institution ...................................................................................... 122 Genres as tools and resources: enacting genre worlds ............................................................................. 127 Genre as a set of affordances .................................................................................................................... 131 Genre’s properties: dominants or the laws of the genre .......................................................................... 136 The methodological import ....................................................................................................................... 137 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 140 CHAPTER 3 ..................................................................................................................................................... 142 PROPERTIES OF THE GENRE: GENRE DOMINANTS ........................................................................................ 142 Non-Fictionality: factuality or reference to actuality ................................................................................ 145 Didacticity: emancipatory role or performativity ...................................................................................... 152 The dominants and production practice ................................................................................................... 157 CHAPTER 4 ..................................................................................................................................................... 159 GENERIFICATION OF THE INDUSTRY, INSTITUTIONALISATION OF THE GENRE............................................. 159 Paratextual analysis: betwixt and between .............................................................................................. 160 Industrial self-reflexivity as genre-enabled self-definition .................................................................... 162 Whose origins? .......................................................................................................................................... 163 Institutionalising the genre: proto-genres and the publishing industry ............................................... 164 Mediating power of genres: the myth of origin .................................................................................... 169 The constitutive modus operandi of the genre ......................................................................................... 174 The vow to ‘perfect accuracy’: an implicit contract .............................................................................. 176 From douceur to quid-pro-quo ............................................................................................................. 191 Performativity: the infelicity of the genre ............................................................................................. 193 From guide-book publishers to travel information businesses ................................................................. 196 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 197 CHAPTER 5 ..................................................................................................................................................... 200 AUTOBIOGRAPHIES AND GENRES ................................................................................................................. 200 Auto-biography ...................................................................................................................................... 203 Becoming a travel writer ........................................................................................................................... 207 Traveller’s tales: displacement and guidebooks ................................................................................... 209 4 Writers’ tales: acquiring genre-related capital ...................................................................................... 214 Genre-related expertise: publishers, contracts, genres and parachute artists ......................................... 219 Configuring expertise: ‘a job done well’ and the genre ........................................................................ 227 CHAPTER 6 ..................................................................................................................................................... 236 GENRES AND MARKETS ................................................................................................................................. 236 On genres and markets ............................................................................................................................. 236 Leveraging expertise: Straddling genres and markets .......................................................................... 238 Entrapped in the genre .......................................................................................................................... 246 Partings/exit: self-publishing ................................................................................................................. 249 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 254 CHAPTER 7 ..................................................................................................................................................... 259 AESTHETIC AND ETHICAL CHOICES IN-THE-MAKING: A CRAFTSMANSHIP ORIENTATION TO WORK ........... 259 Craft ethos and practical mastery: in pursuit of excellence ...................................................................... 259 Editorial briefs and genres ..................................................................................................................... 261 Spreadsheet culture: ‘stick to your brief’ .................................................................................................. 263 Aesthetic choices ....................................................................................................................................... 268 Ethical choices ........................................................................................................................................... 273 ‘The note-guide’: writing while walking .................................................................................................... 277 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 279 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................................. 282 Critical reflection ....................................................................................................................................... 286 Potential usefulness .................................................................................................................................. 292 ENGLISH ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................................... 295 DANISH ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................................................... 297 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................................... 298 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The journey of this thesis was way too long, often circuitous and haphazard. The thesis grew steadily as it went, not unlike the guidebooks themselves. As a result, its debts accumulated progressively. Where to start? It would have hardly been possible to work on such an odd and obscure topic (and stick with it), if it were not for the unwavering support of my supervisor, Brian Moeran. With a great dose of open-mindedness and tolerance, he granted me an immense freedom (and autonomy) to be infinitely curious, to wander seemingly fruitlessly through theoretical and analytical labyrinths, and to unleash my imagination. But, more importantly, he always managed to get me back on track. He painstakingly taught me to become a better writer, a better teacher, and a better ethnographer. And, yes, he always stood besides me, and not only as a supervisor, but as a great friend. My greatest thanks are to him. The thesis would not have been possible without the generosity of travel writers. I owe them everything I know about travel guidebooks. I would like to thank them all for their time, perseverance, and kindness in sharing their knowledge, experiences, insight, anger and exasperation with me. I would also like to thank the writers who had given me access to various mailing lists. After having pestered them with a series of calls and email, Nielsen BookScan finally granted me gratis access to their costly databases, for which I am extremely grateful. Copenhagen Business School provided a comfortable and protected nook throughout the years, where ensconced, I could undisturbed continue to mind my own business. Majbritt Vandelbo, Annika Dilling, Lise Søstrøm and Susanne Sorrentino made my life in Denmark a tad more bearable by providing the legwork and paperwork behind residence permits, insurances, sick leaves, trips abroad, conference participations, reimbursements, field trips and you name it. Most importantly, they all stoically put up with my dismal administrative skills. They should have great credit for that. It was so calming to know Hans Krause was there always ready to offer his fatherly support with a smile. Thanks Hans, for rendering my problems seem surmountable! The Danish Agency of Science and Technology (DASTI), Otto Mønsted Foundation and the OMS Doctoral School at CBS, provided the generous financial, but also logistic support for my research visits at Stanford and Leeds University in 2009. I am enormously indebted to all of them for this selfless help. Another debt is owed to all those who have discussed ideas with me, who took the time to read my freewheeling scribbles, and who allowed me to appropriate their ideas. I rejoiced in the Creative Encounters Friday seminar series in the villa, that provided a stimulating arena for trying out and refining ‘quirky’ ideas. I thank Flemming Agersnap, Chris Mathieu, Jesper Strandgaard, Trine Bille, Lise Skov, Can-Seng Ooi, Fabian Csaba, Bo Christensen, Hitoshi Uno, Kristine Mungård Pedersen, and Janne Meier. Fred Turner, my host at Stanford, was and still is a sympathetic interlocutor who widened my research horizons. I thank my host at Leeds University, David Hesmondhalgh, for the intellectual encouragement and endless discussions that sharpened my theoretical focus. I also want to express gratitude to Adam Arvidsson, Timothy de Waal Malefyt, 12 about one another. The extent to which, and the modes in which, the genre mediates (structures and organises) the producer’s agency and experience of autonomy is what this thesis seeks to address and theorize. Travel guidebooks: a lowly genre and hack writers Travel guidebooks have long been considered a lowly, even raffish, genre - ‘fit for moral ejaculation’ (Barthes 1993: 75); ‘an uninteresting, superficial, (if not vulgar) genre’ (Behdad 1994: 36). Such a genre represents a sanctuary for ‘second-rate literary talents’ (Fussell 1980: 212), ‘unashamed dilettantes’ and ‘opportunistic journalists’ who are profit driven and entertainment oriented (Holland & Huggan 2000: 12-13). Guidebook writing has long been defined by literary scholars as a profession without professionalism. Travel guidebook writers are nothing but ‘tourists with typewriters’ (Holland & Huggan 2000:30); ‘unimaginative writers’, ‘hacks’ who churn out daily word counts established by publishers (Jackson 2011: 52). Under the dictate of its genre-poetics, guidebooks vow to represent actuality accurately, and thus exude precision, objectivity and detachment as they provide hard data and practical information about visiting a foreign place. These include things like history, as well as where-to and how-to prose related to accommodation, eating and drinking, transportation, and itineraries. As scholars recently have argued, guidebooks are ‘boring’ because they are ‘too real and descriptive’ and ‘handcuffed by the narration of brute facts’ (Lisle 2006:30). It becomes obvious that being non-fiction (referential) and didactic (a functional loco parentis of sorts), travel guidebooks are denied the status of a literary genre, when compared with their ‘sister genres’ -- travelogues and travel journalism. At the same time, travel guidebooks form a hybrid, mixed genre that blends stories, myths and word of mouth anecdotes with documentary, historical, and frequently scientific, accounts. It is precisely because of this hotchpotch character that some scholars have compared travel guidebook writing to a ‘brothel’: it ‘is a raffish open house where different genres are likely to end up in the same bed’ (Rabaté quoted in Borm 2004: 16). Against this backdrop, this thesis is an attempt to take the genre seriously in its own structural modus operandi and understand its producers on their own terms, beyond the sordid and sleazy connotation they invoke in the popular imaginary. It is an attempt to restore the dignity of a ‘lowly and blind’ animal laborans that produces ‘repetitive products for fast consumption’ (Arendt 1998:133) - professional travel writers who make, or struggle to make, a living by writing ephemeral and factual travel guidebooks. 13 Travel guidebooks: reference publishing As a non-fiction genre, travel guidebooks are the product of so-called ‘reference’ publishing (as such they share much in common with cookbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopedias). Travel publishers acquire content and turn a specific genre into cultural commodities (books, e-books, apps, audio tours, and similar) in the hopes that they will capture whimsical traveller tastes, and sell books sufficiently to generate profit. The ‘modern’ guidebook was conceived almost concomitantly in the mid-1830s: in England, by the venerable publisher John Murray III; and in Germany, by the august publishing house of Karl Baedeker. Today,1 the UK market is dominated by three guidebook publishing brands: Lonely Planet (purchased by BBC Worldwide in 2007); Rough Guides and Dorling Kindersley (both imprints of Pearson); and AA Publishing. In the US market, Fodor’s (owned by Wiley) and Frommer’s (part of Bertelsmann) follow Lonely Planet in market share. In reference publishing the brand is vital to market success because a strong brand secures repeated purchases and wide stocking of destination-specific books. Contrary to widespread public opinion, especially in light of new media technologies and adjacent discourses of the democratization of media production, travel guidebook publishing is not in precipitous decline: not, at least, in terms of sales and market share. Admittedly, the industry falls prey to world events; yet it seems immanently resilient. Economic and political crises or natural calamities indeed affect the way people perceive and spend their disposable income, and thus travel. Yet, according to publishing experts, the industry bounces back once travellers announce the end of a ‘wallet freeze’, or alternatively decide to travel closer to home (Mesquita 2009). On the other hand, no one can deny the impact of digital technologies on travel publishing. Reference publishing in general is based on time-sensitive information and content-heavy databases which have lent themselves easily to digitization (Clark & Phillips 2008). Hence, the industry’s insiders consider travel guidebook publishing to be a canary in the digital coalmine (Danford 2011). Travel guidebook publishers were among the first to experiment with different vehicles of content delivery, including CD-roms, disks, web sites, publishing-on-demand, and similar. With vast amounts of travel-related information available for free online, travel guidebook publishers strengthened the brand ever more intensively as an index of content quality. The recent proliferation of navigation-enabled locative media and handheld devices has provided the platforms travel publishers long wished for. They have opened up further possibilities for new, potentially lucrative, revenue streams -- ebooks, interactive guides, and augmented reality applications. ‘These are exciting times’ – is the most frequent industry-wide adage. 1 Based on Nielsen BookScan, Travel Publishing Yearbook 2009, (prepared by Stephen Mesquita) 14 These are, no doubt, exciting times for the researcher as well. The accelerated industry conglomeration of travel guidebook publishing in the last decade, followed by digitization, has resulted in changing patterns of authorship and commissioning polices that have strained industry labour relations. Within such a tumultuous institutional framework, writers were forced to constantly negotiate their professional status and craft standards in daily practice. Yet, I argue in this thesis that it is not enough to analyse these institutional conditions in a vacuum from the cultural object they give rise to; it is also necessary to take stock of the genre’s diachronic trajectories, but also synchronous structural patterning, as institutionally embedded in, but also as constitutive of, the industry and industrial practice (commissioning, contracting, copyright and payment, scheduling), in order to arrive at a somewhat fuller understanding of cultural production. Some years ago, Coser, Kadushin & Powell (1982:260) claimed that the products of reference publishing are ‘books without authors’ or ‘no books’ – ‘products manufactured on an assembly line’, and not written by individual authors. On the other hand, Barthes (1977) and Foucault (1979) argued that ‘the author’ tyrannizes and strangles the vitality of ‘culture’, so they readily proclaimed ‘the death of the author’ in the Western intellectual tradition. Authors were subsequently expelled from the study of culture, both sociological and formal-structuralist studies, in favour of reception analysis and reading practices (Radway 1991). In contrast, this thesis advocates attributing agency and subjectivity, that is authorship, to writers within the institutions of production, no matter how sleazy or lowly their status seems to be. Shunning crude biographism or sheer psychologism, I focus on authors’ auto-biographies and authorial practices as imbued by the genre with and in which the authors work and live. Although his obituary has long been announced, the author in the digital era is ever more robustly the key supplier of content in the publishing value chain, and as such his authorship merits to be analyzed in all its complexity. In the wake of the scandal of the factual genre The scandal of ‘the TK Affair’, or the ‘Memoirgate’ as it is already widely referred to by industry’s insiders, ripped open the modus operandi of the genre as simultaneously institutionalized by, and institutionalizing of, publishing institutions and producer practices. The genre and its poetics were presented as matters of process, procedures, and the sanction of ‘accuracy’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ (no-freebie policies, pay commensurate with efforts, quality assurance standards, and similar), but also as a matter of ethically-sound responsibility and respect for reader-travellers. At the same time, in the face of the scandal, which threatened to petrify the already value-laden image of travel writers as unreliable and shameless, travel writers ever more fiercely defended ‘the seriousness of the genre’, ‘dignity of the profession’, and ‘responsible service to the reader’. The castigation of unethical behaviour, however, needs to rest on a proper acknowledgement of the ambivalences and complexities of a ‘factual’ genre and the production techniques it commands, as well as the assumptions it connotes (Winston 2000: 9-23). 15 The genre furnishes protocols of appropriate behaviour that is in turn sustained by concrete institutions and common practices of production. The genre’s factuality is predicated on a series of assertions of truthfulness, upheld by producers, promoted and branded by publishers and expected by, and paid for audiences. Yet, the criteria of truthfulness are not abstract or suprahistorical. They are to be found in the origin and diachronic development of the genre, as well as in the synchronic structural features that inflect established procedures and actual practices. The scandal of the factual genre evinces the practical interplay between genres, producers, audiences and institutions of cultural production. Winston (2000), who summarized the British documentary fakery scandal in the mid-1990s, and Mittell (2004), who followed historically the quiz show scandal in America in the 1950s, demonstrate convincingly through textual and visual analyses how genres matter to producers and inflect the very processes of ‘ethical’ production. ‘The strict reliability’ (Winston 2000: 19) of documentaries and ‘spontaneous, ad-libbed, unrehearsed, fair competition’ (Mittell 2004: 37) of quiz shows are impossible to fulfill, not because of their producers’ outright and unashamed moral corruptibility, but because neither language nor camera can offer ‘unmediated’ representation of reality, which will thus, diffract truth claims and complicate ‘truth-telling’. Both Mittell and Winston vehemently contend that the factual genre inevitably relies on artifice or subterfuges – daily ploys and manoeuvres for the attainment of ‘objectivity’, and hence calls in question its producers’ moral (ethical) and amoral (aesthetic or creative licence) choices. The question is then: just how much of a ploy is ethical? Or, to what extent is mediated reality permissible? It is this dose of mediation that Mittell and Winston argue is regulated by regulators. Although no top-down, governmental regulation was triggered by the TK affair, as it was by documentary or quiz shows scandals, it nonetheless induced producers to reflect upon the dose of inevitable mediation pertinent to the genre and to reevaluate their commitments to the genre’s claims to ‘actuality’ and ‘realness’, yet also to their professional sense of responsibility for the audience, but also the places and people they represent in their work. In the wake of ‘Memoirgate’, the producers’ overt invocation of ‘genre’ as a precondition for their ethically-sound and responsible practices of making ‘good guidebooks’ led me ask the question about the productivity of genres and their specific poetics: ‘What is the role of genres in the actual processes of media/cultural production?’ 16 INTRODUCTION The place and role of genres in cultural production: an intellectual Odyssey In what follows, I want to outline my somewhat personal intellectual Odyssey through numerous trials and tribulations in my search for authorial agency and autonomy in relation to the category of genre. The main reason for recognizing my own subjectivity and partiality in this overview is to make room for a dialogue with a plethora of voices that have informed my own thinking about the productivity of genres. These ideas have gestated for so long, accumulating an enormous amount of debt, that they have generated an ‘anxiety of influence’ (Bloom 1997) as I went about them. My aim here is to rescue some of these influences from becoming ‘a vanishing mediator’ (Jameson 1988) and to restitute their status as the forbearers of such thought, thus giving them due scholarly acknowledgment in order to move not beyond, but around and with them. This is inevitably a post-rationalized account that tries to make sense of a sometimes unreasonable spanning of disciplinary boundaries, which at the time seemed to consist of merely serendipitous, indeed partly irrational, choices. Therefore, owing to the detours that I took from comparative literature and hermeneutics to media and cultural studies, by way of social sciences mainly sociology and some anthropology, during the course of my intellectual development, I weave here a number of disciplinary strands that have had a formative influence on my own thinking about how to think, firstly the circularity between production and reception, and secondly the relation between the humanities and social sciences, as a precondition for a better understanding of the subjective standing of authors, or more broadly cultural producers, their autonomy and genres. Some of these strands show little awareness of each other, for various reasons. One of these is the persisting impermeability of academic disciplines, such as the humanities and social sciences (Wolff 1999; Zolberg 1990); another, perhaps, the ever-growing hiving off of fields into subdisciplinary areas. This has come about partly in response to the enormous proliferation of scholarly work being published, but also to the geographical and linguistic dispersion of various strands of thought, with the result that no one can reasonably be expected to grasp them all in their totality. In this protracted scholarly attempt to somehow bridge the divides between texts and contexts, reception or interpretation and production, I have probably ended up as a fullyfledged member of what Ytreberg calls ‘a generation of “orphans”, of researchers who have no “parent discipline” [for whom] the agenda of interdisciplinary exploration is perhaps the closest to a scientific platform they are likely to get’ (2000: 60-61). It is owing to this attachment to interdisciplinarity that this thesis will look more like what Geertz (1983) has called a ‘blurred genre’ – neither belonging completely to, nor fulfilling the horizons of expectations of, either 17 humanities or social sciences, but one that will hopefully ‘accommodate a situation at once fluid, plural, uncentred, and ineradicably untidy’ (p.21). This situation fairly aptly describes the numerous studies, theories and thinking about genres and their relations to cultural production and reception. This state of ‘untidiness’ has to do probably with the long-lasting existence of the category of genre that has spanned more than two millennia, since it is at least as old as Aristotle. Over the centuries, it has been used and reused, abused and accused, denied and cursed, celebrated and cherished, in various contexts, to various ends, within various disciplines. A category loaded with such baggage defies a unitary or definitive definition of either its ontological or pragmatic status. A half century ago, Northrop Frye reproached literary studies for not being able to develop any systematic genre theory of action – that is, a theory of how genres actually matter in and underpin the processes of production and reception, the central aim of my thesis ⎼ because: ‘the very word “genre” sticks out in an English sentence as the unpronounceable and alien thing it is’ (1957:13). The concept is as elusive today as ever, associated with the anathema of genres in modern criticism that includes New Historicism, Post-modernism, and post-structuralism (Altman 1999). Let me be clear about one thing at this point. I am not setting out to tidy up this messiness. That task looms too large. What I am more narrowly interested in, amidst the ‘sound and fury’ surrounding this category, is the relationship between genres and the processes of cultural production, in particular authorial action or agency (what is also well subsumed under the term authorship) and how this can be extended to institutional self-understanding. This means I am interested in the mediating and animating force of genres: that is, in genres as categories of ‘production and labour’ ⎼ not necessarily ‘tools’ as a means to an end, but ‘resources’ as a range of possibilities and abilities of and for action (writing, composing, configuring texts as cultural objects, but also self-interpretation). In a word, I approach genres as active ingredients in production practice, as opposed to merely being determined by or defined by institutions, social factors and organizational dynamics. Almost in a kind of a Zeitgeist, the category of genre has lately been enthusiastically, though independently from one another, embraced and conceptualized by scholars coming from a wide variety of disciplines interested in issues of artistic or cultural production. I feel that there is a need now to take stock of these developments discussing divergences, but also convergences. I believe that genres are important in the analysis, not least, because of my conviction that the products (groups of products or genres) of such production are by their very nature categorically and ontologically different from other manufactured products in the consumer industry (Wodmansee 1984). For this reason, it is also important to understand how the different approaches have addressed the category of genre. I, thus, set out to critically discuss the place of genre within the studies of cultural production, especially those studies that have clearly marked the salience of genres to their analytical frameworks. 18 There are four interrelated points of overlap and convergence, that I hope will transpire from the overview Odyssey, and which I take as a departure point for the thesis as a whole: 1) every production act is genre-bound, and by corollary genres are a necessary even systemic condition, either enabling or constraining, of cultural production; 2) the interplay between innovation (original work) and tradition (epigone work) is enshrined in genres, so that genres immanently offer the resolution of the dichotomy between structure and agency; 3) genres are what makes the text historically and locally intelligible and communicable, so that they unite recipients and producers, reception and production, and 4) genres are social and institutional unities of individual textual instances, thus they offer to overcome the separation between text and context: that is, cultural objects and contextual factors of production such as organizational, managerial and institutional work that goes into a genre’s production, distribution and definition. In a nutshell, one way or another, all these approaches2 identify the notion of genre as a potentially productive means for foregrounding interdisciplinarity by bridging the gap between the humanities and social sciences. The divergences can mainly be detected with regard to the presentation of the genre as an analytical (rather than descriptive, explanatory, taxonomic or heuristic) concept for the empirical study of cultural production. It is here that I think useful interventions are still to be made by refining the analytical ways in which the genre can be productively introduced to and, most importantly, operationalized for the study of cultural production. The points of overlap, therefore, promisingly reveal the emergence of a genre approach to cultural production. By bringing them into dialogue and pointing to certain of their deficiencies and divergences, I hope to contribute to a further consolidation of an emerging inevitably interdisciplinary, genre-centered perspective of cultural production. I especially focus on the possible modalities of turning a hermeneutical category of genre predicated on ‘implied authors’ and structuralist poetics into an analytical category for the empirical analysis of cultural producers, their work and professional self-understanding and perception of autonomy. As I meander through the vast array of studies, I also take a stance as to what I take genres to be in this study, and most importantly why I see a ‘structuralist hermeneutics’ (as developed in ‘the strong program’ in cultural sociology) to be a way forward in the analysis of what may be tentatively and tautologically called ‘production poetics’. Hermeneutics: genres as production categories that mediate authorial action Literary studies for a long time paid their dues to what has come to be known as ‘the intentional fallacy’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954). The intentional fallacy posits a disjuncture between authorial intention and the text, as well as between the social existence of the author and the cultural product. By abhorring the reductionist psychologism and biographism of literary 2 With the exception of ‘the production of culture perspective’ that serves as a contrasting backdrop for many other genre-centered approaches to cultural production 19 positivism (see Taine 1871, inter alia) or literary ideologism (see Lukasc 1974), Wimsatt and Beardsley, further assisted by proclamations of the ‘death of the author’ (Barthes 1977), have influentially undermined authorial agency and subjectivity in favour of the literary artifact as a self-sufficient, bounded entity. According to their argument, it is only the interpretive power of the recipient, not the creator, that counts as a productive force, insofar as it is through reception that the work is actually produced. Latching onto this tradition, reader-response criticism and the aesthetic of reception openly denied the ontological status of a work of art, and focused on the phenomenological relationship between texts and reception as taking place within the lifeworld of the reader (Jauss 1982, de Man 1979). Therefore, the relationship between author and text, and thus between producer agency and cultural object, was to be read backwards ⎼ in Gell’s (1998) phrase, ‘abducted’ ⎼ from finished products through reception, and not to be read forwards ‘in terms of the movements that gave rise to them’ as ‘objects-in-the-making’ (Hallam and Ingold 2007:3). Much of literary hermeneutics is similarly reception-oriented, yet does not deny the actual existence of a work of art and authorial intentions. Hermeneutics includes not only a theory of reading (Jauss 1982; Iser 1989), but also intersects with poetics, a theory of techne and creative activities3. It is the hermeneutical focus on production, that is on poetics, in addition to reception, that I found to be the most fruitful entry into the empirical investigation of the roles of genres in actual processes of cultural production. My own thinking about genre and production is, therefore, much indebted to hermeneutics, in particular to the phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur (1973; 1991), but also of Edward Hirsch (1967). I here, start out from the assumption, that the hermeneutical tenets about the constitutive role genres play in the act of production, represent both an empirically testable hypothesis and an explanatory framework, that can be applied to the empirical study of cultural/media production. For both Ricoeur and Hirsch the compositional and receiving practices are always interpretive and, as such, inevitably genre-bound activities. In Hirsch’s (1967) words: ‘all understanding of verbal meaning is necessarily genre-bound’ (p.76). Hirsch establishes that every author possesses an ‘intrinsic genre’ that allows him to create and convey meaning. The intrinsic genre is ‘the entire complex system of shared experiences, usage traits, and meaning expectations which the speaker relies on’ to communicate a meaning to his readership (p. 72). But this genre is only indirectly, not empirically, accessible. It has to be recuperated by a reader (interpreter) through subsequent historical textual analysis. 3 That hermeneutics and poetics are entangled in ‘the aesthetic od production’ (in spite of the prevailing focus of hermeneutics on reception and the aesthetic of reception) is best captured by de Man’s illustrative example: if Homer says ‘Achilles is lion’ then the hermeneutical act will encompass the understanding that Achilles is courageous, but if the reader concludes that Homer has been making use of metaphor or simile (what constitutes techne), then that is the sphere of poetics. An intelligent interpreter cannot indeed see these acts as separate because the one entails the other (see de Man, pp. ix-x, in Jauss, 1982) 20 For Ricoeur, too, literary understanding is always ‘genre-bound’, both at the level of configuration (Ricoeur’s term for production) and refiguration (reception). As he pointed out: ‘composition, belonging to a genre and individual style, characterizes discourse as a work’ (1981: 136). However, ‘composition, genre and style’ are first ‘categories of production and labour’ (p. 136), and only afterwards categories of reception. The way genres work, therefore, is the way the work itself is done: To impose a form upon material, to submit production to genres, to produce an individual: these are so many ways of treating language as a material to be worked upon and formed. Discourse thereby becomes the object of a praxis and a techne. In this respect, there is not a sharp opposition between mental and manual labour. … Labour is thus one, if not the principle structure of practice: it is ‘practical activity objectifying itself in works’. In the same way, the literary work is the result of a labour that organizes language. In labouring upon discourse, man effects the practical determination of a category of individuals: the works of discourse’ (ibid. as above, original emphases). For Ricoeur, the genre ‘mediates’ and ‘structures’ the individual composition. A work is ‘subsumed’ to a genre, but also given a ‘unique configuration’ through the same genre, in the process of ‘stylisation’, a process predicated on praxis or techne, that is labour. There is no belonging to a genre without the ‘labour of distanctiation’. According to Ricoeur, that distanctiation or ‘stylisation occurs at the heart of an experience which is already structured [by a codified genre] but which is nevertheless characterized by openings, possibilities and indeterminacies’ (p. 137). Hence, Ricoeur argues, ‘style is labour that individuates, that is, which produces an individual, so it designates retroactively the author’ (p.138). There are as many genrebound technes to underpin the style as creative activities. A techne is something more refined than a routine or empirical practice and in spite of its focus on production, it contains a speculative element, namely a theoretical inquiry into the means applied to production. It is a method; and this feature brings it closer to theoretical knowledge than to routine (Ricoeur 1996: 340). From this Ricoeur infers that ‘the author is the artisan of a work of language’, the author always enquires into the nature and methods of his means of production, and so the investigation of authorial praxis or techne ‘belongs to stylistics’ (1981:138) while poetics to the art of composing (1996). From here it is not surprising that Ricoeur conceives of the author and ‘the categories of production and labour’ as categories of interpretation, categories that are cotemporaneous with the meaning, rather than with the empirical activity, of the production of the literary work. There is no authorial subjectivity, intention or action outside what can be retroactively inferred: that is, ‘reconfigured’ or ‘construed’ from a literary artifact through reception/criticism/interpretation. In this way, a literary work transcends its own sociological conditions of production and thus becomes necessarily ‘decontextualized’, only to be ‘recontextualised’ in novel socio-historical circumstances by the act of reading (p. 139). It follows from this that the production and labour are nothing but ‘a guess’ (Ricoeur 1973:106) and interpretation ‘a guesswork’ of ‘authorial actions’, which pertain to the ‘categories of production and labour’, that now become solely heuristic devices for making sense a posteriori of the process of text construction. As Ricoeur put 21 it: ’the localization and individualization of this unique text are still guesses’ (ibid.). In other words, the localization and individualization of texts cannot be solved by simply returning to the imputed intention or subjectivity of the author or, as Ricoeur prefers to call it, ‘the incommunicability of the psychic experience of the author’ (p. 107). Rather, the meaning of a text is achieved by guessing the relationship between the ‘implied author’ and ‘the genre system’ ⎼ a relationship that Hirsch called ‘the intrinsic genre’ (1967: 86), which is always reconstituted by the reader. Now, as I worked through these arguments, the question that I felt loomed large was: is there a way to curb such clairvoyant analysis? Can the study of the methods of production or techne be more than tea-leaf reading? If authors care about ‘their’ genre, that ‘intrinsic genre’, how do they themselves interpret, cherish or work with it? Isn’t this as important as how readers imply authorship? Is the act of creation so ineffable that the ‘psychic experience’ of the author becomes ‘incommunicable’ and ‘unintelligible’? Can poetics, involving genre-bound techne, be researched empirically? In order to begin to answer these questions, I conducted one such hermeneutic/stylistic study of ‘retroactive production’ on the genre of postmodern fiction (Alacovska 2002, Master’s thesis). The probing of retroactive production was indeed apposite for a genre that has commonly been referred to in literary studies as ‘postmodern metafiction’, a genre that is characterized by a high degree of ‘self-reflexivity’ (Hutcheon 1980) or ‘self-consciousness’ (Waugh 1984), which overtly turns in on its own principles of constructedness and legitimation, to its status as a cultural product (hence the prefix ‘meta’). In this study I strove to ‘deconstruct’ the genre’s selfreferentiality, its closing in on itself. I detailed how authorial practices and techniques (praxis and techne) of making were prompted by an author’s awareness of the genre and theory underlying the construction of fiction, which itself called upon the reader to engage in co-productive interpretation of the principles of making, as a precondition to understanding. Yet the deliberate impenetrability of this ‘narcissistic genre’ (Hutcheon 1980) planted in me the ‘sociological’ worm of suspicion that came to underpin my future research. Could ‘selfreflexivity’ and ‘self-consciousness’ be anything more than educated or erudite ‘guesswork’? Could an author’s ‘intrinsic genre’ be grasped forwards instead of backwards? If the author was so ‘selfreflexive’ why could I simply not call him up and ask for an explanation of his ‘artisanship’ (Ricoeur 1981)? What would happen when ‘the intrinsic’ genre was actually ‘contextualised’ in the act of production, instead of ‘decontextualised’ in the act of reception? Well, then the genre would cease to be ‘narcissistic’, I supposed, but also the analysis would require some sort of wedding between the humanities and more sociological disciplines. But how was this epistemological leap to be accomplished? First, I found it plausible to extrapolate from hermeneutic theory the working mechanisms that govern the production of texts as genre-bound process and procedures; and second, I recast them from the sphere of reception and structuralist-semiotic analysis (the privileged focus of hermeneutics) to the sphere of sociological/anthropological inquiry. Culler’s work on structuralist poetics, the later work by Ricoeur regarding hermeneutics of action, and 28 A certain exasperation with what I perceived to be the elitism of the narcissistic genre of metafiction I had been studying, together with a desire to ‘sociologize’ what I knew from the humanities, next drew me to cultural studies. Cultural studies accorded due significance to lesser genres or popular genres, in a way that seemed alluring and more accessible for the inquiry of authorial genre-bound ‘self-reflexivity’ (Hutcheon 1980). This shift complemented my hermeneutical concern with co-productive interpretation as a corrective to a work's enclosed selfreferentiality, because of cultural studies’ sociological and empirical attention to what may be called the ‘genre-bound’ productivity of reception. Indeed, cultural studies made the category of genre operative at a production level, although in a primarily subcultural, amateur, or fan production framework. These studies looked at how genres ‘governed’ (Culler 2002) or ‘mediated’ the productive actions of amateur authors and the self-interpretation of fans in the context of what Kinsella termed ‘the twilight sphere of cultural production’ (2000:105), or Fiske called ‘shadow cultural economies’ (1992:30), spreading beneath, yet always in dialogue with, the official institutions of production. Some important scholarship in this ‘twilight’ zone obviated the fact that genres are indeed capable of influencing production, though of a subcultural and amateur kind. This was a step closer to my determination in this thesis to study professional genre-bound cultural production ‘in the limelight’ ⎼ that form of production which unfolds within the official institutions of production. Reception studies: genre-bound productivity of reception A parallel emphasis on recipients rather than on producers or authors in hermeneutic and literary theory is visible in the realm of cultural studies as well. This may partially, perhaps, be attributed to the seminal article ‘Encoding/decoding’ by Stuart Hall (1992/1973). However, while Hall elaborates the ‘decoding’ of the massage by its recipients in sophisticated detail, he somewhat leaves untheorised the processes of ‘encoding’ by the sender of the message8. Such an influential elaboration on ‘decoding’ resulted in burgeoning scholarship on the productivity of reception. Seminal studies by the Birmingham School paved the way for the analysis of the audience’s critical engagement with mainstream culture, through deployment of available technologies to do-it-yourself publication pursuits. Productive communities, such as zine cultures (Duncombe 1997) and fans (Fiske 1992), have been studied as genre-bound self-publishing subcultures that make use of mimeographs and photocopiers, or more recently the Internet, to create, multiply and disseminate their independent (from the commercial interests of media industries) productions. These include horror comics (Barker 1992), adult manga (Kinsella 2000), and sci-fi (Jenkins 1992, 1995). Audience studies have provided, in my opinion, the model for seeing audience-driven cultural production as genre-bound production. Barker, for example, shows how the genre of the horror comic, although (or probably because) it is commonly considered an ‘awful object’ (1992: 8 For a critique along these lines see du Gay et al, 1997. 29 5), exerts an influence, never predictable or determining, on its readership: ‘The further the reader goes into the genre, the more she or he learns the rules and roles and relations of it’ (p. 134). By immersive reading, readers steadily acquire genre competence: that is, they become aware of the genre principles of composition (shock logic, topicality and similar), to the extent that they can then start rejoicing in producing the genre on their own. Moreover, Barker argues, the genre provides the tools with which readers are able to evaluate and judge critically the quality and aesthetics of their own, their fellows’, or professional producers’, horror comic production. In similar manner, Kinsella (2000) argues convincingly that amateur producers in Japan appropriated the conventions of institutionally published manga, while simultaneously reinventing and revitalizing the genre. In short, they ‘produced radical and stylistically innovatory manga’ that in turn accelerated the transformation of professional adult manga production (p. 107). Kinsella goes on to ethnographically substantiate how the ‘self-defined characteristics of amateur manga genre … which self-consciously identifies itself as manga without direction, narrative or meaning’ (p. 184) underpinned professional editors’ evaluative judgments and criticism of professionallycreated manga and its artists. For instance, the amateur genre’s self-definition permeated editors’ discourses about the lack of passion and social engagement on the part of professional artists – unlike amateur artists, who were passionate, energetic and outspoken, qualities that were then connected to the themes of ‘pride’, ‘passion’ and ‘sex’ of the genre of amateur manga (pp. 182185). However, it was not only genres of publishing that had the capacity to influence amateur productive practices, but also those of music and television genres. Among the most inspiring studies concentrating on the power of genre to influence amateur productivity are the studies of hip-hop by Andy Bennett (1999, 2001). Bennett (2001) contends that the genre of hip-hop disseminated by the media industry ‘is a global resource’ (p. 93) appropriated and rearticulated in localized youth music-making practices across the world, thereby indicating young people’s attempt to reconcile issues of musical and stylistic authenticity with racial and gender identities through the genre (p. 138). In his study of Turkish and Moroccan hip-hop fan communities cherishing their particular sub-genres of rap in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, he demonstrates trenchantly how the fans turn and rework the genre into ‘a localized form of cultural expression’, so as to explore nagging problems of racism and citizenship (Bennett 1999:71). The hip-hop enthusiasts self-compose rap songs in German, but interlace them with Turkish and Arabic lyrics, melodies or tunes in response to dominant linguistic and cultural repression. In short, the genre of hip-hop and rap (Bennett uses them interchangeably) was put to use in local situations to personal and communal ends. After having identified the impact of institutional arrangements (such as municipal facilities, non-profit immigration reconciliation projects, and so on) on the localization of hip-hop, Bennett insightfully links the process of genre localization to the genre’s specificity (in addition to socio-cultural circumstances in which the fans have been embedded). He writes: ‘it seems to me that there are certain characteristics of the hip hop genre which make it particularly well placed to act as a form of local expression’ (p. 86). He then pinpoints these ‘characteristic’ 30 aspects of the genre as its distinctive ‘hands on’ accessible nature – rhymed speech delivered against continuous pre-recorded backbeat, as well as its grassroots origins in African-American street culture – and developed as a mode of channelling a gang spirit to creative ends, thereby playing on the capacity of genre to be reworked and appropriated in local alternative, immigrant music-making scenes. Another elaborate and ethnographically grounded piece of scholarship consists of the studies of science fiction by Henry Jenkins (1992, 1995), in which he describes the move from watching to producing television, and thus from reading to writing, as mediated by genres. If Bennett opened up the possibility of according genres the power to become an active participant (actor, mediator) in the process of local self-expression and self-exegesis, it is the work of Jenkins that looks at this possibility more systematically. He shows convincingly in his work on Star Trek, the pinnacle of the science fiction genre, how the genre provides the repertoires and resources that loyal fans adopt and accommodate to their particular practical needs and identity work, as a kind of self-exegesis: Not only do readers select from the range of generic options available to them at any particular moment but they also inflect their readings of those selected narratives to reflect their own particular orientations and interests. Science fiction enthusiasts, …, recognize the potential problems within the genre’s characteristically optimistic versions of the future. At the same time they are attracted … [to the genre] as a utopian alternative to their lived experience; hard science fiction provides them with a set of core myths which facilitate their own practical activities and flatter their own need for professional dignity (1995: 214). Jenkins shows how ‘Trekkers’, as Star Trek fans prefer to be called, employ or ‘poach’ cultural material from mass culture so as to make sense of their own subordinate status, social exclusion and identity crises. He also provides extensive evidence of how women as members of fan clubs, set in motion a whole publishing industry of newsletters and fanzines, whereby they ‘reinvent’ the genre conventions of science fiction previously perceived to be dominated by masculine conventions (Jenkins 1992). They thus re-wrote the genre and move it closer to romance, as they were mainly interested in exploring intimately salient romantic and erotic relationships in a genre that had hitherto largely ignored romantic or erotic features (genre markers). The fans thus made the genre fit into their lives, while the genre itself furnished them with culturally available modes of self-interpretation and self-knowledge, as well as with alternative sources of recognition as fan writers or artists. Moreover, the establishment of such a semi-professional publishing industry provided a major training ground, ‘a nurturing space’ to aspiring science fiction professional writers who were able to develop skills, styles and themes pertinent to the genre (pp. 47-49). The genre, then, not only furnishes audiences with ‘a set of core myths’, but also with institutions that cherish, one way or another, the specific genre. Jenkins (1995) argues that MIT, a hive for the world’s most venerable interpretive and producing community of science fiction, ‘imagines’ itself through the genre. He concludes: ‘Strong cords of technical utopian thinking run 31 through the Institute’s official rhetoric and self-promotion’ (pp. 119-220). The genre permeates the Institute’s ‘technoculture’, from employing science fiction writers in residence as ‘catalysts of more imaginative research’, to offering language courses on ‘Advanced Klingon’. Exams crafted with reference to Star Trek or William Gibson, and dorm discussions of sexuality framed by Star Trek, are just a few examples that Jenkins credibly puts forward (pp. 120-121). In her work on adult manga, Kinsella (2000) goes a step further when she illuminatingly sheds light on how the genre of adult manga was appropriated and acted upon by large Japanese companies such as Sony or Honda in their effort to self-promote and self-reflexively ponder their corporate status. The genre, argues Kinsella, was chosen ‘as a medium of choice for communication and public relations’: Presenting public relations and internal communications in manga format appeared to be a means of attracting target audiences to read what might otherwise be unattractive or irrelevant information (p. 77). So the genre ⎼ with its associations with personal progress, passionate social perspectives, complex exploration of psychology, and anti-establishment aesthetics ⎼ offered a model for institutional self-inquiry and self-interpretation. By making use of such genre characteristics, a company’s promotional activities were made to look more like dramatized humanitarian projects geared towards improving living standards than like sales pitches on the part of profit-making capitalist enterprises (pp.78-79). My own Master’s thesis argued for the genre-bound productivity of reception in the use of travel guidebooks (Alacovska 2007). Through a combination of ethnography and a critical discourse analysis of guidebook use, I was able to trace how guidebook readers became accustomed to specific genre principles that informed their genre-related ‘foreknowledge’ (Jauss 1982) and eventually morphed into ‘genre competence’ (Culler 2002). Guidebook readers shared prescriptions (not only expectations) about what constituted a ‘good guidebook’, reflecting their demand that the genre be factual, accurate and based on an actual journey (and thus reliable). Such genre knowledge and competence gave rise to reader production of genre-related derivatives ⎼ first in the form of travel tips, recommendations and guidebook updates; and second in travelogues, travel blogs or wlogs (very much in vogue at the time of writing) through which the by now user-producers made sense of, rejoiced in, or re-imagined their past travels through the genre. Audience studies of the genre-bound productivity of reception showed systematically and empirically how the genre helps organize productive action and self-understanding from within the genre worlds fans voluntarily inhabit. The genre provided the resources or the culturally coded material that its users-cum-producers drew upon when producing ‘subcultural’ or ‘amateur’ texts as an act of self-knowledge and self-exegesis that ‘already always’, as Ricoeur (1991a, 1991b) argued, happens through the detour of cultural and semiotic codes enshrined in genres. Although no overarching theoretical approach was spelt out, reception studies in my opinion managed to situate textual formalism and structuralism within diversified modes of social and communal 32 activity in Geertz’s sense (1983a, 1983b). This placement was ⎼ quite understandably for audience or reception studies ⎼ in the social world of the recipients, who acted, behaved and tried to selfunderstand in and through the genre they intimately and affectionately cared about. As such, these studies act as a model for operationalizing the co-productive relationship between interpretation and production, authors and genres. My intention, however, is to widen the scope of this scholarship by recasting the focus from reception to production, while never losing sight of the fact that production only comes about through interpretation, and interpretation, as well as self-interpretation, is always a genre-bound activity. In this way, I came to start musing about the possibility of situating genre effectiveness in influencing action and selfunderstanding from the social worlds of audiences to the social world of professional authors or producers more generally. Paradoxically, such audience studies strengthened my interest both in producers and in the processes of professional genre production, and thus foregrounded this doctoral thesis. Who stood behind these sleek and bright guidebooks that appeared to come as if from nowhere? Who were the travel guidebook writers? What was going on behind the scenes of an industry that overtly defined itself as travel guidebook publishing through the genre it produced? Did travel guidebook publishers ‘imagine’ and ‘self-promote’ themselves through the genre, as Jenkins, in a slightly different context, argued happened in MIT? If the relationship between a text and its active, productive audiences is genre-bound, what about the relationship between professional producers and texts? What about the relationship between institutions and genres? One might reasonably expect, as hermeneutics always contended, that the relationship between professional authors and texts is respectively genre-bound as well. Following Ricoeur, if genres were indeed matters of ‘production and labour’, then one should examine ‘the praxis’ and ‘the techne’ of genre-bound professional production, or more precisely interrogate how the textuality of genre ‘jumps’ into action ‘in practice’ (so as to influence the act of composition and individual style). Following audience studies’ empirical engagement with genre-bound ‘fan’ production, one should in principle also be able to research empirically the ‘action-level’ or mediating power of the producing actors (Wolff 1975:54) since this was most likely to reflect the relationship between genres and producers. This trajectory of thinking led me in search of ‘the professional producer’ and thus to the field of creative labour studies, on which this thesis builds and to which, hopefully, it also contributes. At the same time, I sensed that a move from the ‘twilight’ to ‘limelight’ zone of professional production necessitated an engagement with studies of the institutions and organizations of cultural production. So, at one and the same time, I found myself being drawn towards sociological approaches to culture and art, and in particular to creative labour studies, as well as to the production of culture perspective. What I have been particularly interested in here is to understand if and how these strands of analysis treat the category of genre, and by corollary authorial agency or autonomy. 33 ‘Cultural industries approach’: the study of creative labour (and genres) The popularity and influential standing of audience studies within media and cultural studies, which obviously placed their research emphases on audiences or media users, resulted in a dearth of studies concerning professional production and producers, especially popular culture production (Hesmondhalgh 2002)9. Even when professional productions were in analytical focus, such as the production of reality shows, scholars have concentrated on the cooptation of ordinary people/audiences as participants in these shows rather than on production in a narrow sense (see for example Andrejevic 2004 or Syvertsen 2001). Setting out to redress this lacuna, creative labour studies concentrated on professional media producers, their lived experiences, subjectivities, pleasures and anxieties of work, as well as on their sense of professionalism (Hesmondhalgh 2002; McRobbie 1998; Ursell 2000; Ross 2000, 2003). Here, the focus of analysis has been on professional media work as it unfolds within the economic and commercial confines of media, cultural or creative industries. For this reason, Hesmondhalgh suggests that this body of research be also referred to as a ‘cultural industries approach’ (2008:567). Creative labour studies were the long-awaited critical and empirical re-rethinking of, on the one hand, the political economy treatment of media producers as ‘puppets’ controlled by media owners and conglomerates (Herman-Chomsky 1997; Murdock 1982; Hannerz 2004), and, on the other, the creative industries policy rhetoric that glamourized creative work (McRobbie 1998). These studies provided ample empirical evidence that, in spite of the enthusiastic policy embracement of creative work as a harbinger of all work in advanced information societies, work in creative industries was precarious – providing insecure and intermittent employment (long and unpaid working hours, long periods of idleness, no health or vacation benefits), and was deeply unequal (with deep-seated gender and racial inequalities at its heart). McRobbie (1998) using a governmentality neo-Foucauldian perspective, has empirically shown that British fashion designers ‘self-exploit’ – putting up with unreimbursed protracted overtime, poor working conditions, and minimal pay, all in the name of living the dream of a self-expressive and self-realizing job. For her part, Ursell (2000), also drawing on post-structuralist theory, has argued that the desirability of creative work has made, and still makes, producers complicit in their precarious life, and assists British TV production companies in ‘the exploitation’ of an unremitting stream of young ‘hopefuls’. Wittel (2001) and Nixon and Crewe (2004) have demonstrated how the injunction ‘to network’ with colleagues and audiences ‘after work’ proves more taxing and isolating than liberating for creative professionals. Gill (2002) has elucidated the gender inequalities in new media work, eventually forcing women, laden with the burden of balancing family life and career in a fastpaced and unregulated sector, out of the workforce. By focusing on the lived experience of cultural producers, these studies have convincingly argued for the ‘relative autonomy’ of cultural producers within the commercial settings of the 9 This is not to say, though, that some precocious and curious studies of production did not signal the advent of the budding interest in media/cultural production such as the study of a women fashion magazine’s editors by Ferguson (1983). 34 cultural industries. Cultural producers’ experience and perception of freedom was found to be not completely squelched by the precarious conditions in, or the totalizing power of, media industries. Although media professions are not professions in the classic sense proposed by Abbott (1988), since they lack esoteric knowledge and strict entry barriers, professional competence is still a tactic by which producers can pre-empt executive control (Elliott 1977:152). These experiences of freedom, as linked to an intrinsic sense of professionalism, have recently been confirmed to be at least ‘ambivalent’ and ‘complicated’ (Hesmondhalgh and Backer 2009), ‘self-regulated’ (Kennedy 2010), and ‘in constant flux’ (Banks 2004). The producers’ relative autonomy is linked directly to the nature of cultural products – they need to be continuously original and innovative if they are to become profit-generating, and thus cannot be completely controlled or structured. Within the institutions of cultural production, producer autonomy is a systemic necessity. Media owners and managers stop short at this ambivalence and are forced to make concessions to creative producers in order to provide the basic conditions for the profitable creation of novelty. Producer’s relative autonomy is thus a function of the organization of cultural industries, in that creative managers exercise a lenient control over the creative process, in favour of more stringent control over distribution (Hesmondhalgh 2002). In Chapters 5 and 6, I confirm many of the findings that the studies of creative labour have put forward. In spite of a widespread popular opinion of its being the work of ‘the free and footloose’, the work of travel guidebook writers is indeed characterized by high levels of casualization (work that is predominantly, if not exclusively, freelance); low pay but long working hours ⎼ especially during the ‘crunch time’ of researching and writing up; extended periods of idleness or the juggling of multiple jobs; individualized responsibility for constant technological skill development and promotion ⎼ all of which happens within an industry that enjoys the benefit of an ever-growing ‘labour pool’ (Menger 2006) generated by the perceived desirability of a travel writing job. Not surprisingly, I also noted a heightened sense of anxiety, exasperation and disillusionment with the profession, which led many of the producers to devise ‘exit strategies,’ either leaving ‘creative jobs’ for good, or resorting to the new digital technologies and going the ‘self-publishing’ route. Yet, in spite of such a precarious climate, travel guidebook producers cherished a degree of autonomy not least by working at a managerial and controlling distance from managers and editors, but mainly by invoking reference to the immanent characteristics and conventions of the genre they worked and lived in. Thus, I take up the insights from creative labour studies in an attempt to understand how genres mediated the sense of professionalism, conscientious work and quality through producers’ protracted and intentional engagement with the genre of travel guidebooks. These cultural industries studies provided the model for seeing authors as more than ‘implied authors’, mere ‘paper’ instances caught in their post-mortem biographies and derived from texts. Drawing on this approach, one can indeed recognize that authors are flesh-and-blood people who feel, experience, and project their future, and who think critically about their working and existential status. Authors are thus not biographical instances, but workers capable of self- 35 reflection, embedded in industrial contexts shot through with organizational, managerial and economic imperatives. As such, these studies are an important corrective to hermeneutics, whose task was, in Ricoeur’s words, ‘to reconstruct the set of operations by which a work lifts itself above the opaque depths of living, acting and suffering, to be given by an author to readers who revise it and thereby change their acting’ (1984:53). Creative labour studies put ‘the living, acting and suffering author’ back into the hermeneutical circuit of interpretation, important if nothing else, for acknowledging the ‘real’ interpretive actions of the authors as workers trying to string together a viable living from cultural production. If hermeneutics and reception studies foregrounded the productive reception of audiences and rendered absent the actual conditions of production, creative labour studies have foregrounded the producer, but in the process somewhat lost sight of the genre-bound dimension of their work. As hypothesized at the beginning, drawing on Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of action and Culler’s structuralist poetics, it transpired very clearly from my empirical work that the genre indeed ‘governed’, that is ‘symbolically mediated’ the ways producers worked in practice and informed the ways both individual authors, but also the industry as a whole, perceived themselves, their relative autonomy and their work experience. However, creative labour studies did not engage with genres or the textual dynamics of the cultural object, a lack of attention justified by the urgent need to understand the standing of cultural workers in a turbulent time of creative policy enforcement amidst a glaring absence of sustained intellectual and academic discussion. Too much emphasis on professional producers in institutional ‘contexts’ (though necessary and relevant as a response to reception studies and the political economy) was likely to result in sidestepping the ‘texts’ themselves, as well as genre as a ‘category of production of labour’. Some very recent studies notice this hiatus and propose productive ways to bridge the gap (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011). This is a fertile development that I draw upon, but I also want to add some insights gleaned from the study of the production of a specific, less-researched, popular genre, the travel guidebook. In their latest study of media work in three different industries (television, music and magazine publishing,) Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011) accord genres a certain importance for the understanding of media work. Although not central to their study, they give genres prominence in the analysis of media work, if such an analysis is to be attentive to the distinctive nature or specificity of cultural products. They acknowledge that creative industries, unlike other industries, largely hinge on genres for their organization as a means of linking unpredictable audience demand with predictable creative outputs (Negus 1998; DiMaggio 1987). In such an industrial and organizational context, genres have their own peculiar institutional arrangements which determine the interplay between creativity and commerce (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011, pp. 94-95). Against this background, it is understandable why Hesmondhalgh and Baker use genres as a methodological tool: ‘a further way of ensuring breadth in our sample of interviewees and cases was to concentrate on three genres in each industry’ (p.14). The import of such a methodological stance is useful in that it leads them to shed comparative light on the ‘considerable variation 36 within particular genre cultures’ (p. 91, original emphasis) which are at the same time organizational structures. For example, the media work within trade press magazine publishing is considered by their interviewees as less creative, and thus less autonomous, than that found in music magazines. But the consideration of ‘creativity’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘autonomy’ is not derived from autonomous genre principles that are culturally or symbolically patterned, but from the organizational hierarchies and deployment of internal resources. Hesmondhalgh and Baker do not see ‘the specificity of creative labour’ in terms of genres, but in terms of symbols and ‘symbolmaking’ (p. 18), thereby leaving the relationship between genres and symbols unexamined in favour of seeing genres as organizational categories, within which, as organizational units, creativity unfolds (Negus 1998). Thus, some genres are perceived (by the interviewees) as more or less ‘autonomous’ depending on that genre’s institutional or organizational arrangement: the relationship between advertisements and editorial in each genre, the ‘world they report on’, the perceived public prestige of the genre, the differences in payment (paid per feature or per word), each of which varies by genre. Consider the following example: Some trade press magazines carry more supplements and allow more copy checking, potentially reducing the costs involved in securing stories, but this potentially damages the prestige of magazines and its writers. Meanwhile, in music magazines the genre of music reported on plays an important role, creating a system of music magazines sub-genres. … So-called ‘urban’ music magazines – those reporting on the ‘urban’ genres of hip hop, RandB and genres such as soul and funk that feed into them – seem to have less space for such autonomy, perhaps as a result of the economic fragility of the sub-genre, but perhaps also because of a relatively lesser emphasis on notions of creative autonomy (p. 91). I concur with Hesmondhalgh and Baker that genres are important in the analysis of cultural work with a view to investigating a producer’s relative autonomy. I especially cherish their ‘going within’ each genre when researching the notion of autonomy in cultural work. Yet, their understanding of genres is sociological and teleological, detached most resolutely from issues relative to poetics. The genres are the end product of creative labour that ‘changes in response to the practices of creative workers’ (p.14) and Hesmondhalgh and Baker, who follow Negus’s work on the music industry, take them as already shaped by industry’s self-definition and differentiation. In their work, genres are not culturally and autonomously patterned systems that exercise their effectiveness upon production, but are defined by the industry itself. This division between genres as organizationally determined and as semiotically coded represents the reverse fault line in humanities-based studies of production. For instance, Altman (1986:28) notes that film studies have long been plagued by a division between approaching genres as ‘derived from the industry’s self-promotion’ and ‘structuralist and semiotic applications of genre’. I think, therefore, that a rapprochement between the two could usefully inform the complexity of cultural production with reference to the notion of genre. In addition to being a product of institutional units or organizational arrangements, I tend to approach genres as autonomous in themselves by virtue of their specific modus operandi which is coded by standards of poetics imbued with the effectiveness to influence cultural work itself, as 37 well as authorial self-perception and production practice, in the sense of Ricoeur and Geertz. I hope to add to the analysis presented by Hesmondhalgh and Baker, an understanding of producer autonomy as symbolically mediated by the genre’s independent trajectories. Thus I will shift the focus from professional autonomy (reliance on impersonal codes of conduct, moral rules and obligation, and systemic organization of work and division of labour) to cultural autonomy, a sense of autonomy provided by the very structural principles of making, that is poetics, relative to the genre. This is rather closer to the Renaissance concept of the author-craftsman – ‘a master of a body of rules, or techniques, preserved and handed down to him in rhetoric and poetics’, and for that matter genres, by which he manipulates materials to achieve effects on the audience (Wodmansee 1992). In contrast to Hesmondhalgh and Baker, following Ricouer, I consider the professional autonomy as inextricably linked to imagination: ‘without imagination there is no action, we shall say. And this is so in several different ways: on the level of projects, on the level of motivations and on the level of the very power to act’ (p. 173). And, imagination is always genrebound. Such power of genres to structure authorial action and professionalism can be explained with reference to Don Quixote. As Don Quixote chose the genre (the novel of chivalry) in which he would be portrayed, so were his actions (windmill fighting) induced by the genre. It is the genre that is essential to social life and individual imagination: ‘he [Don Quixote] knows his genre from inside out. His genre is his fix on the world’ (Colie 1973:31). According then to Ricoeur, the genre (especially narrative genres) prefigure individual action and freedom, through the ways usersproducers of genre do things with, around and through it. It is worth mentioning here that the category of genre has gained independently more and more prominence in research on cultural/media industries. In their latest study, Havens and Lotz (2012), for example, position genre as the most important category to shape or ‘circumscribe’ media producers’ autonomy, or what they decide to call ‘circumscribed agency’. Media producers, in their view, so thoroughly internalize genre conventions that the genre almost naturally and inevitably ‘restricts’ their agency (p.16). They write: ‘Genre, a French word that simply means “type”, is one of the main restrictions, because popular media texts fit conventional genre definitions before they can get made’ (ibid.). The degree to which genres restrain producer autonomy is indeed debatable here, as well as the genre’s level of institutionalization. Especially, what is left unanswered is how ‘media texts’ are made ‘fit’ into the genres, something that requires an examination of the very processes of production. However, the fact that Havens and Lotz accord strategic significance to genre as a category of ‘production and labour’ (as opposed to an organizational category) in the study of media industries is important. Yet in the way they parenthetically define the notion of ‘genre’, one can infer the still fresh and hesitant inroad that this category makes in the ‘cultural industries approach’. When seeing the still undefined place cultural industries studies accord to genres in their analyses, it suddenly becomes apparent the hiatus between a more macro perspective on genres, by which genres are institutional and institutionalized categories, and on other, micro perspective, by which genres imbue the daily practices of individual producers. Traditionally, the hiatus that the 44 ‘concrete autonomy’ of culture becomes situated in concrete (lived, formulated, emoted) historical processes, and thus visible and researchable on a social plane: Arenas of action are the social historian’s entrée to the actual formulation of the culture structure. In these arenas historically specific conditions, interests, experiences, and contingences meet, interact, and culminate in cultural formations through “the often contradictory or antagonistic action of a large number of actors and groups of actors” (p. 59). It is the notion of ‘culture-structure’ as a performative codification of cultural/textual features that allows for the conceptual resources developed in humanities-based studies of genre to be inserted into social science. Genres are independently coded systems of aesthetic devices and dominants that have ‘an organizing’ role in the process of cultural production. Drawing on the Russian formalist idea of dominant aesthetic devices, Neale (1990) argues for such an organizing role of genres: Particular genres can be characterized, not as the only genres in which given elements, devices or features occur, but as the ones in which they are dominant, in which they play an overall, organizing role (1990:65-66). The dominant characteristics of genre determine ‘the use of devices of expressive language’ and help the author navigate through the possible ‘sets of techniques’ (Jakobson 1987:44). It is the generic dominant ‘that rules, transforms and determines’ the aesthetic nature of a work of art (p.41). The ‘organizing role’ of the genres, therefore, is what should be studied ‘in the arenas of action’, since it is here that the dominant properties of the genre will be grasped as acted upon through use, interpretation, contestation and negotiation by relevant actors/authors. It is only when probing their ‘concrete autonomy’ that the study can be extended beyond textual or structuralist analysis (which conceived of genres as self-contained and self-referential entities) to see how they mediate, work and act upon those relevant actors, who themselves mobilize, engage with, and act upon those features. Swidler (2002) has contended that culture provides the repertoires of habits, styles, skills that people can draw upon to devise their own context-specific ‘strategies of action’ or ‘certain kinds of self’. Here, the repertoires of resources that culture offers are in the form of stories, plots, symbols, and world views. In other words, culture has the capacity to enable and constrain action through its own codes and symbols (Swidler 2002:73). Taking Swidler’s approach in the analysis of music, for example, DeNora (2003: 134) argues that music structures action: ‘music is a medium to which agents may turn, as they engage in their routine, full-time sense-making procedures in realtime daily life’. Thus music offers models of feeling, general attitudes, modes, and lines of conduct, that are appropriate in specific circumstances, such as, for example, in aerobic classes or shopping malls (p. 140). She argues: Music comes to serve in some way as an organizing material for action, motivation, thought, imagination, and so forth. It is here that we can begin to talk of music as it “gets into action” (DeNora 2003: 46). 45 Therefore, DeNora contends that, because music gets into action, the focus can also be on ‘music-as-practice’ (p. 46); that is, music furnishes the basis for practice and action because various actors mobilize and use music routinely in specific events. And thus, one can speak of ‘what music affords’, of what ‘it makes possible’ (p. 56). I have introduced Swidler’s and DeNora’s arguments about culture/music as mediators structuring action and self-understanding, because they make a useful contribution to the study of the roles of genres in cultural production. As I have shown, genres have been conceived of by hermeneutics and genre approaches as consisting of devices, properties and features that function as socially shared and accepted ways of doing, acting or behaving. Genres have ‘an organizing role’ that structures the way cultural objects get made (and are received) (Jakobson 1987; Neale 1990). It is with how ‘genres get into action’ in practice, to paraphrase DeNora, or how they provide the actual resources or repertoires for action and interpretation (interpretation is always action), to paraphrase Swidler, that I am most concerned in my analysis. Thus, I cherish a focus on genres as mediators in Hennion’s sense: ‘the mediator acts, operates, connects yet has nothing to do with the result’ (1995:235). Thus producer action, experience of work and self-understanding always pass through the genre, while the genre does not completely pre-determine the final cultural object. The genre does something for producers by means of its autonomously coded nature (properties, features or dominants). In order to mediate effectively, the genre as a mediator has to become invisible, although it is reflexively recognized as a condition for action by actors (Hennion 235-236; DeNora 134-135). Genres make people implicitly act in certain ways, but nonetheless can be reflexively interpreted by producers. In parallel with the understanding of ‘music-as-practice’ (DeNora 2003), genres and what they afford their users can in this manner be approached as ‘genres-as-practice’. According to Derrida (1980:56) ‘“Do”, “Do not” says genre, … the figure, the voice, or the law of genre’ which forms both the ‘nature’ and the ‘technè’ of a specific genre. Underpinning the nature of cultural work, genres are on the verge of disappearing, but underpinning the technè they are always potentially consciously and self-consciously mobilized in practice (see also Ricoeur 1981). In this view, what matters is authors’ relation to generic structures (not the structural patterns in and for themselves), but more precisely how authors use genres in production practice. In this way, the conceptualization of genre ceases to be unitary, timeless or even normative (as its historical specificity is to be reconstituted by empirical analysis). And this, inevitably leads to a focus on actors (producers or institutions) as they engage with or mobilize the genre dominant features (Derrida’s ‘law of the genre’, 1980) in actual specific practice and events, or what Kane called ‘arenas of action’ (1991). From this perspective, precedents of such an approach can be found in the audience studies’ treatment of genres within subcultural production, outlined above. The focus on genres as a mediator through which action, feelings, self-understanding are being mediated, entails subscription to what Alexander and Smith call a ‘structuralist hermeneutics’ (2006:145) ⎼ one that sees culture as a text ‘that is underpinned by signs and 46 symbols that are in a patterned relationship to each other’ (ibid.), and as such, furnishes people with socially-distributed cultural tools to uphold their own individual action or interpretation. Thus there is a need, first, to establish the ‘analytic autonomy’ of genres with their dominant (structural) characteristics as inter-textually patterned, and then to examine how producers’ modes of doing, interpreting and experiencing take shape in and through those genre characteristics. Along similar lines, Ricoeur had argued that the structural analysis of written corpuses of texts, that is genres, ‘is a stage – and a necessary one – between a naïve interpretation and a depth interpretation’ that makes possible ‘to locate explanation and understanding at two different stages of a unique hermeneutical arc’ (1973:113). This hermeneutical arch has to connect the guesses of hermeneutical analysis with the methods of empirical validation, intrinsic in social sciences. This is why I think a ‘structuralist hermeneutics’ does in fact provide a way forward. However, I want to refine my approach to genre as based on ‘structuralist hermeneutics’ through the sociology of culture’s emphasis on ‘a hermeneutic sociology of art’ (Wolff 1975) and ‘a sociological hermeneutics’ (Born 2010, see also Born 2002), by way of Wendy Griswold’s proposal for a hermeneutic approach to culture production (1987). From ‘a hermeneutic sociology of art’ and ‘sociological hermeneutics’ to ‘structuralist hermeneutics’ For a long time, the production of culture perspective represented the core of the sociology of culture (Wolff 1999). It indeed obeyed sociological requirements with regard to the generalizability, objectivity and reliability of scientific inquiry, and so subscribed to a strictly ‘valuefree’ sociology, one of rigorously weeding out any subjective or evaluative judgments (Zolberg 1990). For the sociologist, there is no aesthetic or artistic value outside what is socially agreed upon in social networks variously defined as ‘fields’ (Bourdieu 1996) or ‘art worlds’ (Becker 1982). Through this prism what is art is a matter of consensus, not intrinsic properties. In response to the dominant paradigm of the sociology of culture and art, several studies made programmatic statements for a more comprehensive sociology of art, one that would take ‘the works of art’ seriously on their own terms, so as to prevent the object of art from falling prey to different sorts of ‘reductionism’ (Wolff 1975; Griswold 1985; Born 2010). By offering methodological agendas, they all proclaim to redress the perceived deficiencies in the sociological study of culture and art: the object of art needs to be properly understood and appreciated, and not only be used as convenient shorthand for drawing up sociological laws or generalizations. I myself subscribe to and endorse these studies’ advocacy for paying fuller attention to cultural objects in sociological analyses of cultural production. I was mostly drawn to them owing to their explicit invocation of hermeneutic theory and the introduction of tenets coming from hermeneutics to enhance and substantiate ‘the attention to the objects of art’ themselves in sociological analysis. All these methodological agendas are complex, multi-layered and interdisciplinary, and I am aware that a brief presentation will not do justice to any of them. 47 However, my aim is rather circumscribed. In trying to understand the import of such methodological agendas, I am most curious about their treatment (or non-treatment) of the category of genre, especially in light of the basic hermeneutical assumption that production and reception are fundamentally genre-bound, or generic in nature. Wolff (1975) succinctly makes her case explicit: In short, I would maintain that the deficiencies involved in any sociological study of art can only be eliminated by a proper attention to the art itself. The sociology of art, that is, necessarily includes aesthetics (p. 1, original emphasis). Proper attention to the art itself would, then, not only sidestep questions relative to the genesis and the nature of art, but most importantly, perhaps, should involve ‘evaluation of the products’ (p. 4). In order to defend this theoretical injunction, which runs counter to the sociological valuefree stance apprehensive of any evaluation, Wolff proceeds to sketch her defense by championing a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to the sociology of art (and literature). Such an approach proceeds through the phenomenological understanding of the individual in a wider socio-cultural context, his subjective meaning and experience grasped in an immediate context of his ‘total experiential structure’ (or Lebenswelt) in which he acts and interacts with others (pp. 611; pp.134-137). In this view, the ‘content of works of art’ (p. 3) can be understood not as a pregiven category or data, but as meaningfully integrated in the ‘total world’. Thus the task of such a ‘satisfactory’ sociology of art will be to: Describe the origin and creation of cultural products in social life, from the methodological perspective of the social individual, and of the phenomenology of the social world (p. 7). The conundrum that Wolff tries to resolve is twofold: the epistemological jump from the individual artist’s world-view to the world-view of a group; from an individual work of art (always expressing an individual world-view) and a cultural unity of works (always embedded in a supraindividual world-view). This implies a methodological circularity between the parts of a unity and the whole, the social and the individual, and a specific cultural product and tradition. To Wolff, such interrelations are most adequately grasped by means of the ‘hermeneutic circle’, as most vocally propounded by Gadamer. Through this the research accent would be on ‘ideas, values and meanings, and their expressions in art’, while analysis would transcend the biographical instance of the artist in favour of ‘his-being-in-the-society’ (p. 55). The individual artist and his artistic creativity are thus intrinsically social. If art expresses his personal values, then these values are nonetheless social, that is constituted by social factors in social contexts. It is the whole which imparts meaning and experience to the parts, inasmuch as are parts form the meaning of the whole. An important mediator of these levels is language, and language games, that structure thought and experience (p. 66). 48 Given the importance Gadamer assigns (as does much of the hermeneutic theory) to ‘the literary models’ or genres, understood as complex signs or linguistic systems, formed by and forming literary (aesthetic) consciousness (supra-individual totalities) to mediate individual action and consciousness (phenomenological comprehension of meaning), it is surprising that Wolff does not make use of such a propitious category which ‘already always’, as Ricoeur contended, structures and organizes individual action and experience through socially sanctioned norms and symbolic patterns. In my opinion, the consequence of this omission is most acute when Wolff offers what she herself calls ‘a sketchy and unelaborated’ application of her ‘hermeneutic sociology of art’ to the case of ‘modern dance’ (p. 134). In this she spells out four levels of analysis: first, the world-view of the society in question; second, the nature of the modern dance as a form; third, the perspectives of the actors (choreographer, dancer) involved in the making of that form; and fourth a hermeneuticphenomenological account of dance in society (pp. 134-138). However, it is difficult to grasp how those levels are interdependent or, indeed, whether the intrinsic, artistic-historical features of the ‘modern dance form’ will in fact have some influence on the way the dance form has been practiced and lived. In this way, the ‘nature of the form’ can only be analyzed ‘descriptively’ (p. 136) and not in terms of ‘mediation’, in Ricoeur’s and Geertz’s sense. Thus it is not clear from Wolff’s argument how and to what extent the nature or the specificity of form is interdependent (co-constructive of) with the Lebenswelt. What is crucially important is that Wolff opens up the possibility of the artist as the interpreter of his own Lebenswelt in connection to the specificity and nature of forms and to the tradition in which the artist is situated in a kind of Zeitgeist or collective consciousness (p.56). This is something that hermeneutic theory had always contended takes place at the level of configuration, but is only accessible through a theory of reading, not a theory of writing (ascribed to poetics). Thus, Wolff is to be given credit for sociological attention to what she calls ‘the actionlevel’ or ‘the mediating factor of the actual creator’ who mediates ‘the aesthetic and the phenomenological’ through his own (always embedded in a social context) search for meaning (p. 54). The main import of this is that the understanding (also the evaluation) of a cultural product comes about through familiarity with the tradition in which, or against which, that product has been conceived and created. It is here that Geertz (1983b) again proves productive in his argument that culture and cultural tradition should always be understood as ‘significative systems’ (p. 3) that mediate social life, so that the analysis should always be in search of meaning, not laws, causes or generalizations. It is here, I think, that the hermeneutic sociology of art (and literature) can benefit from a dialogue with poetics or the pragmatic theory of genre, as a subset of hermeneutics. As we saw earlier in my discussion of Culler, Scholes and Ricoeur, it is a central tenet in poetics that authorial action can only be rendered comprehensible within a genre-related tradition. The genre is recognized by a structure and formal techniques and properties, nonetheless shared in specific 49 socio-cultural contexts, through which meaning is encoded, that is, expressed in texts, and understood as cultural objects. Genres thus offer repertoires of action and self-understanding (much as the studies of the genre-bound productivity of reception have empirically demonstrated). In a way, this is a shift (but not displacement of focus) from the mediating power of the ‘actual creator’ to the mediating power of genres (the symbolic mediation they entail). Once it is recognized that genres play a role in the shaping of producer agency, institutional self-promotion and authorial self-understanding, it is not clear how this in fact happens in practice. In other words, what is still not clear is how genres (constituted by and constitutive of the artistic/aesthetic tradition) are played out in action. What Wolff seems to be most interested in is Gadamer’s acceptance of ‘prejudices’ or ‘prejudgments’, or what he also calls ‘foremeanings’, as necessary conditions of understanding, although she does not notice that those prejudices are also genre-bound. The interpreter, the cultural historian, or the sociologist of art brings to bear his or her prejudices on the study of cultural products. This is especially important as it gives a possibly satisfactory solution to the problem of value-free sociology. Through constant checking and rechecking, trial and error, the analyst will revise his own prejudices, which will be adjusted and tested in subsequent inquiries. Thus the ‘evaluation’ of the cultural product is arrived at through a constant verification of prejudices which arise from further penetration into meaning (Wolff 1975: 105). The researcher and the researched (the aesthetics) for hermeneutics are temporally separated, as mentioned earlier. A contemporary researcher tries to understand the production of cultural objects, finished and finalized in the past, on their own terms. However, following Gadamer who trenchantly argued for the ‘historicity’ of understanding, Wolff introduces the researcher and researcher’s own historicity back into the analysis of cultural production, his own prejudices and foremeaning, as well as ‘the perspectives of the actual creators’. Yet the ‘prejudices’ seem insufficient to express how ‘actual actors’ and ‘the researchers’ are constituted by traditions of cultural production, that are themselves generic in nature, especially as the consciousness of the tradition shapes the ‘foreknowledge’ of understanding (Gadamer 2006:270). But what is this ‘consciousness’ made of? It seems to me that Griswold (1987) takes the first step towards the delineation of the practices of actual creators and the researcher as they engage with cultural objects that are traditionally grouped into ‘genres’, and which in turn are preconditions of both sociological and practical understanding. She proposes a framework for a ‘cultural analysis’ that is both scientific, but also ‘sensitive’ to cultural objects: one which does not treat cultural objects merely as ‘porkbellies’ (p. 3). Such a framework involves, first, the intentions of creative agents; second, the reception of those objects; third, an analytical comprehension of the objects with a view to the genre that they claim to belong to; and fourth, an explanation of the objects, with reference to the experiences of the social groups involved in their making (1987:1-2). At all these levels the focus of analysis is on the interaction between individuals and a cultural object. And the analysis involves 50 two different types of individuals, ‘the social agent’ as creator (and his ‘intentions’) and the recipient (and his ‘reception’), so that both creator and recipient are circular phases of agency – the creator is recipient and, vice versa, the recipient is a creator of meaning. The ‘analyst’ is a special kind of ‘recipient-creator’. Every creator’s agency is based on intentions. Intention is the creator’s purpose in light of the constraints imposed by, firstly genres (requests for internal patterning and structure), and secondly, social conditions of production (requests for organizationally sanctioned creative work). The intrinsic requirements relative to genres, and the external requests relative to social production form the authorial charge or brief – the immediate prompts to act. If the ‘analyst’ is to ‘comprehend’ the immediate conditions of production and to ‘appreciate’ its direct outcome, he must first understand the dynamics of the genre, as specified in ‘structures, symbols, or patterns’ (p.10) but also the historical genre trajectories and frames of reference (ibid.), through which he will be able to acquire ‘foreknowledge’ of the aesthetic, become aware of his own aesthetic ‘prejudices’ and thus ‘validly’ reconstruct a creative agent’s probable intentions and likely agency. Only then, the analyst will be able to embed the cultural object in a wider social world and historical consciousness. The notion of ‘genre’ thus becomes pivotal for the analytical comprehension of the social agent’s intention and agency – why, for example, a particular poem reads the way it does. Drawing on the work by mainly Jauss (1982), but also Hirsch (1967) and Rosmarin (1985), Griswold argues that the analysis needs to elucidate ‘the sense of genre’ (p.18) which underlies the authorial charge or brief within which the author acts, and the recipient receives, but also within which the analyst comprehends and explains. Creators, recipients and analysts are all enmeshed through their shared sense of genre by means of which they all interact with the cultural object (which, as a result, itself gradually changes): [T]he producer (originator, or creator) and the recipient … may be better understood as phases of agency. … The recipient of a sonnet becomes the producer of another sonnet or of a critical essay. The producing agent has some idea of what genre he is working in; that is he intends his cultural object to fit into, or refer to, one or more known classifications having particular characteristics. This sense of genre… constitutes the agent’s brief; Piero [della Francesca] knew that the genre of altarpieces implied certain things that all altarpieces had in common. In empirical cultural analysis, the analyst reconstructing the creative agent’s brief attempts to understand his intrinsic genre. But, to comprehend the cultural object for his own practical purposes, the analyst makes generic decisions of his own, treating genre as a heuristic in his attempt to get a comprehensive handle on the object in question’ (pp. 18-19). I think this is a powerful proposal, especially as it does away with the ‘intentional fallacy’ rooted in the humanities, and takes the category of ‘genre’ to provide sociological access to the aesthetic. In such a way, Griswold allows the category of genre to be at once a variable and a constant in the analysis, and links dynamically the levels of analysis (form, agents and social world that were isolated but left unconnected in Wolff’s agenda). The genre exerts some sort of influence on creators who self-consciously work within the frame of reference provided by the 51 genre, and stipulated by the work’s commissioners (for example Piero’s religious patrons). The creators are active genre-users and interpreters of genres, which are shared in a social world by the recipients but also by patrons (and by extension managers, owners, sponsors). It is here that Griswold suggests a reversal of Jauss’s ‘horizons of expectation’ by which a reader always situates a text against his and his readers historical set of references, experience and preferences. So, Griswold suggests that authors are users/recipients of genres, and as such their ‘horizon of expectation’ should be reconstructed against authorial preferences, experience and knowledge. Every recipient and every creator participates in the social world that shapes and pushes the genre in certain variable directions. On the other hand, it is the analyst who, in order to appreciate, comprehend and explain, needs to analytically recognize the existence of the genre (as it has been recognized by the authors themselves) and treat its characteristics in her empirical analysis as if they were the properties of the cultural object. In other words, the analyst needs to specify them in terms of symbols, signs, and patterns that are valid as conventions in certain local and historical circumstances. Once the genre is given an ‘analytic’ autonomy in this way, the analysis should proceed by examining social agents’ engagement with those analytically stipulated genre characteristics. However, although it argues for the historicity of understanding, Griswold’s analysis remains an ex post facto agenda influenced by the very tenacity of literary canons. A cultural object cannot be understood on its own terms, but always with reference to the social agents’ and analyst’s historicity, that is to their social, cultural and temporal embeddedness. Nevertheless, instead of giving temporal advantage to the producing agent and his interaction with the genre, the analysis is merely an exercise in an idem per idem probability. That is, the analyst analytically devises a heuristic genre on the basis of the genre that is supposed to have had an influence on the very production process, and is thus ‘a finalized’ product of that process. In other words, the analyst explains the same with the same by which the hermeneutic circularity of understanding is once again perpetuated infinitely. It explains the process of genre-bound production by the very principles of the genre thus produced. Indeed this is the criticism all too often leveled against the methodological inadequacy of the ‘horizon of expectation’ for an empirical analysis (see Holub 1984). Under these circumstances, it would be more fruitful if, once the analytical autonomy of the genre has been established by way of formal or structural analysis, analysis focuses on the ‘aesthetics’, in such a way that cultural analysis proceeds by probing ‘the mediating level’ of the actual creators’ (Wolff 1975) with reference to such formally established characteristics or common traits that I will later call ‘dominants’, following the Russian Formalist School. In this way, the genre becomes an analytical category whose dominant structural properties are acted upon and with, mobilized and engaged with by the producers in their daily working lives and practices. In this way, the genre can be taken to afford, or make possible certain appropriate modes of experiencing, feeling, and most importantly perhaps, acting (writing, researching, composing, revising and so on). In this way, interaction with the genre will be understood not only in terms of 52 intentions and actions (purposes and motivations), but also as modes of self-interpretation and self-understanding. Recent publications by Born (2010), building upon her landmark ethnographic studies of two world-class institutions of cultural production IRCAM (1995) and the BBC (2005) have helped my understanding of how cultural production takes place in the context of the genre it produces. Born’s work offers a systematic inclusion of (and a programmatic statement for) the concept of genre in the study of cultural production, and as such provides fecund ground upon which to further the investigation of the role genres play in the process of production. Although her work is based on elitist forms of cultural production with high-symbolic capital (in Bourdieu’s sense, 1996), Born (2010: 175 and also 192) advocates, following Foucault, that we see genres in their ‘positivity’, that is, as separate entities of discursive practice that can be positively and constructively described on their own terms (and not just through negation, as is often the case with low-brow culture). As a result, her framework can also be applied without restriction to popular cultural genres such as travel guidebooks. In her programmatic essay Born (2010) offers a resolution to what she perceives to be an unsatisfactory state of the current ‘value-free’ sociology of art, which I have described in detail above; namely its inability to ‘engage with the questions of form and aesthetics, and with the interpretive criticism, that are central to the humanities’ (p.174). Her proposal for ‘a non-reductive account of the aesthetic in theorizing cultural production’, amounting to ‘a sociological hermeneutics’, is predicated on what she calls ‘an analytics of mediation’ (p.172). This, she says: Requires reinvention in relation to five key themes: aesthetics and the cultural object; the place of institutions; agency and subjectivity; questions of history, temporality and change; the problems of value and judgment. These themes are deeply connected; each can be seen as ultimately subordinate to the first. (ibid.) Born argues that institutional ethnographies most suitably weave together all the five elements immanent in ‘the analytics of mediation’, something that she herself demonstrated in her earlier work on IRCAM and the BBC. First, they allow for a sociological analysis of art or culture (how social relations, such as, for example, an institutionalized and stratified division of labour, enforcement of creative policies, management hierarchies or even charismatic managerial personalities influence what gets produced in its materiality as well as circumscribing a producer’s relative autonomy). Second, an institutional ethnography, especially if combined with history, is well placed to offer an interpretation and critical judgment of the cultural object itself (by eliciting producers’, as well as influential critics’, own interpretations thereof, and by heeding their evaluative discourses, both aesthetic and ethical, which in turn establish the conditions for assessing creativity, as inventive or repetitive respectively) (Born 2010:189-192). It is this second injunction I am most drawn to. It is here that Born introduces the concept of genre, mainly drawing on the phenomenological hermeneutics of Jauss (1982). By so doing, she ascribes sociological credence to a category hailing from the humanities. In this way, it seems to me that she remedies Wolff’s (1976) oversight that genres might be a propitious category in 53 ‘hermeneutical sociology’. Born is adamant that ‘a sociological hermeneutics’ can only be based ‘against the background of an analysis of the history of a genre-in-process’, which makes it possible ‘to assess the degree of inventiveness or redundancy of the cultural object in question’ (p. 192). It is only against the account of the historicity of the internal differentiation of aesthetic formations, their ‘productivity and genealogical longevity’, that authorial agency can be understood as ‘creative invention’ (p. 188) – that amounts to a producer’s capacity of making ‘a difference’ in the diachronic linage of that specific genre. In this way, it seems to me, Born (2004) centrally upholds the hermeneutical assumption that every act of production is genre-bound, and as such genres must be central to the empirical study of cultural production. There are two methodological gains here. First, Born dispenses with the ex post facto research agenda entailing the reconstruction of authorial probable intentions pertaining to products that are finished, finalized and complete, without throwing history and historical meaning overboard (Griswold 1987). Instead, she argues for the temporality of the relationship between an object, its producer and its genre, by calling for a focus on ‘the genre-in-formation’ (p.192), rather than consider genres as already stabilized and petrified structures. Second, she argues for a ‘post-positivist empiricism’ (p. 198), which allows the juxtaposition of producer and critic discourses and interpretations with the historical and ontological trajectories of the cultural object. Thus the analytical task is to review innovation and creativity in relationship to issues of authorial agency, reflexivity and intentionality within the institutions of production, but also the aesthetic systems in which they are embedded and function. Although she does not include genre among the five dominant themes of ‘the analytics of mediation’, Born pays heed to it as a category. She justifies its productivity in the study of cultural production by detecting a lacuna in previous studies, which she finds bypass the category of genre as a condition of agency: If there is an overriding dimension of creative practice that has been lamentably neglected – by Bourdieu, production of culture and cultural studies alike – and that demands to be studied, it is the insistent, existential reality of the historical orientation of producers by reference to the aesthetic and ethical trajectories or coordinates of the genres in which they work, an orientation that enables or affords agency (p. 192, original emphasis). The accent on genres as frameworks to which producers orient leads Born to conclude with reference to her work on ‘genre-specific professional cultures’ at the BBC that genres offer ‘varying degrees of resistance to the onerous conditions wrought by the managerial reforms’ (2010: 192; for a similar argument see Born 2002). However, although ‘the orientation to genres’ is enabling, it also constrains or circumscribes the margin of authorial freedom by setting, as poetics maintains, the boundaries of what is thinkable or doable in certain circumstances. Thus, as Gadamer (2002) argued, genre can curb ‘free invention’ and act as ‘straitjackets to imagination’ (Derrida 1980). In addition, genres are never independent of managerial impositions or institutional arrangements, as genres within institutional settings will always be strategically managed as ‘formats’ ⎼ that is, as rules and norms 60 (of one’s position in the world, one’s relation to work, and freedom) always passes through interpretation, and interpretation only comes about through culturally coded sign systems, which as most centrally in the case of genre, have the power to imbue that self-understanding and action. My argument is that, in order to understand how genres play an active, animating and constitutive role in cultural production, producer self-understanding and discourses, the genre should be given an analytic autonomy in Kane’s and Griswold’s sense of a ‘realist’ sort of analysis, and that this is only possible through a recourse to structuralist or formalist techniques (for example, Jakobson, 1987 or Neale, 1990), because, as Broekman (1974) argues, they zealously guard ‘the specificity of the aesthetic’ and ‘the properties of the object’ (p. 55). In addition, the structuralist/synchronic genre-poetics is what is bequeathed by history and tradition, and thus is actively engaged with by professional producers. Only when the dominant characteristics of genres are identified as if they were properties of the cultural object18 can one proceed to examine the historical variability and local deployment, employment or enactment of those dominant characteristics that now become resources for acting, experiencing and self-perceiving in specific concrete events or social situations. However, this is not to accept uncritically the structuralist credo that sign systems have no reference outside themselves or are timeless. Sign systems are always enacted in practice in concrete social events by social actors who draw upon them to construct meaning19. By specifying the genre dominants, one indeed starts off from another basic assumption in structuralist genre theory: that genres are systems of ‘repetition and innovation’ and ‘similarity and difference’ (Rosmarin, 1984:47)20 with which authors consciously and constantly get to grips by proficient usage (Ricoeur 1984; Culler 2000). In this way, genres are not essentialised, but are understood in their performativity, as they are both outcomes of work, and play an active part in the constitution of that work. And, if approached as a mediator, genres analytically transcend the dualisms between the aesthetic and the sociological, between active human agents and passive objects (Hennion 1995). Moreover, such an approach adds another dimension to the understanding of genres as hermeneutic frames of references, immanent in the conceptualization of the changing horizon of expectation whereby genres play a key function in their establishment (Jauss 1982:22-24). The genre is then understood as a frame of action, in addition to that of interpretation (see Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of action). On the other hand, the analytical specification of genre dominants allows the analyst to access and assess producers’ self-interpretation and experience of work as performed through their interaction with the genre (Griswold 1987), however unobtrusive, tacit and unarticulated that 18 I say as if because they will always be indeed inter-textually, and by corollary, inter-subjectively relational. 19 See Ricoeur, 1973:93-5, who argued that genres and language should be understood as always in use, and thus as enablers of meaningful action – a specific doing by a particular person in some concrete moment. 20 See also Todorov 1990; Neale (1983: 50) also talks about ‘difference in repetition’; while Bawarshi (2008:79) prefers ‘imitation and invention’. 61 genre-knowledge is in everyday practice (Bourdieu 1987). As I showed in the Prelude to this thesis, it was only in the aftermath of a scandal, of deep crisis, that travel writers openly evoked and embraced the genre, and its dominant (ethically and aesthetically desirable benchmarks) as a corrective to (un)conscientious and (ir)responsible work practices. In most of its everyday practices, the genre is obdurately present; it permeates producer discourses so much that it becomes normalized, and thus almost invisible. It is in light of this normalization that understanding genres analytically as mediators which, owing to their specific properties, make producers act or behave in certain ways, enables the analyst to grasp the complexity of cultural production. In doing so I follow recent approaches that emphasize the artwork as a mediator in its social production (Becker et al. 2006; De La Fuente 2010; Strandvad 2012). I extend this framework, though, by arguing that genre, as a corpus of texts21, may be seen in the analysis not as passively caused by institutional structures or as cultural-historical backdrops, but as playing an active, cocreative role in the process of textor object-making (Hennion 1995). Therefore, genres have an active status – by default of their genre-poetics inferable through structuralist analysis ⎼ and they furnish probable or plausible lines of action, while not compelling or enforcing behaviour in prescripted or pre-determined ways (DeNora 2003; Latour 2005). I think that it is only by approaching genres as structurallyand formallypatterned mediators that one can understand how they can enable agency, enact autonomy, and/or invention or imagination. Cultural production always involves a generic recognition of opportunities as well as limits as to what is possible and plausible; what it is desirable to do, when and how; and these opportunities and limits are inextricably connected to the dominant characteristics of the genre as accepted and sanctioned in specific socio-cultural and sociohistorical circumstances. I recognize that this is indeed rather similar to the audience studies’ approach to the genre-bound productivity of reception, whereby the genre was accorded an active role in the processes of subcultural textual production, as well as subaltern types of selfexegesis (see Bennett, Kinsella, Jenkins). But this is how I want to work with the category of genre: genres act upon their producers by way of furnishing plausible, desirable and appropriate modes of action and interpretation, at the same time as producers actively work the genre out. Thus, I conceive of genres as systems of formal features or properties that serve as conventionalized guiding or organizing frameworks for the production of media texts, with which producers regularly and strategically, if tacitly, come to terms in expressing knowledge, experience or feelings. These constituent properties of the genre are actively and variably mobilized in production practice, and it is this condition that opens up the possibility for change and innovation, and that has to be studied in its complexity. Thus, I approach genres as an active agent 21 This is what Born (2010:184, see also Born 2005a), drawing on Gell, called ‘distributed objects’ as a way for pointing out to the temporality of the inner relationship between texts, that is a genre’s immanent intertextuality (genres are prototypical inter-text) 62 in ordering and organizing cultural production while producers activate these affordances in production practice. On the other hand, how genres coordinate complex forms of social action and how they enable professional and individual activities, self-exegesis and writing practices involved in, for example, court trials or tax accounting (Devitt 2004), have long been central concerns for the pragmatic theory of genre as appropriated in rhetoric studies of genre (Miller 1984; Orlikowski and Yates 1994) or linguistic anthropology (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Bauman 2008). This theory holds that genres carry the capacity to influence meaning-production in specific socio-cultural circumstances. The gist of these studies is that genres are ‘social actions’ because people ‘take action through their conceptions of genres’ (Devitt 2004:64). This is so because of the very resources immanent in the genre that users draw upon so as to produce meaning. So genres are the organizational principle of production, since they ‘guide’ its user-producers under certain conditions of performance and perception (Bauman 2008:3; Bakhtin 1984). What a genre consists of (its properties) is what enables its user-producers to do things with it (selfinterpret or excuse, for example), since they perceive those resources in terms of what they mean and allow them to do. I will later argue that here the concept of affordances (Gibson 1973) will prove fruitful for understanding the interplay between the perceived ‘-ablness’ of the genre and what its users-producers intend to do in relation to it (English 2011). In order to capture such dynamics, this strand of analysis proposes a qualitative approach to ‘poetics’ also named ‘ethnopoetics’ one that I myself wish to subscribe to, that will study the formal properties of genres as they are negotiated, employed or used within specific events or social worlds of its production, now easily called a genre world (see Bauman 2008; Devitt 2004 both of whom discussed ‘genre communities’). ‘Ethnopoetics’ thus studies the active process of negotiations in which ‘participants reflexively examine the discourse as it is emerging, embedding assessments of its structures and significance’, in such a manner that the ‘discourse’ pertains to the genre, its poetic patterning, symbols and properties, which in turn affect the social action of the community around that genre (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 69). Thus, ‘ethnopoetics’ may also be said to study ‘the regimens of calibration, that is expectations and values, bearing on the degree to which individual performances should conform with or depart from what is taken to be normative for the genre’ (Bauman 2008:10). This performance, as ‘a regimen of calibration’, is always based on an interplay between ‘the intrinsic qualities’ of the genre, and ‘the performer’s virtuosity’ (ibid.). Thus the genre is studied in its capacity ‘to move’ the performers (as well as audiences) towards appropriate and good performances, but always with regard to the generic discourse relative to its characteristic properties. Therefore I see here a benefit for recasting these studies’ focus on speech-genres (riddles or spiels, for example that Bauman studied) to one on media genres (such as travel guidebooks) and their production within a specific genre world (within which individual 63 performance is calibrated as a matter of interplay between a genre’s properties and performer’s virtuosity). Hence, it is this line of analysis that I want to further develop in relation to the performative role of genres in the processes of cultural production. Thus, in Chapter 2, I discuss this framework in more detail, mainly through the work of Ann Swidler, literary, film and pragmatic genre theory, and later in the empirical chapters I draw on Alistair MacIntyre, Harrison White, Gerard Genette and Jerome Bruner, who latched onto Ricoeur’s ideas of genres as central to the textual and genre-bound understanding of action and identity. In Chapter 3, I offer a genre analysis of travel guidebooks by applying Jakobson’s idea of generic dominant properties. In the empirical chapters that follow, I concentrate on how these properties are acted upon, and engaged with in actual production practice, as well as in individual and institutional self-understanding. Approaching genres as mediators potentially leads from a ‘revised sociology’ towards some of the earliest work within media production studies (Jensen 1984, 1998; Dornfeld 1998). If the category of genre has received little critical or theoretical consideration in the sociological studies of art and was only just recently influentially revived and reinvigorated (Born 2002; 2005; 2010), it can be found usefully operationalized in the empirical analysis of media production within the ‘cultural studies of media production’ (Caldwell, Mayer and Banks 2009). There is an important difference here. While Born (2005) intermittently and sometimes in broad-brushstrokes discusses a wide range of genres that the BBC’s Drama Department is producing, mainly under the dictate of tight budgets, rigid commissioning policies, employment contracts, such as the hospital drama, historical documentary, satire, thrillers, docu-soaps, even ‘rapid-response dramas’ (p. 353), and so on, media production studies go straight to the core of the production of a single genre (the educational documentary, talk show, sit-com), so as to vivisect the production procedures as interlocking with a specific genre-poetics. Unsurprisingly, these studies are central to my own study that concentrates on one single genre, that of travel guidebooks, and its production poetics. By going deep ‘within the world of the participants’ (Jensen 1998:157), media production studies are fully-fledged ‘genre world’ studies, those social worlds that have the ‘cultural material’ at its centre (Jensen 1998:45). This would be a world, defined and experienced in and through the very genre it produces, it cares about, and takes professional pride in. Genres matter: the interpretive approach to media production In a nutshell, media production studies established that genres are central to the empirical study of media production owing to the dynamics of interpretation, negotiations and practical contestation of genres within social worlds of production. These studies try to shed light on producer meaningand sense-making processes of media production always with reference to the genre they produce. As such, these studies represent what Bruun (2010; 2011) has recently named ‘a genre approach to media production’. I hope to contribute further to the consolidation of such 64 an emerging paradigm by extending the scope of the concept of genre in the study of media production. In an article published in Media, Culture and Society in 1980, Mortensen and Svendsen offer an analytical explanation of what they observed is a prevailing condition in journalists’ working practice within Swedish newsrooms. They were puzzled by the finding that in the face of rigorous editorial supervision the genres provide leeway for individual autonomy: ‘the genres ease the carrying out of daily work and we find them built into the total work process’ (p.171). They tried to make sense of this by probing into how genres underlie the daily routine of journalistic practices and journalists’ discourses. They contended that genres provided the impetus for work and producer freedom by furnishing modes of efficient writing, confident expression and expertise. At the same time, genres were found to impose internal and implicit control over what and how stories got produced. Mortensen and Svendsen conclude that genres are not only integral to the idea of ‘good journalism’ but that they enable it: The “good journalist” has learned to command the journalistic genres. These enable him to produce adequate material, finish to deadline, treat usual subjects with authoritative sources and to present them in an uncontroversial and reader-friendly manner. Control is built into the organization of the working process as internal and implicit (p. 175). The strength of Mortensen and Svendsen’s analysis is that they approach genres as active ingredients in and within the social life of the newsroom, as opposed to backgrounds or frameworks. Journalists go about their daily work always in relation to the genre or genres in which they are embedded, and which they are expected to (re)produce. Genres thus help structure daily work and news stories because the journalists actively and strategically engage with the genre. Mortensen and Svendsen, thus, emphasize the power of genres to enable action, but also to exercise control over work practices, or on what ‘genres make possible’ (Culler 2002). Such early and revealing accounts of the role of genres in the production process, however, are sporadic, geographically detached, and unappreciated in further production studies. But they paved the way for an integration of the hermeneutical perspective, which traditionally hinged on genres, with production analysis, which was traditionally concerned with media institutions and organizations (Ytreberg 2000). I want here to consider such studies which, for the most part independently from one another, built the scaffolding of a genre approach to media production, with each new study adding to the consolidation. As early as 1984, Joli Jensen wrote a programmatic article arguing for ‘an interpretive approach to culture production’, an approach that inevitably hinges on the category of genre. It was central to Jensen’s agenda to bridge what she saw as a gap between cultural studies’ concern at the time with unveiling the buried meaning of the text, and a sociology of art that disregarded the textuality of cultural products in favour of institutions and organizations. Her agenda thus restored the connection between text and production by calling attention to ‘the assumptions, biases and beliefs of producers about their work, the business, the audience, the times, the genre’ (p. 110). For Jensen, producers’ ‘interpretive processes’ were always ‘evidenced and enshrined in 65 the cultural material’ (p. 111). ‘My suggestion’, she wrote, ‘is that, in studying production, we take the expressive nature of the material as seriously in inquiry as it is taken in actual practice’ (p. 114). The goal of her agenda, therefore, was ‘to determine and express “what holds true” in the cultural world being examined, since that is what determines the nature and character of symbolic expression’ (p. 115). Once one latches onto what ‘holds true in the world being studied’, judgmental divisions between low and high culture made during the course of the critical debate on mass media disappear. For Jensen, the mediating power of ‘cultural material’ was to be approached through a focus on ‘cultural forms and genres’ understood in terms of ‘practices and beliefs’ (p. 115), not as categories imported from without, because they are ‘what holds true’ within the production world by way of being constantly interpreted and re-interpreted by producers. The interpretive approach to production should, therefore, be attuned to the category of genre ‘as an arena of negotiation; it is in and through it that ideas, values and beliefs are worked’ (p. 114). In this way, Jensen argued, such an approach ‘takes seriously the connections between experience and expression’ (p. 116) whereby the genre foregrounds the constellations of belief embodied in producers’ practice and experience of work. Interestingly, although initially proposed as an intervention in how television production studies were being conducted at the time, Jensen (1998) applied this programmatic agenda to the production of country music. In this study she focused on a period of deep transformation of the genre (1950s and 1960s), a period when country music was ‘in crisis’ – shifting from its dominant hillbilly and barn dance style to new commercialized pop style, and producers were accused of ‘selling out’ and ‘going commercial’, while the genre was characterized as ‘dying out’. In opposition to the classical account of country music by Peterson (1998), Jensen described in detail how the redefined genre mattered to the people from within the world it produced. She argued that the shift depended on intimate, interpretive and sentimental considerations about what was ethical and aesthetic about a genre, rather than on structural changes in the industry and technology (television and radio becoming prominent venues for the genre’s promotion, leading to professionalization of the trade, central to Peterson’s account) (p. 159). In this period, which was associated with changing styles of instrumentation, country music was taken to imply spontaneous and natural music, with ‘heartfelt lyrics’ ‘about real life’ (pp. 131-135), ‘honest, sincere qualities’ (p. 129) which functioned as what might be called historically operative genre dominants (Neale 1990). Such internally coded ‘symbolic material’ was constantly interpreted, worked and revised in production practice, while producers took pride in getting such a style ‘right’. Jensen then gave an account of what seems to me to be a craftsmanship attitude to work with an emphasis on techne and praxis, again in Ricoeur’s ‘author as artisan’ sense. For example, she showed how, in spite of working in organizational and professionalized environments, the country music songwriters she studied devised techniques (and this is my gloss, not Jensen’s) to uphold the ‘realness’ of the genre that emanated ‘from the heart’ by maintaining contact with ‘common folk’ such as songwriters going fishing with ‘ol’ boys’ or hanging out in ‘small town taverns’ (p. 131). In this way, Jensen gives prominence to the link between ‘the symbolic material’ 66 and the values, beliefs and practices of the people engaged as producers of that material. It follows, that a producer’s interpretations of the cultural material are doubly articulated: they are both an act of (self-)interpretation and a fully-fledged act of production: ‘cultural material is not “processed” like soap by organizational, technical and economic factors, it is constructed in and through interpretations’ (1984: 110). Independently, Ytreberg (2000) suggests that ‘a basic hermeneutic mechanism’ may reconcile the divide between ‘text’ and ‘context’ in the study of ‘text production’ (p.52): ‘in production, as in reception, the element of productivity is dependent on an element of interpretation’ (p. 56). Whenever producers set out to work on text production, they share a common understanding of the goal, conventions, and expectations of that class of text, that is genre. This common genre-related understanding is constantly ‘negotiated and subjected to compromises in a social and professional context’ (ibid.), while the interpretive repertoire is acquired through professional training and work, and is enacted in every single instance of production (p. 57). Essentially, what Ytreberg proposes (and where I think he extends Jensen’s agenda, which is not explicitly quoted in his work) is the constitutive, constructive nature of interpretation. That is, text production and text interpretation are mutually constitutive (p. 57). Genre producers produce through the interpretation of the genre. They are already always genre recipients that productively interpret genres within production context – professional cultures, programme policies, resource allocation, and organizational structures (pp. 58-59). What it seems to me Jensen and Ytreberg propose is a sort of production-as-interpretation approach. On the one hand, this approach counteracts the idea that genres are merely the outcome of industrial structures, and on the other hand, it may be seen as indeed the necessary shift of attention from the roles of genres as predominantly foregrounding the reception to genres as underpinning the production. Here the aim is to view genres as central to, what I called before, the genre-bound productivity of reception in a production context within media organizations. However, the question that arises now is what are these interpretations of? Through this prism, genres are a function of producer interpretation, and thus are shapeless, essentially devoid of any concrete existence. It is the interpretation that makes genres what they are, rather than there being specific genre properties which enable or constrain the possible outlook of interpretation and negotiation. The focus on genres as mediators or set of affordances (the possibilities that they furnish for action, Gibson, 1979; Hutchby 2001) may refine this view. Producer interpretations are an interpretation of the genre’s properties, that now become set of affordances: render available different spectra of genre-use. By paying attention to the structural properties of genres one moves from, without losing sight of, accounts, beliefs and interpretive construction of genres, to genres that underpin the possibilities of manifold trajectories of action and thus frame the ways in which genres are involved and mobilized in the production of the final shape of the cultural product. Thus, the analytical focus will be on how producers manage the possibilities of action (and by corollary the pressure on their relative autonomy to maneuver them) that emerge from a genre’s affordances. Inevitably then, the focus on genre properties, which afford certain practices 67 and action, has to centrally accord analytical autonomy to the genre-poetics, that is the norms, compositional strategies, technique that govern, without necessarily completely controlling, production. In this way, the genre will be accorded an active status with the capacity to exercise influence over actors and production practices, not only being influenced by more structural forces or serving as mere backgrounds or benchmarks against which the artistic value should be measured. Here, the things are getting complicated as the genre-poetics is always embedded within institutions of cultural production. It is then, at the level where the genre-poetics is being engaged with within institutions of production that the co-producing relationship between genres and cultural production can be studied. This is evocative of the co-producing relationship between cultural material and the actors involved in its production, a relationship that Hennion and Meadel (1986) argued needs to be studied ‘at the point where they mesh, where they create an entity and are experienced’ (p. 285). Some insightful ethnographic studies that concentrate on the actual and institutional production processes of specific television genres come close to such an analytical credo22, although the analytical import relative to the concept of genre as an active category of production, is largely to be extrapolated: Dornfeld’s (1998) study on high-brow educational documentary; Grindstaff’s (2002) on day-time talk shows and Bruun’s (2010) on sit-coms. What all these studies have in common is the refusal to look at genres in isolation from the immediate social settings in which they were produced and consumed or to take the industrial fiats for granted in favour of textual reading of media output23. In addition, all these studies treat genres as active ingredients and forces in the production process, not simply upshots of institutional dynamics. By continuing in the footsteps of these studies, and focusing on a specific publishing and popular culture genre such as travel guidebooks, I hope to contribute to a further consolidation of a genre approach to media production outside the frameworks of television24. In his ethnographic study Dornfeld (1998) follows the production (especially the conceptualization and decision-making phase) of a high-brow educational documentary titled Childhood. Although his main interest is to elucidate how public culture gets mediated by public 22 A more explicit genre approach to production, therefore, may be said to have been practiced by researchers of the television industry, an industry that stringently maintains and polices different genre boundaries. This should come as no surprise. As Fiske (1987:109) has argued: ‘Television programs appear to fall “obviously” into clear generic categories – cop shows, soap operas, sitcoms, hospital dramas, quiz and game shows, and so on. Television is a highly “generic” medium with comparatively few one off programs falling outside established generic categories’. 23 This separation has been a commonplace in media studies, as I will argue in Chapter 2 (see Neale 1990; Altman 1986; Mittell 2004). 24 In a rather sporadic study of the roles of genres outside of television studies, Bird (1992) found that the journalists who produce supermarket tabloids -- a genre that conjures up sleazy images and preposterous, brazen producers – actually take pride in innovating within the genre’s formula. They become adept at using leading yes/no questions, recombining info from multiple sources just to arrive at the good intrinsic to the genre: ‘the good money quotes’. Bird found that supermarket tabloid journalists (not unlike their ‘serious’ news journalism colleagues) were more prone to defend their (disputed) ethical stance and professional standing through the formal moral codices immanent in the genre, the skills and techniques required for a proficient production of the genre, and genre-specific professional norms. 68 service programming and ideology, he nonetheless dedicates considerable attention (see chapter four) to genres and genre-poetics as ‘currency’ in the production process: Much of the aesthetic discourse I heard throughout the production of Childhood pertained to genre, though sometimes through metaphorical and analogical language. … Genres have a currency and import even prior to the work of production, influencing expectations critical for setting in motion structures of production. A program is developed (planned, funded, scripted) shot, edited, and slotted into a station’s schedule with continual attention to genre: what type of program it is, how it coheres with others of this type and contrasts with different genres, and what textual features are appropriate, conventional, and effective within that generic class (1998:91). Dornfeld corroborates this with copious evidence. He shows in rich empirical detail how the generic features that underpin the educational documentary poetics are vigorously interpreted, negotiated and discussed: for example, between the producers and the TV network executives, or between international stakeholders and distribution channels, or between creative personnel and scientific advisors. In this way he grounds his analysis in what I have previously called ⎼ following Briggs and Bauman (1990) ⎼ an ‘ethnopoetics’ of the public television documentary, in order to elucidate issues of authorship, authority and production practice more generally. Producer judgments and decisions about the overall shape and scope of the program were grounded always in their assumption about audience desires and attention, as well as in ‘the conventions of making “good television” within this program genre’ (p. 122). It is with a view to the ‘poetics’ of the genre ⎼ its visual and narrative codes ⎼ that producers chose practically (or were halted from choosing) appropriate sequences in terms of verbal and visual density, decided in favour or against incamera presentation or voiceover, sought a balance between entertainment (enjoyable and fun to watch) and scientific representation (factual, didactic and edifying), and strove to be innovative (by introducing, for example, cinema vérité style dramatized, staged, recreated scenes) as opposed to orthodox aesthetics of realism (observational unedited sequences), and so on. In meticulous detail Dornfeld shows how Childhood producers made use of the genre-poetics with a view to attaining cinematic, dramatic or scientific qualities of the sequences being filmed, edited and scripted. In doing so, Dornfeld (pp. 151-157) documents how documentary producers rigorously judge the morality of techniques and the immanent ethical import of formal (aesthetic) decisions, such as the ethical considerations (regarding racial or national stereotyping of the subjects represented, but also the producer duty to educate the audience) arising, for example, from the juxtaposition of archival and contemporary scenes of a Japanese mother dressing up in kimono; or from, the inclusion of an unedited sequence of an African-American family’s Christmas lunch fraught with tension25. 25 A comparison with Born’s (2005) shorter but insightful discussion of the editing stage of the documentary film The Return of Zog immediately springs to mind (pp. 444-448). Here Born documents the constructedness of documentary production by showing how the producers go about the choice, both ethical and aesthetic, of specific sequences mainly featuring Albanian poverty and hardship. However, Born spends much more attention, not on how the ethical and aesthetic choices involved in the making of these sequences are mediated by genre-poetics, but on ‘critically interpreting’ and judging the ‘generic’ qualities, that are almost equated with innovation, of the final product. She 69 Similarly rigorous attention to the active role played by genres in the media production process is Grindstaff’s (2002) ethnographic study of the production of daily talk shows. Grindstaff evidences in minute detail how the structural features of the genre of talk shows, predominantly ‘spontaneity’ and ‘live-audience participation’, play into the heightened anxiety levels of producers who feel unable to control and manage the direct consequences of these dominant genre features: the unanticipated, fast-paced production events that defy any attempt at scriptedness and the unreliable performance by the audiences, who are in need of carefullybalanced ‘orchestration’, ‘manipulation’ and ‘rehearsal’. For producers and guest-participants in the show, the fine line between deception and manipulation, exaggeration and distortion so as to obtain ‘a dramatic money-shot’ (another dominant feature of the genre) in the form of fistfights, weeping and open confrontation, is always mediated through the genre’s autonomous logic. Genre permeates producers’ commitment to doing ‘good television’ within the ‘genre coordinates’, and to upholding their ethical and professional stance in balancing ‘the genre’s inherent tension’, a tension between ‘scriptedness’ (order) and ‘spontaneity’ (disorder) (p.78). ‘Good television’ requires the money shot to be genuine, but also constantly produced (ibid.). This leads Grindstaff to conclude: Producers who encourage guests to exaggerate their emotions or prioritize the more sensational aspects of their stories do so in the name not of deception but of producing good television; this requires a certain amount of manipulation. For their part, some guests exaggerate or embellish their stories with little or no encouragement from producers, because they, too, know what constitutes good television within the parameters of the genre and are eager to provide their performative competence (2002:248-249, emphasis added). Grindstaff and Dornfeld adeptly introduce the category of genre into their analyses, as it is worked and acted upon in the process of production by the producers. In this manner they both demonstrate the performative and operative force of textual forms, not only their interpretive nexus. In doing so, Dornfeld (1989) closely reads the documentary genre analysis by Bill Nichols, and probes Nichols’s poetics of genre in a production setting with organizational arrangements and managerial impositions: ‘the documentary poetics offer formal strategies’ to manage practical and managerial conflicting goals and demands (p. 139). Thus Dornfeld treats genres not as classifying systems but ‘a set of practices that guide, condition, and mediate between production reads The Return of Zog as a ‘foreign report’, ‘political thriller … with comedic touches’, ‘mystery’ that ‘teeters on the edge of parody’ (p. 447), all of which complements her effort at criticism-infused sociological hermeneutics, which does not preclude issues of ‘value’. Instead of probing further how the genre itself with its formal properties guides producer ethical and aesthetic action on-the-go (immanent in a structuralist hermeneutics or what Dornfeld calls ‘documentary poetics of making’), Born engages in orthodox genre theorizing to the effect of classifying and making an editorially and writerly completed textual instance ‘fit’ or ‘misfit’ in a particular set of ‘mixed, complex of hybrid’ genre (see Derrida 1980, Altman 1999 inter alia), easily inferable from the decision to title the presentation of this particular empirical episode as ‘Which genre?’. Here the underlying assumption is that hybrid or what Hutcheon (1980) called ‘self-reflexive genres’, those mixing for example documentary representation and comedy, historical presentation with melodramatic pathos, and so on, are more innovative, thus qualitatively better, in both ethical and aesthetic sense. 76 visible than in the field of cultural production where the people producing the genre, at the same time use it to self-define and self-interpret themselves. Cultural producers deploy genres to craft autobiographical selves, but also conscientious and aesthetically valuable work practices, and those are indeed concrete instances in which ‘the genre’ gets into action, that is these are acts in which genres articulate selves and practice. Thus, the thesis makes use of multiple methods which encompass the analytical injunction of a ‘structuralist hermeneutics’ (Alexander and Smith 2006). Methodological approach Formal properties: identifying genre dominants I have argued for the importance of establishing the analytical autonomy of the genre of travel guidebooks, as a precondition to examining the role of genre in cultural production. To establish the analytical autonomy of genres I propose first to establish the structural features of a genre through textual analysis describing textual features in varying degrees of generality that tend to become dominant or defining conventions over time. As such these features are empirically inferable from a corpus of texts as ahistorical (synchronic) invariants (Scholes 1967). Although, the proverbial problem of the chicken and the egg becomes immediately transparent. Are different texts grouped together because they pertain to an already defined category of texts or genre? Or is it that the genre definition arises afterwards, after the empirical analysis of the structural properties? This aporia has been much discussed with no clear resolution other than the immanently ambivalent acceptance of genres as frameworks of classification of complete, finished and finalized products (see Altman 1999, Todorov 1984, Derrida 1980). As I am interested in how the genre actually informs the production of ‘the object in formation’ (Born 2010; Ingold and Hallam 2003), I follow the path trodden by the Russian formalists, mainly Jakobson (1986), but also (Neale 1990) and Gerould (1991) and their characterization of a specific genre’s dominant properties or dominants: the dominant may be defined as the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant that guarantees the integrity of structure’ (1987:41). This theory of dominant characteristics sees a genre’s properties in certain historical circumstances as exhibiting an organizing and structuring capacity over the reception (and one can reasonably expect the production) of texts. The compilation of dominant features, however, is not completely arbitrary, as it is governed by an ontological assumption of an immanent structure that makes the differentiating elements in a text cohere. This is why, for example, Iser (1989) talks about genres as ‘sets of structural techniques’ (p. 222) which ‘make plausible description of the subject matter; … and also facilitate description of the production of meaning (p. 223). 77 The textual analysis of travel literature and travel writing sees the genre of travel guidebooks as a sub-genre or sub-category alongside travelogues and travel journalism (Barthes 1973; Fussell 1982; Young 2002). Within post-colonial studies, scholars such as Koshar (2000), Pratt (1992), Said (1978) and Behdad (1994) have conducted superior analyses of the discursive formation of the genre of travel guidebooks, as the most prominent discursive artifact of the ‘contact zone’ – the space of encounter between travellers and natives – in a historical perspective, meticulously charting the ‘sets of techniques’ that characterize such textual instances as opposed, or in relation to other travel-related genres. It is here also that Bourdieu’s (1996) relational conception of the field of cultural production is helpful, in that every occupant of a structurally defined position in the field (genres included) is relationally defined to other occupants mainly through struggles or tension. Genres are always defined as inter-genres (Derrida 1980). Thus the travel guidebook genre’s dominant characteristics are defined as inter-genre, in relation to the similar yet different neighboring (sub-)genres of travelogues and travel journalistic accounts. On the other hand, several reception-oriented studies have extended and strengthened the text-based research agenda of travel guidebooks, by systematically gleaning the basic constructional principles of the genre and their impending impact on the reader (Lew 1999, McGregor 2000, Jack and Phipps 2005, Bhattacharyya 1997). I have profited immensely from these textual studies of the genre of travel guidebooks. They have found that the genre is highly conventionalized and formalized, and compiled a list of dominant features, fundamental techniques and principles of composition, and the kinds of effects these have on the reader. I draw on their findings in order to probe further how the genre’s dominants are engaged with and mobilized in the act of production and professional selfunderstanding. Hence, I start from the premise that genres are self-contained systems of reference with forces, purposes and telos of their own. But I go a step further, and probe their effectiveness in concrete local and historical circumstances of production through interviews with authors and participant observation. Life story interviews Travel guidebook writers, for various reasons, were eager to talk to the obscure researcher. I solicited informants through open calls posted on three private travel guidebook writers’ mailing lists. Some 45 responded to the call, while others were snowballed. Five writers contacted me independently, volunteering for an interview. In total, I interviewed 65 writers, out of whom only 21 were female. All the writers were contractors or freelancers working prevalently for the companies that dominated the English and American travel guidebooks markets. In order to protect their privacy and identity, I have assigned them pseudonyms, as well as disguised their personality by obscuring their destinationor niche-specific expertise, intimate information and personal peculiarities. 78 Where possible, I met the interviewees in Scandinavia, throughout the Balkans, the UK and California. Remaining interviews were conducted via Skype or telephone. As the freelancers were scattered across the globe, and only five of them were members of trade unions, I made use of online occupational communities conducive to such ‘itinerant professionalism’, such as mailing lists and forums, which afforded access to current and heated occupational debates. The interviews lasted from one to three hours. I have conducted repeated interviews with ten writers. In order to understand how cultural producers professionally self-define and interpret, I elicited autobiographical accounts from travel guidebook writers focusing squarely on professional development, and career paths, as well as on personal experience of work. I resorted to life-story interviews: ‘the use of life story involves a focus on biography and background and demands that the participant make connections between historic past, present and future’ (Belk 2006: 160). Such a narrative method allows for access into personal and experiential insights, subjective version of reality and the construction of self as a unitary subject. The life stories valorize subjectivity and autonomy (Denzin 1989: 2). Such an approach is not without problems. Goodson identifies the pitfalls of life story interviews: first, they are individualized ‘beautified’ self-portraits and thus isolated from social and cultural context, second, in spite of appearing individually constructed, they are socially scripted by rules and forces; third, they are de-contextualised from and ignorant of institutional structuring (Goodson 2012: 31). Therefore, life stories need to be put into cultural, social and historical context. Goodson proposes then a transition from life story to life history: the life history explores interface between the individual representations and the social and historical forces impinging on these representations’ (ibid.). Following his advice, I try to situate the autobiographical account within the historical trajectory of the genre and the diachronic lineages of the travel guidebook publishing industry. In this way, the autobiographical accounts are enmeshed in historical, cultural and institutional trajectories, and interview data are not read as an immediate and direct translation of reality. As Denzin has trenchantly argued ‘a self story’ ‘is literally a story of and about the self in relation to an experience’ and those experiences are always connected to a group, an institution or social context more generally (1989:43) On the other hand, the focus on life stories as stories of subjective experiences of life, work and careers turns the subject who professionally defines himself as an author into an ‘author of oneself’ who is already always ‘entangled in genres’ (Ricouer 1992). According to Ricoeur, the genre (and he concentrates mainly on the genre of narrative fiction with the sub-genres of ‘epics, tragedies, dramas, novels’, 1991b:32) plays a vital role in personal self-understanding. People apply and mobilize the concepts, features, plots and characters of the genre they intimately know and which have been handed down through culture. People project into stories, plots, characters while reconfiguring their own lives. In life-story interviews ‘the life story turns the subject into an author. … this means the author has an authority in the text that is given by the very conventions that structures the writing or telling of the story in the first place’ (Denzin 1989:42). 79 It is at this point that the structuring role of the genre could be examined in the autobiographical accounts of professional authors, which are ultimately producers of genres. As Born (2010: 193) proposes, producer discourses need always to be held up against the ‘aesthetic and ethical’ requirements of the genre. Therefore, I tried not to succumb to ‘the authority of the author’ and resisted taking producers’ autobiographical stories at face value. I interpreted the interview data always with reference to the compiled genre dominants. This helped me confidently describe some of the producers’ accounts, which drew on and mobilized the genre of travel writing, and travel guidebooks, as hyperbolic, self-promotional, self-exonerating, nostalgic, allegoric and so on (I dwell on this in detail in chapters 5 and 6). And this is all the more important in the realm of cultural production, a realm that itself overproduces autobiographical accounts for promotional and advertising purposes, and which may portentously mislead the analyst (Moeran 1996: 28-9; Caldwell 2006). Caldwell argues that the authenticity and success of ‘any player’ in the media industry ‘is established not simply through the accounting department’s numbers, but rhetorically, through a process of storytelling, one involving short term anecdotal “chunks”’ (p. 129). In my research, I was constantly reminded that producers’ ‘self-portraits’ are permeated with what Caldwell calls ‘pitch aesthetic’ – a selfaggrandizing ‘elevator speech’, that freelancers use to convince editors, producers, and directors of the value of their work, and not least fashion a conscientious and discerning work-ethic in front of the analyst, while concealing details that may induce a less flattering image. In this light, the etic, or analyst’s interpretation has to be conducted always in relation to the properties of the genre, which producers produce and whose worlds they professionally inhabit (see Caldwell 2006, pp. 128-134). Yet there is one big limitation in the interviewing technique, that the accounts of experience are already interpreted and textualised in that they are made sense after the fact. As post-rationalized accounts, the interview data are less about lived experience and more about interpretation (see Kvale 1996). Therefore, I complemented the interviews with participant observation. ‘Fieldwork on foot’ while ‘thinking aloud’ I observed the on-the-ground work of two writers commissioned to complete a guidebook. By tagging along with these writers, I was able to grasp a lot about their daily work in destination places. Protracted correspondence followed their periods of write-up, manuscript preparation, and marketing. Participant observation allows an approach to the experience of work as it is lived, since it entails following actors as they go about their everyday duties, in addition to heeding their discourses (Moeran 2005). Thus cultural producers’ attitudes, behavior and practices come to the forefront through participant observation (Jensen 1998). 80 As much of the work involved in researching the production of travel guidebooks entailed writing while walking, I followed the methodological proposition set forth by two anthropologists Vergunst and Ingold (2006) about ‘fieldwork on foot’ – which involves ‘participant observation in the form of sharing walks with other people’ (p. 68). According to Vergunst and Ingold, ethnographers are much accustomed to carrying out their work on foot as ‘everything takes place, one way or another, on the move’ (Vergunst and Ingold 2008: 3). In their opinion, this approach is useful as ‘sharing and creating a walking rhythm with other people can lead to a very particular closeness and bond between the people involved’ (p. 69). Such an approach provides an insight into how environment and the place to be professionally described in a travel guidebook are sensually experienced, since the ‘walking ethnography’ is the entry point into embodied sensual experience, while also binding together practice, thinking, doing, feeling and not least, writing (Vergunst and Ingold 2008:2). By walking together it is thus possible to partake in the same embodied practice and learn the ‘tacit knowledge’ (Polanyi 1998) often involved in cultural production, such as making ethical and aesthetic choices in practice (Bruun 2010; Fine 2008). This, therefore, serves as a background for more thoroughly understanding producer discourses and practices relative to concrete production circumstances. The closeness and intimacy with informants that fieldwork on foot entails, coupled with the notoriously difficult access to studying media/cultural production and the sense of obligation and indebtedness it produces once granted, may have compromised the ethnographer’s willingness or ability to critique the practices of informants (Radway 1989:10). The relationship of indebtedness for being granted unrestricted access to their homes or lodges, and a deep reverence for the accomplished travel writers indeed sometimes, I confess, resulted in ‘an overraport’ – my views merging with theirs, and also cancelling out the critical distance required for critical analysis (see for a similar experience Dornfeld 1998). Wacquant warns that such identification with informants can put forth ‘truncated and distorted accounts’ in such a way that they ‘articulate even celebrate the fundamental goodness – honesty, decency, frugality’ of the investigated subjects (2002:1469). According to Wacquant, then, one is tempted to ‘sanitize’ the accounts and practices by ‘downplaying or suppressing information that would taint’ the desired image (ibid.). However, very much aware of such pitfalls, I used my knowledge of genres and hermeneutics as a critical lens through which to observe and frame, and not least to interpret once again, my informants’ discourses and practices. According to Bruun, taking the genres producers produce and interpreting their accounts in terms of the products they produce allows for identification with the informants but also helps maintain a critical distance from their professional knowledge (2011:30). This is so because the genres play a dual role – they are used by the producers in their self-understanding and action, but also by the analyst in her own endeavor to make sense of producer discourses and practices (Bruun 2011: 33) On the other hand, while some writing activities involved in guidebook production were fairly externalized (thus rendered accessible for observation) – such as taking notes, revising, taking pictures of published texts ‘on the go’ such as posters or menus, correcting an existing 81 edition, – others were ‘already an enduring part of the person’s disposition’ such as what a writer is ‘contemplating, considering, or eliminating’ (Bazerman 2012:96-97). This internalized behavior was observable through ‘thinking aloud’. As Wolfgang Iser (2000) admonishes, ‘doing ethnography’ as part of ‘literary anthropology’ is nearly impossible. The writing process usually takes place in solitude and silence, or as Iser contends, citing Geertz, it is situated in the hearts and minds of the people involved (p. 159). In Iser’s view this produces ‘an insurmountable gap of understanding’. If this is so, how is one to go about researching the writing activity? How is the silent process of writing to be accessed by the observer? Should one resign oneself to the fact that this ‘gap’ is indeed insurmountable? ‘The think aloud’ method, developed in psychology mainly to investigate knowledge processes and creativity in expert thinking, proved to be extremely helpful. This method has been applied, for example, in the study of design architects (van Someren et al. 1994) and nurses (Fonteyn and Fisher 1995) as they go about their own work in practice. What is more important for my study is that this method is prominent as well in psychological studies of compositional cognitive processes among professional technical (Lewis 1982), academic (for a review see Horning and Becker 2006) or workplace writers (Bazerman 2009). As such it has been applicable to expert and professional travel guidebook writers at work. The ‘think aloud’ method, is extremely useful to elicit expert knowledge while the subjects perform a set of tasks since it makes some of the ‘compiled tacit knowledge’ and embodied problemsolving behavior visible (van Someren et al. 1994: 43, emphasis added). In addition, Horning and Becker argue in their study of academic writers, the think aloud method is especially valuable for elucidating a writer’s relationship to implicit audiences, but also their ‘metalinguistic’ and ‘rhetorical awareness’ with regard to genre conventions that are the mainstay of professional writing (2006: 210). Over the years professional writers develop ‘an intuited awareness’ of the genre, and ‘the think aloud’ is then appropriate to make that intuition explicit (ibid.). And the genre here is important since it is through ‘the genre’ that professional writers on the job ‘imagine their audiences’ and manage ‘the pragmatic constraints of the workplace’ (Shriver 2012:294). According to Beaudet et al., the think aloud method reveals how genre conceptions and conventions are reactivated in the writing process (2012:109) and how choices, both ethical and aesthetic, are made in relation to genres in the act of writing (Bazerman 2012:90) as they shed light on ‘different skills, modes of expression, action stances, and processes of production’ (Bazerman 2012:93). The ‘think aloud’ method operationalizes ‘ethnopoetics’ (Briggs and Bauman 1990). Given my interest in how genres inform the guidebook production process through writers mobilizing the genre properties in the act of actual composition, this method indeed proved appropriate for gathering data heuristically related to ‘genre awareness’. In the process, I prodded my informants to think aloud, that is, to verbalize the stream of thought while walking and writing. I was permitted to stay in front of the computer while my informants drafted parts of the travel 82 guidebook to be. In the process, I probed for more explanation as to feeling, thinking, behaving, deciding while recording the discussions. However, as this method involves a combination of introspection and structured prodding by the observer (van Someren et al.: 1994: 40), it is not without immanent pitfalls. It is open to cognitive disturbances (the observer altering the ‘natural’ state of cognitive processes and inducing the subject to behave more rationally than otherwise), incompleteness due to synchronization of cognitive processes and verbalization, and disruptions of ‘the usual flow’ of thought since verbalization is in itself a cognitive process of post-rationalization (see van Someren et al. 1994). I took these disturbances into consideration as much as possible when analyzing the data, and was explicit about the limits of this approach especially in chapter 7. Paratextual analysis If freelance writers were forthcoming, the same could hardly be said of the publishing companies, which were extremely reticent about revealing their own dynamics and, for a long time remained inaccessible and secretive. In the summer of 2009, however, I was -- miraculously - - invited to visit Lonely Planet’s Head Quarters in San Francisco, although not allowed to conduct fieldwork there. I did manage, though, to interview six commissioning editors, two online community managers, and two financial managers working for mainstream English-language guidebook publishers. In light of the impossibility of following the organizational dynamics through ethnography, mainly drawing on the work by Genette (1997), in Chapter 3 I conduct a paratextual analysis of the travel guidebook publishing industry. Paratextual analysis allows for following the institutional self-exegesis performed with reference to the genre produced, circulated and marketed by those institutions. During work on the thesis I consulted more than 20 nineteen-century, and around 40 contemporary guidebooks, paying a special attention to what Genette (1997) calls ‘a paratextual surround’ – prefaces, postscripts, disclaimers, author biographies, publisher slips – in a word, all the textual instances in which the industry made sense of itself on the edges of the printed book. During the period of research, I entered two writing competitions for Lonely Planet. Winning one of these allowed me close observation of editorial and managerial work behind the contests. Trade press, company archives, websites and their archives were also perused regularly, together with publicly available official documents. I provide more specific details of the practicalities and pitfalls of a paratextual analysis in Chapter 3. 83 CHAPTER 1 CULTURAL PRODUCTION: THREE PARADIGMS The ‘grand tradition’ of cultural production In this chapter I present three dominant approaches to cultural production – the sociological, anthropological and socio-cultural – paying special attention to how they deal broadly with cultural objects and with the notion of genre (specifically), a concept largely subdued or obliquely tackled. This is an attempt to chart the background of a larger field of investigation in which the emerging genre approach to cultural/media production is situated as it straddles these disciplinary boundaries. The choice of theorists is based on what I regard as their indisputably significant place in my study and represents what may be called the ‘grand tradition’ in the social sciences analysis of culture and art (DeNora 2000:1). This contrasts with, what DeNora (2001:4) called ‘the little tradition’, which I presented in the introduction and upon which I grafted the analytical framework that foregrounds this thesis. Bourdieu and Becker form the classical lynchpin of the sociological study of cultural production which has advocated the demasking of ‘the aura’ of aesthetic objects by placing them in a network of social forces and institutional determinants. It is thus understandable why these writers have also become a sort of bête noir and serve as a backdrop against which new ‘progressive’ work is carried out. The majority of writings in the ‘revised’, ‘non-reductionist’ or ‘new’ sociology of art are crafted in direct opposition to Bourdieu’s and Becker’s theoretical agendas. For example, Hennion’s ’art-sociology’ in ‘a post-critical time’ (1995, Hennion and Grenier 2002), ‘the new sociology of art’ (De La Fuente 2007), and Wolff’s (2008) ‘post-critical aesthetics’ are all built in direct response to Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’. Born’s (2010) programmatic essay explicitly and systematically pronounces ‘a post-Bourdieuian critique’. Critiquing Bourdieu, Entwistle (2009) develops an analysis of what she calls an ‘aesthetic economy’ and so on. These ‘reworked’ sociologies of culture and art, in their crudest, set out to redress the absence of ‘the aesthetic’ and ‘cultural objects’ in Bourdieu’s sociological framework, as well as his rigid structural determinism by which ‘the aesthetic’ is merely determined by social factors or functions as a symbolic resource for distinction. Becker and his towering Art Worlds (1982) is the cornerstone of the production of culture perspective, and one of the most inspiring studies of micro-practices of cultural production. Every ‘good work’ involves, if looked at a practical level, moral considerations and aesthetic choices relative to some sort of genre-related conventions (see Fine 2008:177, 183; Faulkner 2003:94). Similarly, Becker’s art world approach represents the contrastive foil of much ‘innovative’ sociology of culture – in the work of DeNora (2000) and Hennion and Grenier (2002), for example, 84 which most influentially marked the move from the treatment of cultural objects as objects to be explained to cultural objects as active in (as opposed to determined by) social life. I brought Bourdieu’s and Becker’s towering frameworks together in order to compare and draw parallels between them, but also to tease out useful avenues about how best to proceed with the study of genre as an active constituent in the process of cultural production. As their respective legacies are currently under scrutiny and revision, I here also find it productive to draw on Bourdieu’s practice theory (mainly detached from his analysis of art) and Becker’s recent embracing of a Latourian version of cultural objects as active agents in the art worlds, something that I think was practiced, although implicitly, much earlier in Faulkner’s analysis of Hollywood musicians and Fine’s of chefs. Besides these sociological approaches to cultural production, the most influential approaches are those by anthropologists, something recognized early on by Wolff (1975:137) who suggested that anthropology could offer a corrective to sociological approaches to culture because of the ethnographer’s immersion in culture, language, rules of behavior, practices and institutions so as to gain ‘an inside position’ from which to describe art in its social context. Recently, too, De La Fuente (2010a:8) has argued that ‘the new’ sociology of art has much to learn from anthropology, in particular from the material culture studies with their injunction to ‘follow artobjects through society’. Born (2010) also contends that a corrective to the limiting determinism of the sociological theory of art and culture is to be found in anthropology, and has systematically engaged with anthropological scholarship in material culture studies by Daniel Miller, Chris Pinney, Steven Feld and Fred Myers on the grounds that it ‘focuses on the cultural object and the forms of mediation through which it is constituted and which in turn it inaugurates’ (Born 2010: 183). Born also praises Gell (1998) who offers a way forward ‘by focusing on art’s material, social and temporal mediation, pointing in this way to a conception of the cultural object as an assemblage of such mediations’ (Born 2010:183). The combined effort of Gell and the material culture anthropologists, in Born’s view (2010), leads to the treatment of ‘the exegesis of the cultural object’ as ‘roundly elaborated, including their aesthetic qualities and their historical conditions’ (p.188), the necessary move from sociological analysis, which is preoccupied with external factors and contexts, to ‘cultural criticism’ which proffers judgments on aesthetic values and artistic merit. Following in Born’s (2010) footsteps, I also concur that anthropological studies have much to offer by way of a comprehensive analysis of cultural production, especially in their linking of authorial subjectivities to the materialities of the art work. Yet, unlike Born, I do not read Gell (1998) or Pinney’s (1997) analysis of the genre of Indian photographic portraiture, or Moeran’s (1997) study of the genre of mingei in Japanese ceramic art, as a contribution to the ‘fuller’ ‘interpretive treatment’ or ‘exegesis’ of the value of cultural objects, and, by corollary, genres, that represent assemblages of cultural material, social or temporal mediation. Rather, given my interest in genres as active constituents or animating forces of cultural production and the ensuing accent on genres as mediators, I am more inclined to read the anthropological studies of art for their focus on the agency of cultural objects, rather than as a nexus of mediation that elicits ‘cultural criticism’. In 85 doing this, my reading of Gell parts ways with that of Born, and coalesces more with De La Fuente’s reading of Gell, which, in opposition to Born’s ‘analytics of mediation’, suggests an emphasis on ‘art-as-agency’ and ‘mediators’ (2010: 223). Against this backdrop, De La Fuente reads Gell’s theory of art as a theory whereby ‘art-objects “enthrall”, “arrest” and, generally, make us do things’ (2010:223; see also 2010a). Such a reading indeed liberates cultural objects, as well as genres understood as a corpus or body of texts and objects diachronically dispersed, from their imputed projection or mirroring of discursive formation or social conditions, and treats them as having agency, purpose and effectiveness of their own. In addition, suffice it to say, Gell’s anthropological account of the aesthetic is embraced rather enthusiastically by scholars from the humanities: in archeology and art history (see Tanner and Osborne 2007), as well as in visual culture (see Moxey 2008). Both Pinney and Moeran also openly set out to develop and refine ‘an anthropology of aesthetics’ therefore, so that they represent an important touchstone for reviewing the convergence between the humanities and the social sciences. In the third section, I dwell in on Adorno’s and Williams’s socio-cultural approach to cultural production. Neither Adorno nor Williams is a sociologist in any strict sense. Yet each developed a sociological analysis of the genres he had studied: Adorno music genres such as the fugue or jazz, and Williams drama, especially Elizabethan drama. Adorno and Williams are the most influential authors within the study of media production. If, as Hesmondhalgh (2006) has contended Bourdieu’s field theory has only been hesitantly used in media studies, then Adorno and Williams hold sway. Williams’s idea of cultural materialism has been most commonly appropriated. Hesmondhalgh (2006) finds Williams’s sociological work superior to that of Bourdieu on the grounds that Williams provides a comprehensive analytics of cultural production with reference to the historical development of the institutions of cultural production and the complex division of labour they entail (2006: 219-220). Ryan (1992) introduces Williams to his sociological analysis on similar grounds, while Garnham (1983) finds Williams’s work on culture as part of the means of production to be central to the political economy of culture. My interest in Williams’s sociology of culture is as much in his account of ‘social formalism’, which largely hinges on an account of genre, as it is in his ‘cultural materialism’. On the other hand, Adorno has been re-thought and reinterpreted within the ‘new’ or ‘revised’ sociologies of culture, most influentially by DeNora (2003) and Hennion (2003) who found his ‘immanent criticism’ (that is, a study of culture that sees social and societal issues through a works’ technical and aesthetic mediation), as a starting point for a non-reductionist sociology of art and culture. My own interest in Adorno’s sociology of music, in light of the central scope of this thesis, is his account of genre as the primary site in which the mediation between the universal and the particular happens as a precondition for innovation and novelty (genres permeate artistic virtuosity), an idea he develops in his aesthetic theory (1997). Interestingly, Williams draws on Adorno’s ideas to argue that culture is a formative force in social life. Much indebted to reflection theory, their respective arguments converge in that music and literature play an important function (they are culturally operative) in society by virtue of their aesthetic and ontological status as made manifest in genres and genre processes. 92 Yet, if Bourdieu’s treatment of institutions hampers the analysis, then his theory of practice may provide a gateway to encompassing both producer agency and subjectivity. At high levels of virtuosity of the métier, heteronomous producers develop practical mastery as an additional extra to their homologous adjustment to audiences and employers. Their virtuosity is an outcome of ‘the practical mastery of the field’ or ‘the feel for the game’, understood as ‘practical apprehension’ or ‘sense of practice’, an ability to: feel and foresee … what is to be done – where, when, how, and with whom to do it, given everything that has been done, everything that is done, all those who do it, and where, when and how they do it (1996: 165). That ‘sense of practice’ is most usefully explained by Swartz (1997) as a ‘fundamentally nonformalized, practical dimension of action’ where actors are ‘not rule followers or norm obeyers but strategic improvisers who respond dispositionally to the opportunities and constraints’ (1997:100). This notion of improvisation exonerates the pre-determination of individual agency. Autonomous creative agency for Bourdieu is strategic and improvisatory, informed simultaneously by the habitus and the field’s forces. However, as Born also argues, despite the centrality of improvisation for cultural agency, Bourdieu does not elucidate ‘the improvisatory valency’ of cultural work, not even when he discusses restricted production (Born 2010:181). If one is to accept that heteronomous cultural producers are in possession of practical mastery, then one needs to turn upside-down Bourdieu’s entrenched assertion that the field of power – that emporium of money and impermium of politics – exerts full and coercive structural conditioning on cultural production. One needs to redress his contention that heteronomy is nothing other than an ordinary economic enterprise. In contrast, the theory of practice holds that practical taxonomies, instruments of communication and cognitive schemes, which have an ‘objective’ modus operandi separate from power structures, exert their structuring efficacy on and orchestrate a group’s practical activities oriented towards practical outcomes (1977: 96-97). Such an approach allows us to divest artistic autonomy from the somehow trite tension between art and money that so often led to normative and elitist conclusions, and to recast it as an issue of practical mastery: how producers in concrete circumstances practically engage with the abstract, formally codified, cultural autonomy of perceptions schemes or language. A producer’s action will then involve a mastery of formal codes of making and a deep understanding of rules, all of which afford a margin of ‘practical’ freedom. Here, in the spirit of Chomsky’s generative grammar so preferred by Bourdieu, practical mastery refers to an infinite number of moves, strategies and tactics to be adapted to an infinite number of situations, which are essentially not reducible to, or dependent on, rule-scripts as mere epiphenomena of structure, but their independent capacity to structure action. 93 In his theory of practice, Bourdieu (1977) argues that social agents are ‘virtuosos’ (p. 79). They acquire schemes of thought and expression scripts which form the basis for an ‘intentionless invention of regulated improvisation’ (ibid., original emphasis). Here he stresses the pre-linguistic, unconscious and unreflexive nature of habitus, which is embodied in actors’ non-formalized, routinised practices and bodily hexis (gestures, deportment). Actors have habituated ‘the schemes’ of perception, appreciation, and action so well that they unintentionally act upon, and do not merely reproduce them, in their daily practice. Elsewhere (1990), using football and tennis players as examples, Bourdieu states that ‘nothing is simultaneously freer and more constrained than the action of the good player’ (p. 63). The actions of ‘a good player’ are unmediated by calculative or mental doctrines, for he acts instantaneously : as the tennis ball flies into his head, he does not strategize, but reacts ‘intuitively’ and is prepared to momentously resolve a variety of practical conundrums. This intuitive momentary reaction is nevertheless a product of painstaking training, knowledge of the history of the game, and calculative analysis of exemplary tactics, which although unconsciously, constrain a good player’s action. Practice in Bourdieu’s sense does not follow a ‘logical logic’ because of its relation to time and efficiency – in urgent practical situations the unconscious schemes operate as skills and competences. If this explanation is to be translated to the field of cultural production, then it follows that cultural producers do not completely conform with market or institutional exigencies or uncritically succumb to amor fati, since their immersion in and habituation of the rules of the game enable them to adequately yet instantaneously react to practical problems of art-making. Cultural producers improvise and invent on the spot within field-specific constraints (art-historical rules, oaths to ethical behavior, genres). Agency is thus made tangible in specific contexts as specific practices of making, which can and often are unarticulated and under-theorized. Such extrapolations from Bourideu’s practice theory for cultural production have been to a certain extent continued by Becker’s analysis of craft worlds as a subset of global art worlds. Instead of lamenting over the commercialization of culture and the imposition of externalto-the-art-world requirements on the autonomy of cultural work (as does Bourdieu), the art world approach views the process of marketization at a micro level as art turning itself into craft, into a world of practice. In craft worlds, however, cultural work is not executed in response to autonomous impulses of creation intrinsic in the historical development of the art, but in a hurdled setting of hic and nunc institutional and organizational forms of control. Within craft worlds, the emphasis shifts from expressiveness and autonomy to ‘good work’. At a high level of technical competence and skill, the commercial artist starts acting ‘like a craftsman’ (Becker 1982: 292) – possessing physical, psychic, and mental skill, discipline, and judgment outwardly oriented towards clients and employers. As Becker put it: 94 an artist who has more interest in the display of virtuosity than in expression of personal ideas or emotions is more open to suggestion, influence, or coercion and more prepared to take on any of a variety of assignments proposed by others (pp. 291-292). Although commercial artists (who think, talk and act like craftsmen) comply with business and economic exigencies, they actually take pride not in the aesthetic content or the beauty of their work, but in high quality as judged by utility and functionality, as well as in responsible service to their audience, not least employers. As cultural producers inevitably operate in institutional settings, they work with and act upon independent occupational norms. In this sense, the standards of making, quality codes, and craft mores underpin the logical justification of commercial art. It follows that in his conceptualization of art worlds, Becker does not define the commercial art world via negativa but accords commercial art its own immanent logic. Commercial art is not the negation of autonomous art which is inferior or low-grade (as it may appear in an idealistic comparison overridden by radical autonomy). But, it has its own modus operandi that is distinct and distinctive, and hence needs to be judged, evaluated and delineated in its own terms. Becker insists that participants in an art world do not succumb to malicious commercial imperatives, but are guided by agreed-on and negotiated craft standards of excellence which mediate even the most mundane aesthetic choices of forms and materialities. Yet, in contrast to Bourdieu’s practical mastery that excludes distance, perspective or reflection, Becker’s craft attitude to work is reflexive and conscious, though often unarticulated. Such an unarticulated aesthetics has nothing to do with anything inherent in the medium or form, but with obligations generated by the art world – choices must be defended (made to appear valuable) in front of others: Among the things they [producers] keep in mind in making the innumerable small decisions that cumulatively shape the work is whether and how these decisions might be defended. Of course, working artists do not refer every small problem to its most general philosophical grounding to decide how to deal with it, but they know when their decisions run afoul of such theories, if only through a vague sense of something wrong (p. 133). With a view to practical theory, Bourdieu and Becker converge surprisingly in that they both accord primacy to specific practices of making, which are not abstract but local, and situated here and now. Therefore, autonomy in commercial/heteronomous cultural production is driven by a practical mastery, but also by craftsmanship reflexivity about quality performance. Practical mastery is interspersed with and propped up by producers’ internal standards of excellence and virtuosity. Yet understanding the partial and indeterminate logics of practical action still leaves unresolved what appears to be a double bind of agency, which is both routinized and formalized, habitual and reflexive. 95 Much in the spirit of micro-analysis, Becker’s overemphasis on individual producers’ imbrications with the actual materials or techniques of production results in an analysis concentrated on decontextualized cases (often textbook examples) lacking any sense of periodization or historicity. In turn, Bourdieu never tries to introduce practical mastery to the field of cultural production, and thus never empirically pursues a practical analysis of cultural production. As a matter of fact, besides early anthropological work on the Berber house and Kabylian community, Bourdieu never gets closer ethnographically to the art field; rather he generalizes insights derived from elsewhere in spite of his own declarative acknowledgement that all fields follow their own specific logic (nomos) impenetrable to the agents of alien fields. A more promising strand of analysis in this regard is pursued under the auspices of the socalled Chicago cultural studies school, by scholars who refine and study ethnographically some of Becker’s speculative findings. Faulkner (1985, 1983) and Fine (1992; 2008) have empirically demonstrated that the loss of autonomy in creative industries (as gauged by the opposition between art and money) is regained through a vested interest in doing the job well in accordance with profession-specific aesthetics and ethics. By analyzing the day-to-day practices of heteronomous cultural producers, Faulkner and Fine argue that Hollywood studio musicians and chefs respectively develop practical mastery of achieving good quality work in a stylistic and formal sense, that is not only utilitarian or functional, let alone subversive. When committed to doing good work, commercial producers carry out ‘the aesthetics of work’ (Fine 2008: 177) in accordance with their top expertise, individual sense of quality, and institutionalized formulas that form the basis for a no less ‘expressive production’ (p. 197). In Fine’s explanation, when doing good work the worker and the work are intimately and inextricably linked, a fact which provides for operational autonomy: Work matters to workers, and workers have craft standards by which they judge work products and performance that transcend the narrow goals of producing things efficiently and to bureaucratic specification (Fine 2008: 178). Beyond and above the institutionalized managerial audit procedures and customers’ evaluations (power structures), cultural producers are themselves the principle judges of work outcomes and everyday choices. Sociological studies drawing on Becker, in what has come to be known as ‘the production of culture perspective’, have trenchantly argued that cultural objects are the product of social enterprise, sponsoring institutions, elites or advertisers, constructed through interaction and organizational constraints (Peterson 1985; Blau 1989). Yet what Fine and Faulkner bring to bear on the analysis is much of the understanding of cultural autonomy in Kane’s sense (see the Introduction): the individual feeling for form, style and formal coherence, which are internally differentiated and as such affect, structure and organize, work and occupational ideals. Only in this way are commercial cultural producers not denied a sense of craft: that is, a sense of 96 identity. Such a stance remedies Becker’s somewhat reductive view that art is like all work, nothing but another occupation, nothing but an outcome of the interaction with others. Although aesthetic and ethical choices are practically executed on the whim of the moment (as Bourdieu also argued regarding practical mastery), and thus are devoid of immediate calculative logic and almost come naturally, theory is not completely absent: it ‘flickers around the edges of the consciousness of workers’ (Fine 1992: 1272). Faulkner details how composers of film music are expected to and consciously try to ‘fit’ into the ‘dramatic style’ – by not calling attention to their music, enhancing what is being screened, stressing the mood, making a philosophical point, invoking a time period, and by surprising the audience (1983: 92) in order to produce good work in accordance with the rules specific to the medium (aesthetic logic), but also earn a name for themselves and thus to keep working (calculative logic). Aesthetic theory informs quality either in the product or in the performance, but aesthetic decisions are made in practice here and now, as an everyday practical reflexive, and not least calcuative, affirmation of theory. Therefore, much in line with Bourdieu’s ‘practical theory’, the aesthetic concepts are fuzzy and vague, yet obdurately present and post-rationalized. By bringing closer together, Bourdieu’s theorization of the field of cultural production, and Becker’s model of the art world, I here tried to explicate the possibility of examining commercial cultural production on its own term, that is its immanent modus operandi, and to restore agency and subjectivity to cultural producers. Yet, as already hinted, Becker and Bourdieu do not address the specificity of the cultural object or its aesthetics, and thus remain short of a holistic understanding of cultural production. Yet, if Faulkner and Fine subsequently established the fact that good work is premised on the identification of workers with the product of their labour, they leave much to be desired in terms of specifying how formal stylistic models influence practical making and are not infinitely malleable to social interaction. Negligence of the cultural object Field and art world approaches are not just remiss in their approaches to the cultural object. It is actually their reason d’être, to disentangle issues of aesthetic (subjective) quality from social (objective) qualities of creative work. Sociological approaches, as exemplified here, have stopped short in front of the inner workings of cultural objects (rhythms, melody, tropes, poetics, cinematography) on the grounds of their empirical boundedness or impossibility to be empirically examined. To satisfy the scientific criteria of generalization, validation and replication, they treat cultural objects as no different from any other consumer product, except perhaps for probably their aura and their ability to bestow social distinction. A cultural object is a social object and does not exist outside social relations. The closest Bourdieu comes to discussing the inherent, that is autonomous, properties of the cultural object is when he discusses ‘the space of possibles’ – a substantive ensemble of probable 97 constraints and possible uses of genres, thematic or stylistic options, and manners of expression (1996:235) which producers interiorize ‘as a sort of historical transcendental’ (p. 236, original emphasis). When an individual producer enters the field, he needs to acquire the ‘specific code of conduct’ and acknowledge ‘the finite universe of freedom under constraints’ offered by the space of possible (ibid. original emphasis). The space of possibles is like a grammar (again in Chomsky’s mould). It defines the space of what is possible, conceivable, doable, thinkable with a view to styles, themes, topics, rhythms and so on. Yet, there is a double bind. The space of possible constitutes and constrains choices (ars obligatoria), yet it also allows for the invention of a spectrum of acceptable solutions within the limits of what is proscribed by grammar (ars inveniendi) (1996: 236). Bourdieu never takes up the possibility he himself accords here for genres and forms to influence position-taking in the field, rather than vice versa. Instead of unpacking the practical mastery of combining ars obligatoria and ars inveniendi in practice, Bourdieu explicates the space of possibles as ultimately identical to production-consumption homologies and denied economies. Thus he develops a pyramidal hierarchy of genres based on commercial profit – theater, as the most popular, at the top, followed by novel and poetry, as the most disinterested in commercial pursuits; and a hierarchy based on prestige – poetry at the top, novel, and theater at the bottom (pp. 114-115). The choices enabled or halted by the genre are merely camouflage for instrumental, cynical calculation, while genres are socially differentiated and hierarchised according to social class, social origin and gender (an outcome of structural homologies). Therefore Bourdieu again develops a relational account of genre differentiation – one based on structural positions occupied in the field and the properties of their occupants, rather than on the autonomous properties of cultural objects. Just consider this conclusive passage about genres as ‘natural places’ for certain social classes (Bourdieu 1996: 269): For example, within the popular novel which (more often than in any other category of novel) is abandoned to writers coming from the dominated classes and to the feminine gender, the different manners, more or less distanced, of treating this genre – in short the position within the positions – are themselves linked to social and educational differences, with the most distanciated, semi-parodic treatments (of which the prime example is Fantomas, celebrated by Apollinaire) being the prerogative of the most privileged writers. By the same logic, … among boulevard authors, who are directly subject to the financial sanction of bourgeois taste, writers coming from the working class or petite-bourgeoisie are very strongly underrepresented, whereas they are more strongly represented in vaudeville [the most heteronomous genre of the heteronomous theatrical genres], which as a comic genre allows a greater role for facile effects or funny and scabrous scenes as well as permitting a sort of half-critical freedom. For Bourdieu, autonomous genres are those genres that are premised on deviance from the entrenched norms of the field and negation of capitalist instrumentality, and are the preserve of 98 the privileged classes. Heteronomous genres, on the other hand, succumb to the logic of stasis and repetition, and are complicit with capitalist requirements (‘facile effects’, ‘scabrous scenes’ that attract mass audiences), and thus in turn attract dominated classes as their producers. As already discussed earlier in this chapter, Becker (1982) shies away from ‘the aesthetic’ and its power to influence action. When he ponders upon what he calls ‘editorial moments’ – the moments when producers actually make choices or devise lines of action such as what colour to use, what instruments to write for – he openly repudiates the idea that choices are made with a view to some immanent autonomous logic, but with a self-conscious anticipation of how other people will respond, emotionally and cognitively, to what they do (p. 200). Yet, by assigning merely to interaction ‘non-communicative’ statements about what feels right or wrong to do in a certain situation, even interaction with an imagined audience is most resolutely deceptive. In a rather sloppy study from 2006, Becker is finally, though fruitlessly, in search of the cultural object – especially, I think, in relation to such ‘editorial moments’. In the preface, in a somewhat embarrassed and vacillating manner, Becker invokes the cultural object back to the sociological analysis: OK, now we know all about artistic innovations. We know about their relations to their environing societies, we know how their making and reception are affected by class and all these other things. But what about – you know – what about the artwork itself? (2006:xiii). Yet echoing considerably the phenomenological understanding of art, the answer Becker gives to this question is negative: ‘it is impossible in principle, for a sociologist or anyone else to speak of “the work itself” because there is no such thing’ (p. 23). The work of art is made, not in the act of production, but through reception. The work of art does not have an existence outside diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations. It exists only as an object in an audience’s or scientist’s head and, therefore is unsuitable subject matter for sociologists. So Becker suggests circumventing this gridlock by turning attention to ‘the career of the work itself’ (p. 6) as it becomes ‘when it is viewed’ (p. 5). As a result, for Becker the work itself is characterized by ‘the principle of the fundamental indeterminacy’ (p. 24) and it is this principle that is to be subjected to empirical study. The work itself is not exhausted in its physical nature, but is always work-in-progress, variable and defiant of definition, since it is recreated in every act of reception. In other simplified words, for Becker, the work of art is a process, a gradual string of small decisions, and a happening. It is a series of choices made here and now from a range of suitable, but available possibilities in the spirit of ‘editorial moments’ which make the ‘contemporary’ account no less interactionist. To understand the work itself one needs to resort to ‘a genetic approach’ to finished works of arts and discover backwards how the work was made and remade with regard to an audience through sketches, revisions or versions (p. 26). 99 For Becker, the work of art is not a matter of christening anymore, but a matter of a continuum of choices being made, actions taken by producers within organized worlds of common cultural production practice which constrain or enable the very process of choosing. To study the formal qualities and principles of the work itself is not ‘sociological’ since a singular instance is not generalizable. It cannot generate social insights or laws of human behavior because the principles and practices of art-making are not replicable given that every ‘real’ artwork is unique. For the same reason, they cannot be subjected to validation (validation, generalization and replication are the three scientific desiderata). It is precisely this anxiety of not being able to satisfy the conditions of science, that creates the pitfall of the genetic approach Becker proposes. The concentration on isolated, single, individual cases as an a posteriori (temporal) rationalization of the work of art (examining finished objects with hindsight, or when the value is already stabilized) does not really bring the cultural object back into analysis. Once again, it only perpetuates the extraordinariness of great art and great artists, and exaggerates yet again the role of the social practices, which enable art making, in isolation from the ontological patterns and logic of the work. Such an approach allows for a post-rationalization of creative production, instead of an ad hoc, momentous practical mastery of making. In addition, when Becker posits the study of the work itself as the study of ‘the constitution of the range of possibilities’ (p.26) from which the choices are made, he hopelessly and unconsciously relapses into the structural constriction of what Bourdieu calls ‘the space of possibles’, which is socially, not formally, constructed, and masks the eventual material and symbolic profits. If one wants to figure out why and how the work matters to the producers themselves, one needs to make use not only of genetic but also of generic approaches. The understanding of cultural production in and through the formal logic of genres will embrace ‘sociologically’ the cultural object sui generis. The notion of genre is itself predicated on a multiplicity of attributes, formal qualities and principles, which possess the capacity to structure and constitute the work, through the ways by which the producers draw upon the genre-specific resources in their practice. Genres principles are socially distributed resources, yet internally structured, employed and mobilized in, thus conversely also structuring, individualized production projects. As such the genres oscillate between social and individual, textual and non-textual, inside and outside, plan and spontaneity, and finally autonomy and heteronomy. Bourdieu was right to feel intuitively that the first, though not the only avenue towards treating the cultural object sociologically was through the genre, which either enables or curbs producer agency. And it is only here, I would argue, that ‘the fundamental indeterminacy’ of the work itself needs to be studied, not in isolated subjective instances of finalized works of art (Becker et al. 2006): how participants in a specific genre world mobilize the genre resources as arising from its formal properties so as to craft their autobiographical selves and vindicate their expertise. It is only in this borderline area between social sciences and humanistic scholarship that the cultural object, and the genres as a corpus of cultural objects, as structurally patterned, become central in driving the work and actions of creative practitioners, especially within the historical development of institutions, who themselves 100 traditionally and systematically deploy the genre resources for institutional self-understanding. Such effort, would accord genres an active role in cultural production. Indeed this comes closer to the recent call Becker et al. (2006:6) extend for the treatment of the work of art itself as an agent in the processes of cultural production. Therefore, the genres should be first accorded an analytical autonomy in Kane’s sense (1991) which will encompass its formal patterning or poetics, and then proceed to examine producers’ practical work, craft and mastery, both conscious and tacit in Bourdieu’s practical sense (1987), of genre dominant properties. In other words, such an approach would allow us to challenge Bourdieu’s and Becker’s reduction of ‘writing “industrial literature”’ as ‘an activity like any other’, that is, as nothing but ‘industrialized work’ for material remuneration. Yet there is divergent opinion and practice about how cultural objects can be brought into social science analysis. If embracing the work of art itself was a daunting task for the sociologist, it is central for the anthropologist. I will now detail why and how cultural objects matter to the analysis by presenting what can be called an anthropological paradigm of cultural production. Anthropological paradigm of cultural production The near complete disregard of cultural objects in sociological analysis reverts to a near total obsession with then in anthropological approaches to cultural production. In this way, the cultural objects are not taken to be the bearers of meaning, representation or significance (as semiotic approaches would have it), or social class or distinction (as sociological approaches proposed), but as mediators of social action entailed in their production. In other words, art is implicated in a complex web of agency or connectedness whereby the object of art is a full-fledged actor, not merely involved in confrontational position-takings (Bourdieu) or rituals of christening (Becker) in which the object exists only as a function of social dynamics. One of the most prominent anthropologists of art, Alfred Gell (1998), insists that the central task of anthropological studies of art should be the social relationships in the vicinity of objects that mediate social agency (p.7). Cultural objects are not merely the end product of certain action, but a distributed extension of authors situated in a determined stage of their biographical lifecycle. As such, artistic objects are in fact social agents enmeshed in a web of intentionalities, will, cognition, consciousness, and projections. A producer’s intentionality and agency, as causal antecedents to the finalized object, can be inferred or ‘abducted’ by recipients from that object. By the same token, producers’ intentions, will and scope are inscribed in the object. For Gell, artworks are ‘indexes’ that betoken intentional agency, analogous to the boiled egg that presupposes the desire of eating a boiled egg and the act of boiling. The object motivates inferences or interpretation of a producer’s agency and intentions. In this view, agents (authors) and objects (artworks) interpenetrate and permeate one another. Objects stand for persons who inflict their intentions on objects; objects contain and reveal the producer’s agency. Hence, objects 101 and agents exist not in and for themselves, but relationally and causally. And these objects are precisely the kind of objects that an anthropological theory should engage with; those objects that ‘have the capacity to index their ‘origins’ in an act of manufacture’ (1998: 23, original emphasis). Cultural objects are able to mediate social relations, and not just vice versa as I have shown in my discussion of Becker’s and Bourdieu’s approaches. In other words, objects act upon the world; they exert an ‘agentic’ and ‘artistic’ influence; they ‘enchant’ their recipients. An object’s capacity to enchant (awe, confuse and even terrify) is the result of a technical virtuosity entailed in its making. Objects are capable of ensnaring or captivating recipients in the network, ‘the trap’ of intentionalities owing to their formal prowess, craft excellence and quality of execution encoded in their making, ‘the act of manufacture’. Recipients are ‘captivated’ when faced with their formal/technical complexity because they are made aware of the incommensurable gap and inadequacy between their own artistic capacities and the superiority of the artistic technique. Recipients cannot effortlessly reconstruct or decipher the process of how the object came into being and thus cannot replicate, even vicariously, the physical gestures of making themselves. Excellently made objects appear to exceed the human domains of the thinkable and doable, so as to resemble the magical. If objects do not mystify their origin, their agency is undermined. Then, as Gell put it, ‘nobody attends to their making as a particularly salient feature of their agency’ (Gell 1998: 68). To corroborate the captivating power of cultural objects, Gell discusses the agency of the colorful, bright and complex optical illusions emblazoned on the canoe prow-boards used in Kula exchanges in southeast New Guinea. The prows dazzle the exchange partners, inducing them to discount the value of the exchanged goods. The aesthetic properties of the prows are irrelevant insofar as they are exquisitely executed so as to be rendered effective and exert influence over social relations (they enable producers to demoralize, intimidate or tame their foes). This vein of thinking led Gell to conclude that it is precisely the status of artworks as ‘made objects’, as ‘products of techniques’, that distinguishes them from other objects: ‘art objects are the only objects around which are beautifully made, or made beautiful’ (1999: 163). What I found to be extremely fecund in this approach is that it imputes agency to objects: they do something for you. This makes it possible for cultural objects to exert influence over the act of production, rather than merely vice versa. As I have already argued, sociological approaches sometimes overzealously set out to disguise why and how art appears and is valued as such, at the expense of any concern for the cultural object, and the adjacent issues of ‘aesthetic theorizing’. The answer is that the institutions of production (be they fields or art words) have implications for the outlook, status, value and shape of cultural objects. In Gell’s anthropology of cultural production, on the other hand, objects have the capacity to index their origin and in turn actively to shape their own history. Objects have their own social lives, with careers and biographies that are embedded in, and constitutive of, an agent’s biographical projects. Agents’ and object’s biographies are thus interwoven. They exist relationally, with reference to one another, in a 108 Socio-cultural analysis: generative legacy of Adorno and Williams A catachrestic, in a way a distorted and misused rather than straightforward and confirmatory reading, of Adorno and Williams, will reveal the possibility of a simultaneous social and aesthetic analysis of cultural production: that is, an analysis, which is potentially alert to the interrelationship between social and institutional arrangements and the aesthetic and formal properties of the cultural object. Through my own readings of Adorno’s sociology of music and Williams’s sociology of culture, I intend to lay the groundwork for a composite understanding of cultural production, one that is as attentive to cultural objects as well as to cultural institutions. Both Williams and Adorno are not generally considered mainstream sociologists. The work of both languishes in semi-obscurity and is, in principle, absent from sociology, with some notable exceptions of course (DeNora 2003). Yet, Adorno, the musicologist, and Williams, the professor of drama, gave a very sophisticated, compelling and interdisciplinary model of socio-cultural analysis of creative work and cultural production. Adorno: musico-technical approach No one takes Adorno seriously these days (Hesmondhalgh 2002; Banks 2007). He is an unhelpful pessimist, reductionist and elitist. Yet, some scholars recently started extolling Adorno’s ‘thorn half’ and his propitious heritage – his insistence on the inclusion of art’s formal properties into sociological analysis (Born 2003; DeNora 2003). It is the specificity of the cultural object that forms the basis for leveling criticism at the culture industry, and not some ideological and pre-set cultural assumptions about quality, so swiftly imputed to Adornian cultural critique. If, as Adorno (1976:xii) claims, the cultural object (music) is more than ‘cigarettes and soap in market’, then sociological study will inevitably require ‘a full understanding of music itself, in all its implications’. It is only through the analysis of how a cultural object is put together in its formal materiality that one can assess how culture is related to and inflects consciousness, both subjective and collective. It follows that the way composers compose, that is, their mode of praxis: how they handle and deploy musical materialities, such as timbre or tempos in specific arrangements – is influenced by the social order. However, at the same time it inculcates that same social order. The intrinsic form of art is socially mediated, but also exerts a social effect (reminiscent of Gell’s enchantment agency of cultural objects) -- Wagner’s music has an ideological effect (Adorno 1997: 315), while the Ninth Symphony a mesmerizing one (p. 319). This has two implications. One for Adorno’s elaborate theory of the listening subjects – formal properties play a crucial role in shaping audience’s subjectivities and behavior; and another for a less-developed theory of composition -- the task of the sociology of music is to accept approvingly ‘the precedence of production’ (1976:198). Cultural products exert influence over their audience (enlighten or barbarize) insofar as they evince a certain mode or technique of composition, which 109 itself is socially constituted. For late Adorno, even commercial music is not completely commodified, because it preserves its relative autonomy in an adherence to formal principles of making, which themselves are mediated by social relations of production. Cultural objects are thus dialectical – autonomous and commodified at once: the customary invectives against commercial mischief in music are superficial. They delude regarding the extent to which phenomena that presuppose commerce, the appeal to an audience already viewed as customers, can turn into compositional qualities unleashing and enhancing a composer’s productive force (1976:208). One can arrive at an understanding of how formal properties are socially mediated and in turn mediate social order through an immanent criticism (Leppert 2002) or what Adorno (1945) himself called a ‘musico-technical’, or elsewhere ‘a micrological’ approach to music (1976:202). So, when Adorno discusses (critiques) jazz music, he locates its putative ‘banalization effect’ in the simplicity and reiteration of musical schemata, tonality and harmony: that is, its ‘sterotypology’ (2002: 472): beneath the opulent surface of jazz lies the – barren, unchanged, clearly detachable – most primitive harmonic-tonal scheme with its breakdown into half-full cadences and equally primitive meter and form (p. 430). Therefore jazz is a demeaned genre because it replicates the mechanistic structures of capitalist society, observable in formal constituents - trite rhythms, repetitive sequences and predictable atonality only illusorily disguised in individualized expression. As such, musical structures mediate subjective relations to society and human consciousness of freedom. This is why jazz adds up to ‘the regression of audiences’; it arranges rehashed tricks and clichés which deter deeper comprehension and engagement by uncritically connecting audiences with the dominant logic of the social system. The Adornian critique of jazz or radio music is thus, not negative but deeply positive, in the sense of according sui generis status to cultural objects. In this way, the aesthetics and the social are indissolubly interwoven. Yet, in emphasizing culture’s effects, Adorno forgoes the discussion of how the act of composition unfolds in practice in favour of reception (listening!) studies. Nevertheless, there are potentially productive guidelines in Adorno’s sociology of music for the empirical study of cultural production that I would like to take up here. Every artist is rooted in a socio-historical process, in what Adorno calls ‘the spirit of a time’. The social penetrates the aesthetic through a unity of spirit, shared historically-specific and situated forms, materials, métier and modes of doing art (1976: 211). Cultural producers ‘assimilate’ social modes and internalize the circumstances of production as generative productive (aesthetic) forces. It is here that Adorno calls for the study of ‘social labor’ (p. 198) – that involves ‘the work of living reproductive artists’ and their own relation with the intramusical-compositional procedures (p. 219). 110 I underline here ‘living artists’ because in a revealing chapter, Conductor and orchestra, in his sociology of music (1976), Adorno draws on his own experience of orchestra participation, and situates producer autonomy in the ‘performing’ moment. Orchestra playing is dull and repetitive under a conductor’s dictate. Yet, those musicians who abandoned the Utopian dream of music, for set working hours and pay schemes, valued ‘expert dogmatism’ or ‘technical competence’ in the ‘musical form’: ‘from beautifully sounding chords, to precise entrances to the ability to beat more complex rhythms in comprehensible fashion’ (p. 115). Much sounding like Fine (2008) and Faulkner (1983), Adorno observes that orchestra musicians are like tight-rope walkers ‘who for meager pay learn the most foolhardy tricks for the tricks’ own sake’ (p. 115) and compensate for ‘the disappointment with the trade’ (p. 113) with ‘recalcitrance’ in the form of ‘sadistic humor’ and ‘jokes’ (p. 112) which arise from the music form. ‘The ideal of the métier’ – the technical standards – merge with producers’ own predispositions through painstaking apprenticeship in ‘technical superiority’ (p. 216). The living artist, his métier and the spirit of the time all intersect in the realm of the genre. It is at this point that Adorno (1997) – insightfully though tangentially brings in the notion of genre (Gattung) as a dialectical, yet mediating category. The spirit of the time is objectified in genres, and ‘whoever creates authentic forms fulfills them’ (p. 264). Genres are universals that mediate the particular – ‘the authenticity of individual works is stored away in genres’ (ibid.). In order to understand the act of composition, Adorno advocates a melding of the ontological view of genre with pragmatism: the genre is effective; it provides the modes (tools) of the prevailing praxis and work’s immanent lawfulness (p. 266). Composers are steeped in the genre by tradition or schools; the genre provides an objective spirit, which entails specification and subjectification for its own realization – the principum individuationis or individual idiosyncrasies. It makes possible the specific mastery of universal and historical artistic material (Materialbehershung), which refers to the personal, inner feel for raw materials (language, colour, tonal systems), adeptness at compositional and stylistic procedures, but also, as discussed above, the margin of resistance, and thus of freedom which underpins paid artists’ jokes and irony. By extension, Adorno posits an aesthetic commonality, which is guaranteed by a universal mediating the particular labour of those who work in the same genre: A meager and impure idea of this dialectical unity is given by the way in which artists of a single genre perceive themselves to be working in a subterranean collective that is virtually independent of their individual products (p. 45). The genre works upon artists through the historical sedimentation of a collective form of action/reaction, as an interplay between the universal and the particular. Artistic idiosyncrasies are unconscious and hardly theoretically transparent at first, yet reflexivity is requisite so that the artist can articulate his relation to ‘the sedimented form’ and ‘the collective’. In this sense, the genre becomes a tool for investigating the particularities. Although Adorno posits ‘the single genre’, where social and formal forces intermingle inhabited by ‘living artists’, as a valid site of 111 analysis of producers’ autonomy, he unfortunately does not elaborate on the genre’s embeddedness in ‘consciousnessand subconsciousness-industries’ (p. 219) in which the artists ‘go on duty’ (p. 114). To understand how genres, work within the institutions of cultural production, both as formal and social categories at once, we need to look elsewhere. Williams: social formalism and cultural materialism That cultural production, in all its complexity as a material and formal phenomenon, cannot be studied in isolation from the institutions of cultural industries is the central tenet of Williams’s sociology of culture (1995). All artistic production takes place within capitalist economic structures and advanced technologies of reproduction, but this in no way elides the specificity of cultural work. Williams outlines four historical phases in social relations (types of employment, contracts, for example) between artists and the institutions of cultural production: the artisanal, the postartisanal (including patronage), the market professional, and the corporate professional phase (including new media – cinema, television). For Williams the issue of artistic autonomy is thus not so much about the tension between markets and culture, but about artistic agency within newly organized production, which itself, for market purposes, cherishes individual autonomy and authorship. Within corporate cultural industries, ‘fundamental questions of cultural autonomy and purpose are raised in quite new ways’ because, although all creative workers are employees of owners and managers, ‘this is of course never only an economic relationship’ (p. 116). And cultural production is never only reducible to the economy precisely because of the specificity, aesthetics and history of the cultural object. To this end, after having charted the historical institutional phases, Williams, reminiscent of Becker’s recent amusement (2006), asks thoughtfully: ‘we now have the sociology, … but where is the art?’ (p. 119). In contrast to Becker, who eventually indifferently dismissed cultural objects from the sociological analysis, Williams advocates powerfully and convincingly argues for ‘a conceptual shift’ to ‘the works of art themselves’ (ibid.). The attention to the works of art themselves does not hypostasize ‘superstructure’ merely as reflection, ideological expression or social representation, but as intertwined with specific historical incarnations of ‘the structure of feeling’. It is here that Williams introduces, however timidly, the notion of genre as an analytical tool and a potential enabler of sociological empirical work attentive to ‘the works of art themselves’: the genre is a concrete instantiation, local and historical, of the structure of feeling. It indicates the social aspects of the formal logic of the cultural object because it organizes the common characteristics and empirical consciousness of a group of writers who create in a particular historical situation (1980: 22-3). As such, the notion of genre displaces the non-sociological analytical pivot from isolated individual works and authors (unique, idiosyncratic) to certain ‘real’ and ‘actual’ (as opposed to abstract) ‘communities of form’ which practice (perform) the injunctions of the genre (p. 25). Even within the institutions of cultural production, genres remain nonetheless ‘very general, and their reproduction is at least relatively autonomous’ (1995: 194). The genre furnishes an autonomous sense of generation or of 112 a period (above and beyond economic relations of capital) through the provision of characteristic material elements or aesthetic devices such as tone, impulse, and tropes. In turn, the genre underpins the ‘practical consciousness’ visible through specific trajectories of action – it structures and organizes the individual uses and deployment of these materials. For Williams, certain formal ‘devices’, ‘dispositions’, ‘modes of compositions’ are in effect genre-bound: ‘available to the artist as a received way of making his work, and available to others as a set of defined expectations and perceptions’ (1995:197). And at this very juncture, Williams approximates Adorno’s ideas about the genre’s mediating power and its reciprocal relation to the ‘spirit of the time’. Yet, Williams more explicitly links the genre’s mediating power to producer agency, and thus equates the cultural object with practice. Genres are not supra-historical, but historically situated and locally produced. To this end, Williams argues that socio-cultural analysis must do away with the nation that important literature is past, and take into account the relationship between the cultural object and ‘its real process – its most active and specific formation’ (1980:29) whereby the producer agency is inculcated by the genre’s collective modes of making. Hence, although implicated in relations of capital and capitalist institutions, cultural producers preserve a margin of autonomy on the basis of the genre’s relative autonomy and its power to autonomously influence ‘practical consciousness’. Therefore, Williams argues, it is vital to discover ‘the other level, at which the cultural producer defines, to himself, the nature of his own work’ (1995: 45). For Williams, a producer’s experience of relative autonomy is to be found at the level of practicalities of active composing or doing within the bounds of a genre: ‘the move to “autonomy” is often no more than a kind of compositional emphasis’ (p. 138). Congruent with this stance, Williams argues that even a ‘bad’ novel can be professionally executed and skillfully composed, for there is ‘skillfully executed nonsense’ or ‘professionally brilliant hokum’ (p. 125). At an epistemological level, cultural materialism and social formalism undergird Williams’s cultural production paradigm. In the first place, cultural materialism presupposes that the production of cultural meaning is a matter of ‘practical material activity’; it is a ‘social creation of meanings through the use of formal signs’ (1977: 38). In other words, it entails social-ized uses of material means of production, which for Williams includes anything from language to technologies of writing, but also electronic tools and communication systems. It is because of this that Williams conceives of works of art as practice, and not as objects. The role of sociology is not to dissect the components of a work of art, but to discover the nature of compositional practice because the social relationships of production are evident or discoverable as: immediate conditions of practice – the signaled places, occasions and terms of specifically indicated types of cultural activity – and those which are so embedded within the practice, as particular formal articulations, that they are at once social and 113 formal, and can in one kind of analysis be treated as relatively autonomous (1995:148). This is the essence of Williams’s social formalism: the formal standing of a work of art is profoundly social, and the social is formal. The soliloquy – a man speaking aloud to himself on stage – is historically one of the most distinct formal devices of drama. It is a common compositional mode that helps writers compose, and readers understand, but at the same time it is inseparable from the then new social conceptions of individuality, personal expression and the redrawn boundaries between the private and the public in the Renaissance period, when it first become consciously used. By habituation, such social order crystallizes into a structure of feeling. Yet, it is only in dramatic practice that such social relations immanent in the structure of feeling, could be practically composed in the form of a man speaking publicly as if to himself. In this way, the formal device, which internalizes social relations, becomes ‘technical procedure’ and ‘working convention’ (p. 147), or more precisely, ‘a device of plot, to make intrigue explicit’ (p. 145). It follows from this, that Williams’s sociology of culture stands at the intersection of the practical material activity of production taking place in specific institutional and historical contexts (cultural materialism), and cultural objects understood as practices, the internalized and internally developed sociality of genres (social formalism) that raises itself to the level of shared working convention. Adorno-Williams: ‘positive mediation’ What is strikingly similar in the arguments of both Adorno and Williams is the mediating power of genres on cultural production. The notion of mediation is where they both converge, in their effort to overcome the crude materialism and economic determinism of the base-superstructure model, by which the superstructure is reflective of or controlled by the base, and denied a social effectiveness of its own. In the Adorno-Williams conception of mediation, genres mediate cultural production in the compositional moment. Adorno elucidates the notion of ‘positive mediation’ (Vermittlung) as central to the project of the sociology of music and constitutive of ‘the works of art themselves’. When Adorno defends the tenets of his inchoate sociology of music, he most explicitly advocates aesthetic mediation as the task for sociological analysis: What I mean in other words, is the very specific question aimed at products of the mind, as to how social structural moments, positions, ideologies and whatever else, assert themselves in the work of art themselves. I brought out the extraordinary difficulty of the question quite deliberately and without reducing it, and thereby the difficulty of a sociology of music which is not satisfied with external arrangements, not satisfied with the position of art in society, with the effects it has in society, but wants to know how society objectivates itself in works of art (Adorno 1972: 128). 114 For Adorno, mediation is processual, a constant interaction between the subject and the object, the person and the world. As such it resides in material, formal properties or structures, which are handed down historically to producers in the form of genres or poetics, and with which they engage in a craftsmanship manner. Williams argues for a ‘positive understanding of mediation’ sympathetically quoting from Adorno: “Mediation is in the object itself, not something between the object and that to which it is brought.” Thus mediation is a positive process in reality, rather than a process added to by way of projection, disguise or interpretation (Williams 1977: 99). The mediation can thus be observable in the formal properties of cultural objects and in producers’ practices. It follows that cultural producers (composers or orchestra musicians in Adorno’s case, and playwrights or actors in Williams’s) are endowed with agency. They deploy, choose and rework specifically aesthetic devices immanent to the object that are conjectural and constellational. For both Adorno and Williams, mediation refers to the necessary processes of composition, which are a practical matter mediated by the genre. Unlike Gell and Becker, who advocated reading a producer’s agency backwards – by inferring the production practice from the finished cultural object, the Adorno-Williams conception, in a way, looks forward – at the product in its becoming with reference to a genre. By linking mediation to genre, such conception, makes Bourdieu’s ideas about practical mastery and improvisation researchable in their specificity pertinent to the field of cultural production itself. The genre is the historical and local incarnation of the spirit of the time and the structure of feeling, which permeate cultural production. The genre provides the inherited and handed-down (hence social) resources of making that influence the producers’ subjectivities and trajectories of action – concrete choice of compositional devices, and critical reworking of formal elements (as incorporated in poetics). In this way, the genre and its poetics can be seen to articulate the social, at the same time as the social defines what is the locally and historically predominant form of the genre-poetics. The Adorno-Williams conception of mediation largely abstains from empirical study. I draw on this composite conception of mediation, in order to understand genre-as-practice, as a constitutive rule that affords cultural production, understood both in its materiality and aesthetic dimension. To this end, I borrow the idea that genre furnishes modes, regimes, medium, schemes that organize and structure action, agency and activities. As such, it mediates the experience of production. This experience is not abstract or a-historical. On the contrary, it needs to be discovered empirically through a focus on the daily practices of production. Therefore, I extend the Adorno-Williams conception of mediation to encompass cultural producers and the way they not only interpret cultural objects in their making, but also make use of the genre and its properties: how producers interact with, act upon and are acted by genres in the process of 115 making. Therefore, genre-poetics is not mere stimulus, effect or cause, but what emerges as a cultural object is intentionality, or intentional relations between producers and genre-poetics. It is important that Adorno-Williams’s idea of mediation presents an analytical model of how to go beyond micro-social interactions within an art world or objective social relations of the field. Taken as a composite, the Adorno-Williams notion of ‘positive mediation’ (Vermittlung) lays the basis for an investigation of the formal or structural properties of cultural objects, and their function in the act of composition or production more broadly. It seems this is a first step towards according genres an active status, as opposed to merely objects of interpretation and explanation, in the processes of cultural production. Yet, if Adorno and Williams posited the notion of genre as an analytical category, it is still not clear how it can be operationalized as a category with a performative or active force, a category that autonomously structures producer agency and intentions. To opertionalize the category of genre, one needs to consider the internal structural patterns of genre, to accept that the formal properties of the genre as encompassed in its poetics have the capacity to influence the way producers work and self-define. This means getting a comprehensive handle on the inner properties of cultural objects as socialized in genres, for which the need to look closely at insights from genre theory becomes inevitable. It is this operationalization of genres as both analytical and performative categories that I take up in the next chapter. 116 CHAPTER 2 GENRE IN ACTION How are agency and authorship conceptualized in relation to genres? How do genres structure and mediate action? In order to elucidate the complex interplay between agency and genre, I draw on recent work within cultural sociology on ‘culture in action’ (Swidler 2001), also known as the Cultural Repertoires (CR) perspective (DeNora 2003). Such research focuses on how culture furnishes ‘repertoires’ or ‘cultured capacities’ out of which people build strategies for action, feeling or perception. The insistence on repertoires shifts attention away from genres as normative and static categories that exert a deterministic influence on cultural producers by providing a pre-scripted ways of doing (Adorno 1975). At the same time, understanding genres as resources for action does away with the long-held view of genres as mirroring the social order and class hierarchies (Bourdieu 1996). More importantly, such an approach brings cultural objects squarely back into the focus of the analysis. In order to develop an understanding on how genres influence cultural production through the provision of appropriate, poetic and ethically responsible, ways of doing, perceiving and acting, (rather than merely serving utilitarian, managerial and marketing purposes), I take up here a wide range of scholarship. The aim is to arrive at a possible way of using genres, not as a heuristic device, but as a performative category – as something that not only classifies, but also acts (in the process of cultural production). At this point, the focus is not so much on what genres are or on their meaning as such, but on what they do, or enable producers to do. Therefore the purpose of bringing occasionally disparate scholarship into dialogue is to show (and learn from) how different disciplines have indeed theorised with various terminologies and methods ‘the genre in action’. Such grounding then allows us to ask what those who use genres do in practice. In other words, how do cultural producers produce genres (and produce themselves) through active use (engagement with, deployment and mobilization) of genres? In this respect, genres and authors, as well as genres and institutions, are co-constructive of each other, producing while using each other. The idea of culture as a ‘tool-kit’ for action I here will elucidate the idea of culture as a resource for action by drawing on Swidler’s and DeNora’s (who also builds on Swidler) insightful accounts. 117 One of the most prominent figures of the CR perspective, Ann Swidler (2001), conceives of ‘culture’ as consisting of ‘equipment’, ‘resources’, ‘tools’ or ‘means’ for action. Her premise is that people develop lines of action rooted in what they already know or are familiar with. In other words, people produce strategies for action because they are active ‘culture consumers’ (p. 93) of popular culture, religious rituals, symbols and so on – all of which provide the cultural materials that shape personal styles, skills and habits. Therefore, culture informs and sustains personal ‘selfforming’ – a certain type of self is maintained, constructed and refashioned by way of using or mobilizing cultural materials (p.71). Culture provides the larger worldview with which people justify their own choices, identity-formation, and desires. For example, Swidler describes how one of her respondents, a co-pastor of a liberal Protestant church, ‘happily borrows’ from Eastern mysticism, Christianity and the pop culture of the 1970s to justify his ‘reinvented’ sense of self, the shift in his attitude towards parishioners, and newly developed managerial habits. Hippy culture, Swidler argues, provided a global style of optimism, candour and care for others with which he treated his parishioners; Eastern mysticism grounded his conviction that he was responsible for everything, since everything was him; Christianity posited a benign world based on eternal good, and so played into his cheerful approach to problem-solving. In this way ‘culture’ provided repertoires of action and ‘allowed him to enact new ways of being in the world’ (p.75) and ‘to become a certain type of self’ (p.79). This perspective is a highly useful one since it elegantly does away with the sociological dichotomy of agency-structure and the deterministic political economic model of basesuperstructure. In this view, social structure is itself constituted by culture. Through this prism, media or popular culture consumers are neither passive nor active agents, but they selfconsciously act upon and act with cultural materials to attain certain ends in their daily lives. Culture structures even conditions action, in so far as it is self-consciously, critically, calculatively and mostly ironically worked upon in the process of routine, habitual, embodied or tacit everyday sense-making practices. Yet Swidler’s account, and more generally the CR perspective, have been criticized for failing to grasp the relationship and hierarchy among diverse cultural practices (DeNora 2003). Although there is potentially a wide range of available resources for action, some practices are more significant than others. As a result, some cultural resources overtake others, interconnect or disconnect. Swidler herself addresses and redresses this criticism by developing the concept of anchoring practices. The core anchoring practices are those around which other practices revolve. This has to do with the stylistic and discursive properties of certain locally and historically situated contexts of interaction, which anchor or order associated practices. In this view structures or institutions, be they military power, educational systems or marriage, are anchored, performed and reproduced in and through everyday local practices. Structures are not abstract or conceptual entities, but 124 practice by professionals who recognise shared ways of doing things. Therefore, the genre and its rules are not completely pre-established or managerially imposed, but are re-formulated each time the producers engage with them. The genre is thus re-worked in the moment of performance. The genre-in-performance is actually a practice in the very narrow sense of a routinised type of behaviour which consists of several interconnected elements: ‘forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, “things” and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge’ (Reckwitz 2002: 249). In this sense, cultural producers are ‘the carriers’ of the practice – carriers of the routinised, both conscious and un-conscious ways of understanding, knowing, feeling, perceiving and most importantly doing (ibid.). By deploying certain genre-related devices, actors try to accomplish or ‘subjectively carry out’ particular institutional arrangements, that are themselves anchored in genres. Cultural logics are always anchored in institutions (Swidler 2000:205). But what is the relationship between genres and institutions? Why is it possible that cultural producers become autonomous carriers of practice? And, how does the genre come to furnish a margin of differentiation, and thus individuality and autonomy? Genre theory has long theorized, though never fully empirically researched, the genre as an institution. The structure of genre as an institution poses practical difficulties of action, to which the genre as an autonomous ontology gives multiple, rival or just partial solutions. As such the genre furnishes not only rational and deductive, but also emotive and intuitive, devices through which action is structured. The repertoire of cultured capacities available to cultural producers constrains the institutional order. Conversely, the pragmatic and practical strategies of action at the producers’ disposal are oriented towards the institutional pattern itself. It may be said that the genre as a social institution is embedded within the institutions of cultural production in a kind of intricate mise-en-abyme. That is, the logic of the genre as an implicit contract between readers and producers is contained within the organisations of cultural production. How is this mise-enabyme conceptualized? Those scholars who no longer perceive genres in negative terms (as deviant or nonconformist) claim that all texts – even all literary works – participate in genres. In this view, the genre becomes the inevitable socio-cultural context in which readers and producers interact. It follows, that the genre is an interrelational category that links together the reader, cultural object and producer, and thus functions autonomously as ‘an institution’. Wellek and Warren (1948/1956) were the first to define the genre as an institution or as an ‘institutional imperative’: genres are neither principles of classification nor legalistic prescriptive systems of classical genre theory, but autonomous cultural/poetic realm which they nevertheless say does exert an effect upon writing (p. 226). Genres regulate production, yet are rooted in an independent logic of text-making, by which they become ‘real, i.e. effective’ (p. 262). According to Wellek and Warren the genre delimits, in an immanent fashion, the boundaries of what is 125 thinkable and doable for the writer in certain historical circumstances. A set of unwritten rules becomes insitutionlised, that is recognizable to and valued by the members of an institution (fellow producers, readers, publishers). In turn, writers, by way of an autonomous action, use genres to produce texts, and vindicate their institutional membership: ‘one can work through, express himself through, existing institutions’ (p.226). Similarly, Dubois and Durand (1988) argue that all the activities of writers are genre-bound, and give rise to ‘a separate genre world’ (p. 144). By provisioning ‘generic injunctions’ the genre affects the division of labour within the genre world (p. 145). For Todorov (1990), the genre is a kind of arena, a forum where producers and consumers meet, rub off each other and jointly coconstruct, intentionally or not, the ‘generic system’ within which texts are bought and sold, produced and consumed: ‘It is because genres exist as an institution that they function as “horizons of expectation” for readers and as “models of writing” for authors’ (1990: 18). To this end, Todorov, in a somewhat revised scholarly stance, argues that genres are not merely ‘theoretical constructs’ (clusters of common textual features deduced ex post facto through metadiscourse), but the recurrence of certain textual properties institutionalized as a discourse which forms the inherited ‘generic system’ or ‘discursive institution’ (p. 162). The genre is thus a product of the intersubjective interaction between writers and readers on the basis of codified, and learned, inherited discursive properties. It institutionalizes production and reception as historical and local interactions: On the one hand, authors write in function of (which does not mean in agreement with) the existing generic system and they may bear witness to this just as well within the text as outside it, or even, in a way between the two – on the book cover; … On the other hand, readers read in function of the generic system, with which they are familiar thanks to criticism, schools, the book distribution system, or simply by hearsay; however, they do not need to be conscious of this system (Todorov 1990: 18-19). If one approaches genres as an institution (world, arena), then the genre reveals itself as a professional system that maintains genre-specific values based upon a contract with audiences and verisimilitude to its inner-workings. As a result, genre worlds establish what constitutes ‘innovation’ and ‘good work’ with respect to those generic boundaries (see Jensen 1984; Dornfeld 1998; Grindstaff 2002; Born 2010). Therefore, regardless of the level of adherence to generic rules, a successful generic production is never ‘predetermined’, nor is the genre necessarily restrictive. Yet, literary genre theory, however useful in explaining that every textual production is genre-bound, remains coloured by an incurable structuralism. The ‘writer’s model of writing’ and ‘the reader’s horizon of expectation’ are ultimately an abstract construct inducted by the means of textual, not empirical analysis. 126 It was film, rather than literary genre theory that ventured into explaining the genre as an institution within the institutions of cultural industries (and not just within the elusive institution of literature). Largely owing to the unconcealed and unambiguous connection between the film and entertainment industry in an American context and the post-war pervasiveness and popularity of film genres spurred on by the widespread expansion of cinema and television, it was film scholars who first latched onto the idea of genre as an institution within cultural industries, on the assumption that the genre was not a critically or theoretically constructed term, a result of detached conjectural induction, but an active entity which was institutionalized by and itself institutionalized actively the film industry. The key figures of modern film genre theory, Rick Altman (1999) and Steve Neale (1990), conceive of the genre as a dynamic category that offers institutionalized modes of action. Through this prism, the genre and the genre system proffer cultural tools that link production, exhibition and reception in a circular loop. The industry mobilizes the genre for promotional and definitional scopes, as it is the genre that unassumingly yet powerfully links cultural products to audiences. According to Altman, ‘genres can serve as institutions only because they are in turn backed up by other institutions, far more material in nature’ (p. 91). Among those material institutions are: production companies, exhibition institutions, governmental agencies and critical establishments. The means that these institutions utilize in the process of institutionalizing genres (regulating the audience-text-producer triad) are both criticism constructs (coming from journalists, film schools) and industrial self-reflexive discourses (embodied in ads, posters, trade videos, iconography, company catalogues, repertoires, and self-referential promotional materials). Therefore, Altman argues that genres are endowed with a ‘generic agency’ (p. 99) that structures and organizes the intuitional, mainly promotional and marketing actions. All the different uses to which the genre is purposively put either by producers (while creating in accord with formats) or the audiences (while consuming in agreement with formats) is reflected in the ‘discursivity of the genre’ (ibid.). Altman’s views reverberate closely with Neale’s (1990) study of film genres where he argues that the film genre (western) is located in the ‘industry’s inter-textual relay’ or ‘the various verbal and pictorial descriptions’ (p. 49) by which the industry makes use of the genre for self-definitional purposes. To this end, Neal makes an argument for incorporating the ‘industrial and journalistic discourses or labels’ (ibid.) in the analysis of film genres. Neal declaratively contends that ‘massproduced, popular genres have to be understood within an economic context, as conditioned by specific economic imperatives and by specific economic contradictions – in particular, of course, those that operate within specific institutions and industries’ (p. 64). Yet, although film genre theory championed a processual and dynamic concept of genre, it hardly did away with the notion of genre as a heuristic category. Its proponents focused not on how genres enable institutional processes of self-reflexive production, but on how they are presented to appear as commercially viable products. This is largely due to the fact that film genre analyses read industrial practices from cinematic texts, and not from empirical investigation. 127 Eventually, they fall prey to cultural pessimism and utilitarianism: the industry rationalizes production through the genre. As the genre entails constant reiteration of familiarity, the production of familiar/similar genres allows for effective redeployment of resources (props, costumes), labour and intellectual property. To understand how genres are used in practice within institutions, one needs to look elsewhere than literary and film genre theory, to the rhetorical conceptions of genre. Genres as tools and resources: enacting genre worlds Although the traditional literary and film genre theory made room for understanding genres as developing culturally and socially, and always at the nexus between production and consumption, it did not give any empirical evidence for how this happens in practice. The compositional or rhetorical genre theory approaches genres as purposive and functional, whereby the purposes and functions are activated within a community. This scholarship showed ethnographically how genres actually sustain and institutionalize genre worlds. In this view, genres are considered mediators of social activities (Bazerman and Prior 2005). Genres are mediating tools that people use purposefully and intentionally to achieve certain communicative aims. In other words, genres play into the structuring and maintenance of social interaction and social organization because they underpin human activities and practices, which are themselves part of larger webs of social activities. For the proponents of composition theory, the genre is a ‘tool’ with which producers achieve certain ends: ‘eulogize, apologize, recommend one person to another, instruct customers on behalf of a manufacturer, take on an official role, account for progress in achieving goals’ (Miller 1984:165). This approach offers a performative specification of genre which is predicated not on substantiative textual matters or even structure, but ‘on the action it is used to accomplish’ (p. 151). Through this prism, the genre is understood as a recurrent social action that ‘fits’ into recognizable rhetorical situations. The main upshot of this argument is that the genre is consensual, a result of the activities taking place within specific discursive community, which recognizes and values, the genre. When people use the genre as a tool in specific communicative activities, then they engage in genre activities or genre practice. All social activities can be viewed as genre practice inasmuch as the genres shape and structure the social activities by way of people strategically putting them to use. Drawing on cognitive psychology, Devitt (2004) argues that in genre activities, genres enable writers to make choices, rather than enforcing them to conform. In order to be creative, the ‘creative mind’ must first recognize and follow the patterns (what psychologists call convergent or vertical thinking or ‘fitting’) and only then depart from already existing paradigms (divergence or lateral thinking). Lateral thinking revises, requalifies and remakes the observable patterns, while vertical thinking helps the new knowledge fit the pattern again, thus making it intelligible and 128 interpretable. Genres contain within themselves the seeds of convergence and divergence. ‘A good writer’ must recognize a genre by converging disparate textual instances into a single entity, a genre indeed. By seeing how the new text appropriately diverges from the pattern helps create a unique text that in turn fits into the genre (p. 152). According to Devitt, this interplay between convergence and divergence is almost naturalized when it comes to professional users/producers of genres. Professional writers, in their expert practice, routinely concentrate on what is unique to a particular materialization of a genre. In this way, the expert practice is underpinned by genre practice – a specific consideration of audience, time and space, structural textual models and techniques, and not what is pre-established. Experts have already habituated the genre in their actual practice. In other words, genres are constitutive of social arrangements and expert practices, which relay on genres for their own reproduction and competence. In this line, the most insightful studies of this kind shed light on how genres are actually put to work within organizational institutions by genre practitioners. As such, genres anchor institutional arrangements, and impose structure on action through the ways in which practitioners do things with the genres on behalf of their clients. The gist of the argument is that genres play into profession-building and profession-maintenance while underpinning conscientious service to clients. Once the professions are institutionalized, the professionals maintain their membership of the profession by competent usage of genres (Bazerman & Paradis 1991: 4-5). In other words, the genre shapes the daily actions of individuals through its operational or agentic capacity. Devitt (1991) brilliantly shows how genres (the types of texts written by tax accountants such as research memoranda or tax protests) furnish lines of expert conduct in a tax accounting company, if only because the practitioners themselves acknowledge and cherish the authority of these genres for ‘doing’ their professional relationship with clients. Accountants perform ‘quality work’ on the basis of what they have learned constitutes the ‘generic ideal’ (p. 353) of tax accounting: new accountants are clued in the profession by learning the ‘tricks’ of the ‘genre system’ which will result in past ‘residual’ texts influencing the creation of future genrebound texts. Novice accountants concentrate on generic convergence, so as to become adept at recognizing the importance of the genre (copying or rewriting past texts) for a particular communicative situation. Only afterwards do they learn the salience of divergence for their professional success. Hence, Devitt (ibid.) concludes that genres constitute professional communities: ‘each text functions to accomplish some of the firm’s work; together the texts describe a genre system which both delimits and enables its work’. Another piece of research, conducted by Doheny-Farina (1991) on business proposals, underlines the genre’s effectiveness to provide a structured environment within which professional behavior is constructed. His research shows how a business plan shapes organizations by mobilizing the activities of investors, software developers, and the company’s founders themselves. The business proposal activates the day-to-day management of the company. This study demonstrates how action is fitted to genres, which themselves anchor the founding 129 practices (fund-raising and administering) of the start-up company. Thus, Doheny-Farina states that creating the business plan (by adhering to its generic requirements) actually at the same time creates the company itself (p. 307). This is an important point since it alludes to the genre’s effectiveness not only to structure subjective action, but to constitute the institutions that enshrine them as well. Interestingly, research in organization and management studies latched onto rhetorical approaches to genres and focused on the communicative practices within a professional community. It contends that the genre is the primary mode of social action that is constitutive of and constitutes a professional world (Yates & Orlikowski 1994:542). It functions as an organizing structure that never fully determines action and works in a particular way upon its practitioners not only to inflect moods and attitudes but also interaction. In this way, organizational genres such as memoranda anchor the organization. The members of the community fit their actions in these genres that delimit conventionalized proper or appropriate behavior. It is this that Devitt calls ‘genre etiquette’ – ‘following generic etiquette enables one to “fit in,” to be marked as belonging to the group’ (2004:147). In order to follow, and most importantly to innovate within, the generic etiquette, one must acquire the appropriate modes of doing thus prescribed. Genre users’ identities are constructed through engagements with genre etiquette. Similarly but yet perplexing, given that these scholarships do not communicate with each other, linguistic anthropology, or ‘the ethnography of speaking’, as it is commonly known, conceptualizes independently genres as regular and regularized tools that organize the discourse and co-produce social arrangements such as marketplaces, for example. Similarly to the compositional studies of genre, the ethnography of speaking focuses on the dynamics of performance and practice relative to genres in specific social circumstances such as tea drinking ceremonies or healing sessions. In an early account, Richard Bauman makes a programmatic definition of genres in the ethnography of speaking, by which ‘genres’ ought to be understood both as ‘a ready-made way of packaging speech’ (1987: 5) and ‘as a resource for performance, available to speakers for the realization of specific social ends in a variety of creative, emergent, and even unique ways’ (p. 6). In this latter work, Bauman (2001) details ethnographically how genres (the spiel and call) accomplish ‘a routine marketplace task’ in a local Mexican outdoor market -- the call shapes, and not just depicts, the sale of staples such as watermelons, whereas the spiel shapes more luxurious products such as pantyhose (p.74). For Bauman, as for Swidler, genres are ‘resources for the accomplishment of social ends in the conduct of social life’ (p. 59) in a poetic or cultural-ized way. The formal and pragmatic features of the generic framework are variably ‘mobilized’ by actors in marketplaces in their ‘daily practice’, thus enticing poetic differentiation -- the particular textual expression is never fully reducible to the generic model by virtue of diversified usage/function. 130 Taken together, these approaches emphasize the genre’s mediating role in social life. By focusing on non-literary genres within communicative/discursive communities, this strand of analysis convincingly shows that the genre is not an antonym to creativity and professional autonomy. The genre user is bound to, yet free to choose from, an available spectrum of genres at her disposal (what Devitt calls ‘genre sets’ and Yates & Orlikowski ‘genre repertoire’): the genre that most properly fulfils the intended social function in a particular social/professional context (say for example a job interview or business proposal). It is not difficult to infer from this that an incurable functionalism hovers over these approaches. The genre contributes to a wider social function, such as profession-building or social integration (understood as functioning wholes). The social function determines the genre choice (although some users are more and other less proficient or productive in the choosing process). Every genre is associated with some domain of activity, which in turn prescribes appropriate genres. Yet, if one bears in mind that the rhetorical approaches to genre are pedagogical – used in teaching students of English to link particular types of writing or speaking to social purposes – then such functionalism becomes a pragmatic device. Again, then the genre has been associated with ‘learned templates’ ‘writing schemes’ or ‘patterns’ to be emulated by students in social situations of communicative anxiety and uncertainty. Yet, what I want to take from these empirical studies of genre use is that the genres are formal models, obeying their own independent logic, but which only make sense when used within ‘genre worlds’ or communicative practices. Genres indeed furnish appropriate modes of conduct by which producers fit their action and behavior into professional communities. However, I want to depart from the implied functionalism and utilitarianism by seeing genres not as a gamut or repertoires from which one chooses with a view to fulfilling some social function or achieving personal goals, but as resources that shape the practical doing and self-understanding in an immanent fashion. The genre prescribes but does not enforce producers to act in certain ways. Genres are not categorical cultural frameworks generated by functional necessity, but they supply an autonomous sense of shared style, aesthetics and ethics, and by the same token, as sense of belonging and expertise. But, how is a process of cultural production squarely centered on one particular genre to be theorized while keeping an account of the genre-specific modus operandi? Can one develop an understanding of genre as developing in one specific genre world, such as that of the travel guidebook? Is it possible to argue that the genre not only accomplishes goals or ends, but helps producers clearly delineate those goals and ends in the process of production? In a rarely precocious study Colie (1973) explains how, by constant and appropriate use of the resources of ‘the unwritten genre rules’, Renaissance writers fashioned themselves as professionals. Colie makes an argument for ‘the social importance of generic systems for writers as members of a profession’ that ‘governed (- a vile phrase) and contributed to (- an O.K. phrase) writers and writing’ (p.8). ‘The conventional variations’ are programmed by, and can only be recognized and valued within, the generic system in which they operate. Slevin (2001), who has taken up Colie’s 131 ideas, argues that Renaissance writers employed genres not as codification of stylistic variation; they simply inhabited the genre: they thought, felt, perceived in available ‘kinds’ learned through community participation in reading and composing. Therefore, the genre is not only understood or embedded within communities, but more importantly genres make possible the activities of the people participating in the community, that can now be called ‘a genre world’. Such thinking leads me back to the inspirational conceptions of genres as the positive mediation of ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams) and ‘brotherhood of forms’ (Adorno) which I discussed in Chapter 1. Because genres embody social experiences, local communities and a historical relationship between producers and audiences, they provide tools for the realization of the practical consciousness of difference and familiarity in historical circumstances, collegial relationships of production, feeling of tones, devices, forms, and kinds. In a word, through their functioning in practice (that equals poetics, as discussed in the previous chapters), genres enact genre-specific professionalism and as a result give rise to locally and historically situated genre worlds, which are institutionalized within the institutions of cultural production. These in turn sanction the producer-cultural object-audience relationship. Now that I have established that genres function as a mise-en-abyme, an institution within an institution, and thus both commercialized autonomous, differentiated and familiar, we need to discuss how this works in practice. How do they proffer resources upon which cultural producers can draw? How do genres afford ways of doing, reflecting, and perceiving the process of textmaking? How do the cultural institutions of genre function within economic and social institutions of cultural production? How does the genre proffer modes of professionalism? How does it actually afford the construction of a specific historical and localized genre world? The practical deployment of genres in production practice is left untouched by traditional genre theory. Genre as a set of affordances Now I have come a long way from the understanding that the genre in cultural production is a straitjacket or a plain mechanism of control that prescribes action, as Adorno had it; and even further away from the idea that genres ‘reflect’ or ‘mirror’ social class and distinction, as Bourdieu maintained. The genre-producer relationship is not causal, but relationally interdependent. The genre exists through usage (its pragmatic force), which in turn enacts competent (professional) genre producers. It does something for those (cultural producers) who appropriate it, and are professionally bound to do things with it, around it and through it, and for whom the genre matters. I suggest that the genre can be seen as a set of affordances, that is affords specific, possible and plausible, action trajectories. In arguing for the importance of the notion of affordances in the study of the role of genres in cultural production, I here bring together James Gibson’s (1977) theory of affordances and Alfred Gell’s (1998) somewhat unarticulated, but nonetheless obdurately present and powerful, idea that a ‘ “corpus” of artworks’ can be viewed as a distributed object (p. 221). That a ‘corpus of artworks’ or a ‘corpus of texts’ refers to genre can 132 be seen in earlier scholarship on genre theory (Mittell 2004:18; Nichols 2001:20; Neale 2002:43 inter alia). The idea of genres as distributed objects has since been taken up by Born (2005a:28). Such a rapprochement will help me materialize the action afforded by what has already been determined as ‘unwritten poetics’ of genres (Colie 1973:4), ‘unspoken models’ of reading and writing (Todorov 1990:18) and ‘subtle and silent’ rules of the genre’ (Devitt 2004:213). The notion of affordances is potentially useful in explaining the opportunities and constraints inherent in genres that become manifest and articulated once producers actively engage with the structurally patterned immaterial logic of the genre-poetics. Gibson developed the concept of affordances in psychology to describe the interaction between animals (and people) and the environment. Crudely put, the affordance of an object is a combination of its physical properties (substance, surface) taken with reference to the people (or animals) that utilize them: ‘the affordances of the environment are what it offers animals, what it provides or furnishes, for good or ill’ (1977:68). Objects afford people activities: offer ways of living and being, or simply modes of behavior (nutrition, for example). People recognize the affordances or the lack of affordances which are thus directly perceivable. In other words, the physical or material properties of an object (those properties that are tangible, audible, visible, or odorous) are positive, that is real, but only in relation to the people who perceive them as affording or furnishing possibilities of doing. This Gibson describes as ‘-ableness’, which puts en emphasis on what object’s properties can do rather than on how we can define them (English 2011:78). The affordance is neither an objective nor a subjective quality or value of an object. Affordances emerge in the interaction between the subjects and objects. Therefore, as Gibson contends, physical properties are not an issue for classical physics, but for ecological physics that studies ‘the meaningful environment’ (p. 67). They exist relationally as invariable facts of the environment: that is, always in relation with, but not as a function of, interaction. For example, water being substantial (property) affords drinking, but also drowning; being solvent affords bathing and washing; being fluid affords pouring, but does not afford support or a prop (p. 71). That is the same to say, the water is drink-able or wash-able, that is, it affords the distinct possibilities of action – washing or drinking. Thus, the material properties of water can enable or limit the range of possible interpretations of it and can configure the uses to which it can be put to use by active subjects that always judge what water (or any other material feature) is good for. What are the properties of a genre? These are not physical in the sense of properties immanent to things, but distributed properties that are nonetheless material. A genre’s properties are invariant, real and, thus relatively autonomous in that they do not entirely depend on the observer’s point of view or attribution of meaning, let alone managerial impositions. They do not belong to texts or to producers, even less so to media owners. They are neither semiotic nor proprietary. Rather, they exist relationally, as inter-textual and inter-subjective. 133 But, where do these properties come from? If the genre’s properties are relatively invariant and real, then how can one account for individual difference, innovation or even historical change writ large? It is precisely because the genre exists in a web of textual and subjective relations that it generates invariances. These invariances act as a kind of ‘social glue’ (Latour 2005) that holds together the specific arrangements of texts, institutions and subjects of cultural production/consumption across spatial and temporal distances. It is the invariances that provide the necessary degree of permanence against which change and differences can be gauged. But this is not in terms of an inventory or classification of common themes, recurrent topics or semiotic patterns abstracted from texts, as classical genre theory so adamantly argued. The genre is made up of ties between animate and inanimate instances (Latour 2005). As such, they form a corpus of texts or ‘distributed objects’ which possess distributed properties that afford agency dispersed in space and time. It is these distributed properties that shape the ableness of the genre, that is what a genre can do or what it is good for. Because of the intersection of difference and familiarity connected to genres as distributed objects, genres do something for their users/producers: they provide the means for professionalized action that is appropriate action or performance. This is indeed shifting the attention from genres as taxonomic labels or classificatory backgrounds to genres as active elements of production. As Latour argued ‘we must learn to attribute – redistribute – actions to many more agents than is acceptable to either materialist or the sociological account’ (1994:33). If understood as a set of affordances genres can be seen in their mediating role, and as participants in the distributed activity geared towards the production of art (Hennion 2003). However, much in the spirit of Latour’s (1994:33) ‘hybrid actor composed of gun and gunman’, the active role of genres can be grasped only in relation with the concrete, historically and locally situated cultural producer, who engages with a genre’s affordances for the fulfillment of this or that goal, scope or professional task. Contemporary genre theory superbly provided a theory, although by no means empirical ‘action’ evidence, that each textual instance provides links to past texts and builds connections with future texts. Biological metaphors of genres as organic units that have relatively circumscribed historical existence in time and space (they are born, mature and perish) are not only recurrent but somewhat entrenched in genre theory (see Fowler 1971; Jauss 1982). It is probably Bakhtin (1984) who most succinctly captures the ‘organicist’ relationship between genres and individual texts which account for genre’s historical vigour: Genre is reborn and renewed at every stage at the development of literature and in every individual work of a given genre. This constitutes the life of the genre. … A genre lives in the present but always remembers its past, its beginnings. Genre is a representative of creative memory in the literary development. Precisely for this reason genre is capable of guaranteeing the unity and uninterrupted continuity of this development (p. 106, original emphasis). 140 procedures that Becker et al. (2006) argue constitute ‘the fundamental indeterminacy of the artwork’ necessary for a sociological analysis of art. Such an analysis attends to all the things that happened in a text’s making (p. 5) – sketches, versions, revisions (p. 26) which in fact perform the work of art. In Chapter 7, I will look closely at how genre-related production choices, both ethical and aesthetic, are made in practice, while concentrating on the editorial brief and preliminary versions that pre-date and shape the finished guidebook, and offer insight into authorial genrerelated action unfolding in time and space. The genre enables choices precisely because its properties are temporarily stabilized and placed within a framework of both calculation and expressiveness framed in discursive idioms, writing mediums, or inscriptions (Barry & Slater 2002). On the other hand, cultural producers need to know their material and object. The greater the bodily and technological understanding of genre properties, the better the job the producer is likely to do. Hence producers develop a craftsmanship attitude to work: a passionate and special relationship with their materials by learning how it feels, acts, and talks back. Rules are adhered to until a certain skill is so well-rehearsed that it becomes habituated know-how. This makes room for expert and professional idiosyncrasies that make possible creative work to be conducted in an ethically and aesthetically appropriate manner, while equally embracing economic calculability and utilitarian values. In chapter 7, I present a detailed ethnography of a travel guidebook writer at work: how she goes about daily production choices, how she relates to and acts upon generic dominants, so as to configure herself as a professional and conscientious agent. I show empirically how the genre serves as an organising force of work, craftsmanship orientation, motivation and imagination. Before proceeding to the empirical, concrete investigation of the genre in action, as mobilized by individual and institutional actors, I want next to briefly outline the analytical autonomy of the genre of travel guidebook by identifying its prevalent dominant properties (Kane 1991; Alexander 2012). Conclusion The type of reasoning elaborated in this chapter has two main consequences. The first is for the more sociological-anthropological paradigm of cultural production. Although the social processes surrounding the act of production are important for the shaping of a cultural object, the genre’s properties need to be installed back in the analysis in order to enable us to arrive at a more holistic understanding of cultural production. The second concerns the socio-cultural paradigm of genres, and literary and film genre theory. The analysis of the structural properties of genres does not suffice to explain how the properties are put to work in cultural production: how they are worked and acted upon in actual production practice within industrial contexts. The argument presented in this chapter is that producers of genre gauge the quality of their work and the success of their career in and though their engagement with generic dominants, as 141 so well demonstrated by socio-linguistics, pragmatic theories of genre and linguistic anthropology. In this way the genre’s properties penetrate authorial selves so as to inform, structure and anchor producers’ autobiographical accounts and underpin their authorial intentions. In turn, the genre exists in and through producer involvement with its dominant properties, inasmuch as producers’ careers are either empowered and imagined by or entrapped in the genre of their labours. On the other hand, given that genres function as institutions within the institutions of cultural industries, the genre’s properties get into, lend form to and organise institutional self-reflexivity as well, as much as the industries institutionalize and capitalise on genres. The institutions of cultural production do things with, around and through the genre: they interpret, define, advertise and exonerate production practice. And all this engagement is possible if one approaches the genre as a set of affordances that always manifest themselves in relation to an active subject. 142 CHAPTER 3 PROPERTIES OF THE GENRE: GENRE DOMINANTS To identify the material properties of a specific genre, one needs to pinpoint the devices, functions, or constructive principles that dominate, organise and override its other features. Such properties differentiate the genres within the field of travel writing from travelogues and travel journalism. The dominant elements of the genre are not exclusive or restricted to only that genre; indeed, they are also properties of other genres. However, the dominants refer to the presence of dominant devices or techniques to which all of the others are subordinate in a given historical moment for a specific generic textual instance. Thus, the dominants that I will outline are not limited to the genre of travel guidebooks31; however, the latter shape the form of the former within a specific spatio-temporal frame. Thus, travel guidebooks have close relationships of difference and similarity with two adjacent (sub-)genres that belong to the overarching or supra corpus of ‘travel writing’: travelogues and travel journalism. Together they constitute the field of travel writing. The dominants organise and govern the trajectories of action and the experience of working with genres within specific genre worlds. Moreover, they are constitutive of both producer and institutional practices of genre-centred cultural production. The members of the genre world acknowledge and accept the authority, salience and indispensability of certain features of the genre in the ethical, aesthetic and professional pursuit of genre-making. Although the presence of dominants facilitates the resilience of genres, it does not reproduce transcendental rules of creation or clustering mechanisms for specific corpuses of texts. These dominants are simply a function of the cultural, social and industrial adherence to historically prevalent features. As a result, the dominants cannot be judged in the abstract because they are a historically specific bundle of discursive instances that define what is ‘right and wrong’ or ‘good and bad’ in the process of genre-making. The dominants, therefore, reveal an aesthetic that is deeply rooted in ethical values and a sense of responsibility among both the producers of and the intended audience for the genre. The dominants set the standard and the technical/craft requirements for a genre at a particular time and place from an idealistic and moral perspective. Every dominant is associated with textual micro-instances and discursive enunciations that articulate generic knowledge and situate the genre in a historical context (Mittell 2004:35-38). 31 For example, travel guidebooks share certain devices and techniques with other cognate genres, such as the genres that roughly may be said to belong to the ‘how-to’ generic cluster (do-it-yourself books on gardening, cooking or medical self-help); another cognate genre is that of news and investigative journalism, yet also ethnographic writing. 143 According to Mittell (2004:36) ‘a generic dominant functions as the primary connotative implication of generic terminology’. The generic dominants underpin the existence of a professional genre world within which ‘generic terminology’ imbues professionally shared generic knowledge, assumption and discourse. As a constitutive part of a genre world, the generic dominants are always actively negotiated and interpreted among professional producers and among critics, interpreters, and scholars (Jensen 1998; Dornfeld 1998; Ytreberg 2001; Born 2002; Bruun 2010). The dominants underpin both the conscious and unconscious engagement with the genre within a specific genre world in which the preoccupation is as much with the definition and meaning of the genre and its ontological or commercial vigour as it is with how to achieve quality, autonomy, responsible work and pleasure within that specific genre-poetics (see Booth 1988; Eaton 2000). There are two distinct dominant inter-textual, relational and typical traits – techniques, devices, principles, construction – to which all the other traits of the guidebook are subsidiary, non-fictionality and didacticity. These fundamental constructional principles (poetics) imbue predominantly the scope, in both ethical and aesthetic sense, of the travel guidebook genre. With the cumulative effect of protracted producer exposure to genre-poetics, these dominants, with varying valence or potency, circulate in the genre world as craft and professional practices, quality assessment devices and ethical values, and even economic value that audiences recognise and are willing to pay for. Although the dominants are invariable as relatively stable structural features, they are not predetermined or fixed; rather, they are experienced, acted upon and manipulated by producers (and users) in practice within the institutions of cultural production, and they generate a system of action based on intentions, professional tendencies and calculative economising agencies. The dominant of non-fictionality or referentiality refers to a generic practice that must always be authenticated. It requires travel with an extra-linguistic component that is factual, real, and verifiable. The dominant of didacticity is a generic constructional principle that has a clear instructional and performative function or purpose. The dominants are historically the basic premises upon which the genre as an institution is erected and in accordance with which the verisimilitude of the genre is construed. In Todorov’s (1990:18) words, the dominants underpin the institution of the genre by profiling ‘models of writing’ for authors and ‘reading schemes’ for audiences. For instance, in travel writing, verisimilitude includes faithfulness, loyalty and pertinence to the inner rules of creation – ‘the rules of the game’ (Jauss 1982) – in this case, nonfictionality and didacticity. These two dominants have a bearing on the choice of specific constructional (or poetic) means or methods that will help create a ‘verisimilar’ effect of factuality and performativity for the reader-traveller. The display of factuality (objectivity, accuracy of travelrelated data and description) and the exercise of pedagogical power (guiding, steering, wayfinding) are central to a guidebook’s structure. 144 The dominants of the genre are expected to remain consistent across time and space. As I will show in Chapter 4, with the advent of the publishing industry and then the accelerated conglomeration of the industry, the dominants became institutionally stabilised and consolidated. The generic properties, once autonomous inter-textual features, were transformed into market property and value. Only within a genre world organised around dominants (rather than in the abstract) is it possible to determine what represents ‘good work’ without undermining the vitality of regulated genre-poetics based on durability, sameness, reiteration and recurrence. Revolving around the dominants, the genre world lays out the self-reflexive or self-theorising, yet not always readily conscious, standards against which the quality of work and the resulting texts (not the least of which is the producer’s autonomy) can be gauged. One can only determine the quality of work and of cultural products by examining the dominants that link diverse, often disparate texts under a taxonomic cluster through shared constructional methods, means and strategies. By pinpointing the genre dominants my aim is to present the autonomous logic of genres (in Kane’s sense, 1991). Industrial practices do not completely define genres. Genres themselves carry an autonomous animating force to influence and imbue industrial practices and an individual producer’s self-understanding. Cultural producers, both individual and institutional, actively and regularly engage with, mobilize, invoke and act upon, with or against the genre dominants. By following a producer’s engagement with the dominants, one will attend to the mediating power of genres, capable of influencing a producer’s actions and value judgments about what constitutes good or bad choices in the process of the genre-making, but also industrial and professional self-definition and self-understanding. Moreover, non-fictionality and didacticity in travel writing generate the foundation upon which the generic hierarchy (among travelogues, travel journalism and guidebooks) is erected. It would be misleading and dogmatic to draw strict boundaries between different sub-genres of travel writing because non-fictionality and didacticity work in unison through a complex interplay; any separation between them serves an analytical rather than a descriptive purpose. In other words, non-fictionality and didacticity are different incarnations of the same generic entity, and the distinction between the sub-genres is a matter of degree rather than a strict opposition. In the section that follows, I will home in separately on each of the two dominants and the constructional principles and practices they imply. I will draw on a variety of sources from both the humanities and social sciences to depict as clear and robust a picture as possible. I examine the dominants as both inter-textually and relationally, culturally and institutionally operative without attempting to extract the genre from its applied contexts of production and consumption. At the very end, I attempt to chart out the consequences and the implications of those guidebookspecific dominants on travel guidebook production. 145 Non-Fictionality: factuality or reference to actuality Many scholars, particularly within the humanistic disciplines, are wary of positively defining the generic bounds of travel writing. They describe travel writing principally with antipathy, aversion and even insults. Surprisingly, few scholars have defined travel writing with reference to the genre’s dominant aspects. Borm (2004), Behdad (1994) and Fussell (1982) attempted to generate a definition of travel writing that is grounded in non-fictionality as the overriding goal and purpose of the genre. All techniques, styles and constructions in travel writing are subordinate to non-fiction, which connotes accuracy, objectivity and factuality. Non-fictionality is the governing principle that unifies the field of travel writing and its various sub-genres: travelogues, travel journalism and guidebooks. The distinction between fiction and non-fiction is inherent in the hierarchy of these sub-genres and, as I will also show in Chapter 6, their markets within the field. Fussell’s study (1982) of British inter-war travel writing juxtaposed travel books (travelogues) and travel guidebooks (guides) with novels and romances. In contrast to fiction, which builds on invention and imagination, travel writing ‘arises from the speaker’s encounter with distant and unfamiliar data, and in which the narrative - … claims literal validity by constant reference to actuality’ (1982: 203, emphasis added). For Borm (2004), non-fictionality is sanctioned in the tacit but voluntary contract between audiences and producers. This contract elucidates the mutual agreement regarding the dominant, authoritative property of the genre: it presents a ‘journey or journeys that the reader supposes to have taken place in reality while assuming or presupposing that the author, narrator and principal character are but one or identical’ (p. 17). Behdad (1994) contends that ‘the informational nature’ of the genre of the travel guidebook involved historically a resolute shift from narration of past journeys (as in travelogues, for example) to an empirical description of actual journeys, that is a move from experience of past travels to information about actual trips that references future travels, and in such way interpellete the reader as a potential traveller. For Fussell, Behdad and Borm, non-fictionality or ‘the constant reference to actuality’, the act of referencing the mundane and practical specifications of travel through actual geographic space, is the dominant of travel writing. To warrant non-fictionality, travel guidebooks make an extensive use of mainly two devices: quasi-scientific authorial voice and non-linear mode of presentation. First, travel guidebooks dispense with the unitary and unifying voice of the author-traveller or the authorial ‘I’, in favour of all-knowledgeable and all-powerful presentational ‘coming as if from nowhere’ voice; and, by consequence, second, they present the empirical data, defined ‘by the accumulation of informative statements’ (Behdad 1994:43), in dispersed, fragmentary, tabulated, stringently organised manner, a mode of presentation that is not linear but successive, circular and pragmatically classified. According to Behdad (1994), the ‘informational nature’ of the genre is rendered most manifest in its ‘tendency to specify’ – that is, the overproduction of details, excessive use of charted information in the form of maps, tables, diagrams and itineraries (p. 45- [Document text truncated for crawler view.]