About the translation of “A conservative revolution in publishing”, by Pierre Bourdieu

Abstract

Books, being both economic and symbolic objects, are at the same time commodities and concentrates of meaning; this means that publishers too are two-sided figures, doomed to reconciling art and money, love of literature and the profit motive, through strategies situated somewhere between these two extremes, between cynical submissiveness to commercial considerations and heroic or mad indifference to financial dictates. This article combats the illusion that the visible « decision-making » spheres (publishers, referees, readers, person in charge of a series) are independent, and points to the economic and social factors determining publishing strategies. Multiple correlation analysis, applied to a study of 61 publishers of Frenchlanguage and translated literature published between July 1995 and July 1996, brings out the structure of the publishing field. On the basis of the total amount of capital assets, an opposition is found between the longstanding, major firms that cumulate capital of all sorts, economic, and commercial as well as symbolic, the paradigm of which is represented by Gallimard, and small, recent firms who are still in the initial accumulation phase, and are practically devoid of every kind of capital, although they do possess some symbolic capital in the form of the esteem and admiration they win from a handful of « discoverers », critics and avant-garde writers, enlightened bookshop owners and informed readers. The second factor differentiates publishing houses on the basis of the structure of their capital, which is to say according to the relative weight of their financial capital (as well as their commercial strength) and of their symbolic capital, derived from their recent past or from their present activity (as opposed to capital accumulated since their beginnings, measured by the rating). The third line of analysis distinguishes between those who publish few if any translations, and when they do, usually from rare, little-spoken languages, and those who, under constraint from the market, publish a great many translations, mostly from the English, which is to say a commercial literature tailored to sell.