Dialectics of culture and the making of literary fields "Technological Determinism"Sociocultural Approach

Abstract

When Raymond Williams explain the British society from the perspective of class system, he discovered that defining aggregations and social classes solely from a material perspective leads inevitably to avoid the social realities. This is why; he started crystallizing an analysis of class or group from cultural data, on the basis of constituting a theory in cultural and symbolic representations. In this area, Raymond Williams went beyond the closed Marxist analysis, he gave a chance for many intellectuals, who came after him, to approach the social class, and to focus either on seeing the world the way Lucien Goldmann does, or to focus on symbolic capital the way Pierre Bourdieu does. From this perspective, the novel did not become a mechanical reflection for the birth of the bourgeois class in capitalist society, but it became a representation of conflicts between lobbyist groups against oppressed groups within a society full of struggle of symbolic capital. And the evidence for that is what Edward Said demonstrated saying that the novel colluded with the Empire according to an expansionary movement that colonies of the 19th century had witnessed. In this article, we will try to enrich the cultural studies by including the most important ideas produced by the cultural sociology from Williams and Bakhtin, and also the concepts laid by Pierre Bourdieu in his book “the rules of art” such as the notion of field and the notion of „Habitus‟