The Restricted Autonomy of Journalism and Cinema

This text brings together reflections on how Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of autonomy, which he drew on in the context of his theory of fields, can be used in research on journalism and cinema. Journalism and cinema cannot easily be compared with pure specialist activities, but their essential traits fit the model and analysis that Bourdieu developed mainly on the basis of the French literary field. At the same time, these two universes seem to present less autonomy than the literary field, and unlike poetry, for example, they have continued to represent economic and political stakes. Finally, comparing the development of the two in France since the end of the nineteenth century shows that there have been rather long-term trends towards autonomization in both these social spaces. Over the past three or four decades, this movement has been characterized by dominant dynamics that, in certain regards, constitute a break with those trends.