We tend to view recognition as a natural consequence: talent exists, it is noticed sooner or later, and recognition follows behind like someone picking up something that was already there. This is a comforting narrative and almost always false. Recognition is not picked up: it is manufactured, through specific mechanisms that are worth understanding, especially if one—as is my case—dedicates part of their work to establishing a position within a field.

The sociologist Nathalie Heinich has studied these mechanisms with precision. Prizes, for instance, do not merely signal a pre-existing value: they produce recognition, they manufacture esteem, and they do so under very specific tensions—the perceived fairness of the selection, the envy of those who do not win, the interdependence between the awarded and the awarder. Furthermore, Heinich coined a concept particularly useful for understanding the present: the capital of visibility, that asymmetry whereby a few are known by multitudes whom they do not know. This capital generates its own media elite, which does not necessarily coincide with the one that would be recognised by peers or institutions.

Because that is the key issue: recognition is not singular, it is plural, and it does not always point in the same direction. It is advisable to distinguish at least three, even if the distinction is mine and not that of the authors upon whom I rely. There is peer recognition—those who do the same as you and know how to judge it, even if their judgement is also tinged with proximity and rivalry. There is institutional recognition—prizes, museums, juries, academies, everything that possesses the power to consecrate. And there is media visibility—the circulation of a name, an image, a face—which can operate entirely independently. One can be highly visible and little respected by peers; highly consecrated by institutions and almost invisible to the public; admired by those in the know and unknown to everyone else. Confusing these three planes—mistaking visibility for value, or a prize for truth—is one of the most common errors in the cultural field, and one of the most profitable for those who know how to exploit it.

The sociology of consecration adds a nuance that deflates any naivety: there is no single agent that decides the value of something. Recognition is produced through the combination of evaluators, institutions, prizes, criticism, rankings, prior status, networks, and narratives. It is a distributed process, involving many hands, and for that very reason, it is manipulable at many points. Knowing this does not make one cynical; it makes one lucid.

I write this without placing myself outside the process. My work includes, explicitly, building a position as a reference, occupying a recognisable place in a field. I know these mechanisms because I use them, not because I observe them from a position of supposed purity. And precisely for that reason, I find it honest to name their trap: the permanent temptation to confuse being seen with deserving to be seen, to mistake the metric—the reach, the mention, the prize—for the thing itself. It is a temptation, not a sin; the problem is not seeking recognition, which is legitimate and even necessary, but forgetting that recognition and value are two distinct planes that sometimes coincide and sometimes do not.

This is where this connects with something I am working on in my research, in part alongside Adolfo Cortés García in an essay currently in preparation. Recognition does not create the value of a work; it makes it affirmable, defensible, public. A work can genuinely reorganise the way we look at something—producing what I call surplus in other texts—without any spotlight finding it; and a work can accumulate spotlights, prizes, and mentions without reorganising anything at all. The correspondence between recognition and value is not guaranteed. It is, rather, the fortunate exception.

And therein lies what I find illuminating, rather than defeatist. Knowing how a reputation is manufactured does not condemn us to cynicism: it frees us from two forms of servitude. It frees us from begging for the spotlight as if it were proof of our worth, and it frees us from disparaging what the spotlight does not illuminate. It allows one to do the work for what the work reorganises, to seek recognition without confusing it with the work itself, and to reserve admiration for what deserves it even if no one else is watching. Which is usually, incidentally, where the most interesting things occur.

On open conversation

This text is part of my sub-series Art and Society, which examines with honesty, and from within, the real conditions of cultural work; here, how vocation is used to cheapen the work of those who possess it, and whom it leaves out. If anyone wishes to intervene from the sociology of work, the economics of culture, or the labour organisation of the sector, the notebook remains open.

Sources

Heinich, Nathalie. “The Sociology of Vocational Prizes: Recognition as Esteem”. Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 5 (2009): 85-107.

Heinich, Nathalie. De la visibilité: excellence et singularité en régime médiatique. Gallimard, 2012.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Columbia University Press, 1993.

Lizé, Wenceslas. “Cultural consecration and legitimation — Modes, agents and processes”. Poetics 59 (2016): 1-4.