3. Art Worlds, Fields And Networks: New Ways Of
3.8 Looking at Networks as Mobile and Unequal
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69 Using network as analytical tool enables to take into account a mobile theorizing (Kesselring
& Volg, 2004), which means mobility as a useful category to understand actions and interactions of individuals in our society. That’s made by using the framework of the mobility approach, theorized by John Urry (2000, 2005) that “understands social networks as mobile and performed, having to be practiced to be meaningful as well as durable” (Urry et. al., 2005, p. 3).
For Urry (2000) “mobile sociology” is meant at overcoming the way society has been understood as a “uniform surface” failing to understand the intersections that exist between different layers and the individual trajectories of people. According to Urry:
There are crucial flows of people within, but especially beyond, the territory of each society, and these flows relate to many different desires, for work, housing, leisure, religion, family relationships, criminal gain, asylum seeking and so on (2000, p.186).
In the mobility approach, the importance is not given to number of links each individual has (as in SNA), but “rather ‘meetingness’ – talking, writing, emailing, travelling and visiting – is crucial to the nature of networks” (Urry et al, 2006, p.28).
This approach emphasizes how all networks are highly dependent upon intermittent meetings and ‘meetingness’ is crucial element for understanding people’s networks.
Central to networks are the forms and character of the meetings and hence of travel in order both to establish and to nourish links or at least temporally cement them. Instead of focusing upon the formal structures of the networks themselves, this mobility approach analyses the embodied making of networks, performances and practices of networking. Social networks come to life and are sustained through various practices of networking through email, forwarding messages, texting, sharing gossip, performing meetings, making two-minutes bumping-into-people-conversations, attending conferences, cruising at receptions, chatting over a coffee, meeting up for a drink and spending many hours on trains or on the road or in the air to meet up, with business partners, clients, and displaced friends, family members, workmates and partner. (Urry et al, 2006, p.29, my emphasis)
This perspective is not interested at the network structure but rather at network practices, and at how, in a network society, people are continuously engaged in establishing and maintaining social ties. This idea has several implication both from a methodological and theoretical (Urry, & Buscher, 2009) and point of view, which enables to distance this approach not only from SNA but even from the traditional approaches to networks.
70 Firstly we can argue that, because of the importance given to practices of networking and not to the networks themselves, ethnographic research17 can be perfectly used to analyze
“networking as an accomplishment and practice, of building and maintaining social ties in mobile ‘network societies’” (Urry et al. 2006, p.29).
The authors present several case studies which suggest the importance of looking at network practices and at the ways of managing relationships through communication and transport technologies, as well as through face-to-face networking.
Secondly the emphasis given upon the mobile nature of network practices implies to distance this approach from the traditional theorization of the network society that we can find in the work of Manuel Castells (1996, 2000). As Urry (2003) mentions:
Although contemporary social-physical phenomena are undeniably networked, they should not be viewed merely as networks. Castell’s notion of ‘network society’ does not capture the dynamic properties of global processes (Urry, 2003, p.15).
According to Urry (2003), studying networks in terms of network structures provides an abstract and static vision of society which doesn’t allow to understand the micro dynamics of social relationships. Network needs instead to be understood associating the category of network to the ones of scapes and flows understood as “networks of machines, technologies, organizations, texts and actors that constitute various interconnected nodes along which the flows can be relayed (Urry, 2000, p.35). In this way, Urry’s approach overcomes Castells’ s network structure, looking instead at the continue and intermittent dynamic movement of social relationships.
On the contrary, Castells’s focused among macro processes applies a radical approach to network as a meta structure where networks pervade society and become foundational unit to understand society, but it lacks to understand people’s everyday practices.
Besides in contrast to Castells’s network structure approach, the perspective of van Dijk (1999) proposes a moderate approach to the study of network in which the basic social units
17 I will explain more in depth the methodology used in the methodology chapter. For now I just want to point out that the analysis of the network practices is made by using a qualitative methodology particularly by using participant observation in order to analyze networking practices during concerts, by using semi-structured interviews in order to analyze the life trajectories of my respondents and the ways they establish and maintain social ties and finally by asking my interviewees to draw their network of contacts. This is an alternative methodology to the one applied in SNA which better enables to investigate networking as a practices rather than network structures.
71 are individuals, groups and society and the networks shape the organization, facilities, connections (and separations) between these social units and not.
Even a totally mediated society where all relations are fully realized by, and substantiated in, media networks, where social and media networks equal each other, would still be based on bodies, minds, rules and resources of all kinds (Van Dijk, 1999, p. 131).
Van Dijk (1999) has a psycho-sociological perspective, and emphasizes the role of individuals in the network, which is the framework that we need here in order to better conceptualize social interactions.
From the micro point of view, Van Dijk (1999) notes that the network organization of social life is the counterpart of a trend towards personalization and individualization. Van Dijk, in postulating network individualization, allows to point out how networks are constituted by power relations and by tensions existing between individualist-competitive and cooperative forces.
Regarding the issue of social equity, van Dijk (1999) points out that networks have different structure and organization characteristics than the traditional hierarchical-organizations.
However van Dijk (1999) seeks to oppose his position to the common understanding of networks that suggests that networks do not possess a center of power and have a high level of equality between the nodes and connections. This morphology of the network is in fact in contrast to the commonsense view social networks as non-hierarchical and flat structures:
networks contain in fact isolated clusters and nodes, and a division between those who can or cannot be part of the network, who is included and excluded. For van Dijk (1999) networks increase rather than decrease social inequalities, competiveness and individualism.
This point enables to understand another characteristic which is crucial to the understanding of network practices, namely how network theorization has always been used interlinked to the tension existing between cooperative and competitive practices, equality and inequality, and that even though network is understood as flat there are in fact power relations and struggles for the position within the network. In other words, this debate enables to connect both the struggle of forces in Bourdieu and the collaboration of Becker. If in Bourdieu struggles for legitimization within the field are crucial, in Becker art worlds are supported by coordination and cooperation among its members. Competition and collaboration are understood here as complementary in the sense that even though networks have flat structures and favor networking and cooperative activities, exactly because of the absence of
72 hierarchies, these tend to be created in the struggle for positions and symbolic legitimization is possible through the recognition given by the others. Using the notion of network enables to take into account these tensions which imply a new reconfiguration of power relations, new definition of space, of distance, and of “meetingness”. Networks live in tension between mediated and face to face interactions, mobility and immobility, equality and inequality, competition and cooperation.
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Conclusion
In the previous chapter I have reviewed the music scene perspective suggesting the need of providing a multi-layered analysis which could at the same time analyze the interconnected, mediated and mobile nature of music practices, the social discourses which are influenced and influence actions and interactions and finally go beyond them, considering political, economic, technological influences and the power relations that can affect the scene members.
My critics to the scene perspective were directed as follows: the music scene perspective is self-referential in the sense that it has understood music affiliations as enclosing and not encapsulating the complexities of activities taking place and it has not allowed to consider broader issues that were debated outside of popular music studies, especially in the sociology of culture and in media and communications studies.
For this reason, in this chapter I have drawn my attention upon other frameworks, particularly Becker’s (1982) art world, and Bourdieu’s (1993) field which have been highly influential in the understanding of cultural production, even from two completely different perspectives. I have emphasized how these two different perspectives can allow to overcome some of the problems of the music scene debate.
Particularly Becker is useful at a micro level of analysis for its emphasis upon cooperation and conventions, which are much more accurately analyzed than in the music scene perspectives. Becker’s application of the sociology of organization to the study of practices of production of art works is very useful for better understanding how music activities need to be related to dynamics of music production. Besides Becker’s symbolic interactionist perspective enables to explain how actions and interactions need to be understood with the social discourses gravitating around them.
Bourdieu instead enables to understand how there is symbolic legitimization that people struggle for to achieve a position within the field of cultural production. In Bourdieu the struggle among the agents has much more a symbolical role of being legitimized within the field than a practical mean in the creation of a work of art in Becker’s perspective.
Besides I have tried to suggest that Bourdieu’s critics to the descriptive notion of art world enables us to explain how even in the scene perspective we can find the same tautological level of definition and analysis which doesn’t help in understanding music practices, but rather music scene perspective is flattened in its common sense understanding and in the subjective representations of its members.
74 For this reason, a multi-layered model should be able to consider the power relations that enable and constrain actors in the scene, and the interconnectedness of the music scene with a political, economic and technological dimensions.
I have taken here into account the interesting adoptions of art world and field in sociology of music: Finnegan (1989) in her idea of pathways, which enable to understand how individual trajectories cannot be encapsulated within musical worlds; Kruse (2003) in her theorization which grounds music formations to local and trans-local networks and in conjuncture to political, economic, social and cultural relations; and finally Webb’s (2007) model which is aimed at combining the abstract level of the field with the notion of milieu which is used a framework for researching networks of people and music cultures.
I have suggested the usefulness particularly of Kruse and Webb which consider in their adoptions of Bourdieu’s notion of field there is a need to have multi-layered theorization which enables to include the abstract level of the field together with the considerations of the networked nature of individual practices.
The notion of network is here used because it enables to understand how actions and interactions of the scene members need to be understood as mobile and intertwined with mediated communication. This is a issue that music scene, art world, and field have not addressed. Particularly, I have mentioned that distinction between local, trans-local and virtual music scenes (Peterson & Bennett, 2004) don’t enable to explain mobile and mediated practices among scene members while the notion of network, in its mobile theorization by Urry (2000, 2005), seeks to take into account how networked relationships are enacted by distance and mediated interactions which make encountering, visiting and meeting crucial in networks. The interconnected, mediated and mobile nature of actions and interactions is crucial for its understanding. And the notion of network complements the music scene perspective because it enables to transcend the local dimension of the scene to include mobile and mediated music activities. Besides this interconnectedness needs to be understood not only at the micro level of analysis of individual practices but rather even in its interdependence to the social environment.
In the next chapter I will try to analyze the importance that notion of independence can play in understanding has played in the music scene perspective and how we can re-conceptualize it drawing on he assumptions made in this chapter.
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