ABSTRACT
Discussions of how artistic practice is organized and coordinated have frequently revolved around notions of “codes” (Pierre Bourdieu) or “conventions” (Howard Becker). The appeal of codes and conventions for sociological theorizing is clear. As Becker (1982: 30) states, the notion of conventions provides a point of contact between the humanities and sociology, in that it is interchangeable with sociological ideas such as rules, norms, shared understandings, and customs. These concepts are also valuable because they help us to understand the mechanisms that orient collective action, institutional stability, and social patterns of production and consumption in artistic fields and worlds. As a heuristic device, however, an examination of codes or conventions may focus the sociological gaze on the rules of social action rather than on actual practices and negotiations as they unfold in space and time. These heuristic generalizations perform the role of conceptualizing “context” (cf. Garfinkel 1984[1967]), acting like an invisible hand in the sociologist’s understanding of the mutual intelligibility of action. Conventions are in some ways a placeholder or “grey box” (Saferstein 2007) for sociology, a way to understand what is happening without closely paying attention to what is really going on at a particular moment or with a particular object. As Latour (2005) repeatedly observes in his formulation of actor–network theory, “social context” or “the social” plays the same role as “ether” in turn-of-the-century physics; it leads sociologists to deduce why actors act in certain ways by assuming their possession of a particular kind of knowledge and orientation to the assumed “social,” rather than looking closely at the details of action to understand what makes them act and what unintended consequences this action may have.
