At the intersection of two antagonistic theories

The author checks his corpus against two statistical tools: the factorial analysis of correspondences and the structural analysis of social relationships, which he integrates within a double theoretical context, a priori paradoxical, but which he manages to bring together. He in effect integrates the dynamic and the influence of social networks and the integration of authors into these networks (a theory which traditionally leans on structural analysis) into Bourdieu’s notion of the field (which uses factorial analysis more, and which ends by projecting onto the same plane of a graph the pre-established characters of the people observed, and where the different positions inter-determine themselves). Yet, in caricaturing, we could say that the first theory comes under a form of individualisation and rational interactions between people, whilst the second considers a social field as a holistic, more determinist, framework, responding to a series of codes which is specific to it and which conditions the position of a human being within society. ‘In reality, literature is a superb subject for sociology, precisely because these major structuring tensions between the individualist or interactionist current and the holistic or determinist current are encountered in this subject. There is a very strong process of individualisation in literature whilst each author is inscribed within a context specific to him or herself. Literature raises questions about to what extent it favours the two interpretations of the social following the observed indicators. There is thus a happy medium to be flushed out to try to understand how the Author, the Romantic figure of the individual genius, manages to negotiate his or her position in a writing collective.’ Björn-Olav Dozo finds this negotiation in the networks within which the writers are integrated. And the study has enabled the conclusion, amongst others, that it is quasi impossible for an author to obtain a symbolic recognition if he or she isn’t inserted within the right networks. ‘Certain researchers certainly had this intuition, but nothing demonstrated it objectively.’

Within the theory of fields, the factorial analysis enables the establishment of objective relationships (resemblance through belonging to the same category, for example place of birth or the studies carried out) between different agents, whilst the analysis of networks mobilises the structural analysis of social relationships, which leans on effective relationships (exchanges, interaction, frequenting the same sites, letters or telephone calls). The mechanism which articulated the author’s thought processes was to consider the inscription of these tools in their traditional theoretical framework, and to disrupt habits. He thus used the analysis of social relationships within the theory of fields. ‘What it all came down was not distorting either the field or the tool, and to determine to what extent it was possible to use one or the other. And it seemed to me that in restricting the use of the structural analysis of networks to effective relationships between writers and defining these relationships in concrete terms, it became possible to articulate these relationships with the social profile of the writers, which is easily integrated into the theory of fields. The position within the relationships thus became a form the agent’s attributes, in the same way as other variables such as professions and studies. And nothing prevented me, it seems, using these formal tools linked to the analysis of networks to subsequently come back into an interpretative framework linked to the theory of fields.’