French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes the global social space as a field with both field of forces and field of struggles present. Bourdieu (1998) notes that as a field of forces, its necessity is imposed on agents who are engaged in it whereas agents, with differentiated means and ends according to their position in the structure of the field of forces, confront each other within field of struggles. I found Bourdieu’s logic of fields very intriguing and the study of Bourdieu’s fields evokes memories of a film I watched and enjoyed some couple years ago. It is German filmmaker Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire (1987). I would like to use this film – a form of material culture – as a lens to explore field, its complexity and multiplicity, and how material culture acts as a medium in delivering the notion of field.
Wings of Desire is about invisible, immortal angels who move through the divided city of Berlin, watching, listening, and comparing notes. The angels populate Berlin, listen to the thoughts of human inhabitants from atop and at times descend to comfort the distressed. Wings of Desire is a beautifully portrayed film in which it carries various messages, portrays the city of Berlin in a particular time period that swayed between realities and imaginations, and grants the audience the freedom of understanding and interpreting the film through different time-space lenses.
Taking this freedom, at the time when I studied Bourdieu and his theories the images of angels and Berlin kept coming back to me. I was thrilled to learn that by recapturing the film with Bourdieu’s notion of field, I was able to gain a deeper—or rather new—perspective on the vastness of Bourdieu’s logics and concepts. Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992) says that to think in terms of field is to think relationally and that what exist in the social world are relations, not interactions between agents. In the film, the guardian angels and the human inhabitants, each represent a field respectively, is in this relational relation. Angels can see, hear, and touch humans but they cannot interact with human beings. Humans, on the other hand, cannot see nor interact with but can feel the presence of angels. This further shows that field, as Bourdieu stresses, follows regularities that are not explicit and codified.
Power and capital play critical roles in understanding the structure of the field. Species of capital and the field coexist in that the value of the capital hinges on the existence of a field whereas capital confers a power over the field. In the angel field, species of capital that is efficacious includes, for example, immortality and the freewill to fly. In the human beings field, the species of capital that allow humans to wield a power and to exist in such field are those of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital. Further, it is also through this different species of capital found across the various field that brings struggles to participants in a field. Power is empowered by species of capital; however, with the volume and structure of capital engaging in a constant dynamic, i.e. an increase or decrease in the total volume of capital and/or a change in capital composition, conflict and competition emerged which brings upon struggles. These struggles, through the eyes of the angels in the film, are intensely present in the field of human the angels are watching. Through angels’ notes and accounts one can see how force and struggles coexist in a field and it is this relation of force and struggles that induces transformations and changes.
These dynamics found in field is further elevated by Bourdieu when he proposes the concept of dynamic borders. Bourdieu explains that every field also constitutes a potentially open space of play with dynamic borders and these are, in addition to granting a field the fluid nature, the stake of struggles within the field itself (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Damiel, one of the guardian angels, falls in love with the trapeze artist. He goes night after night to the circus where she performs above the centre ring and he follows and listens to her doubts and vulnerability. When Damiel decides to descend into time, he is at this dynamic border of his field, struggling and struggled, and eventually gains the power to enter a different field.
Note that Bourdieu often uses the term “the feel for the game” when he describes habitus. Though not discussed together when Bourdieu uses the analogy of a “game” to depict his understanding of field, one can see the relational force that bounds the two together. For Damiel the angel, he posses this habitus, this feel for the game, that allows him to navigate in a specific field; however, when the desire to feel the game of a different field grows and comes into play with the relations of force in his field, Damiel finds ways to gain the “admission fee”, as Bourdieu and Wacquant described, to the human being field.
Humans feel. Damiel the angel wants to be able to touch, smell and be a part of things. Damiel wants to feel. He asks Cassiel, the other angel, how it would feel to feel—to be able to feed a cat, or get ink from a newspaper on your fingers. What makes being human beings appealing – the tangible and intangible complexity of humanity – is perhaps the exact rationale when Bourdieu states that field, as complex as it can be, promotes a mode of construction that has to be rethought anew every time.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1998) “Appendix. Social Space and Field of Power” in Practical Reason in the Theory of Action. Malden MA: Polity. 31-34.
Bourdieu, p. (1990) “Structures, habitus, practices” in P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice. Standford, CA: Stanford University Press. 52-79.
Bourdieu, P., L.J.D. Wacquant (1992). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.