We should not forget technicians: towards a study of technical intermediaries in art worlds

In the analysis of artistic production processes, technical craft workers, such as sound engineers, stagehands, copy editors, film editors, light technicians, are rather ignored by sociological studies, most works focusing either on artists or on audiences. This might be explained by what Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1977) calls the « charismatic ideology of the creator » : gazes, even the sociological one, tend to concentrate on who is designed « creator », leaving all the things « creating the creator » in the shadow. Even Howard Becker (1984) was considering technicians as « support personnel », included in art worlds as a « residual category, designed to hold whatever the other categories do not make an easy place for » (1984 : 2). The recent stream of studies around « cultural intermediaries » could have opened the door to the study of technicians. But the concept is never used in a way that could describe their activities, both in theoretical texts and in empirical studies. However, isolated studies of technicians in art worlds (Kealy, 1979, Le Guern, 2004, Kuipers, 2015, Hennion, 1987) show that focusing on technicians is a chance to deepen the knowledge of social dynamics of cultural production, due to their critical position in the production nexus. We will show it by first defining the activity of technicians in art worlds. We will then propose the concept of « technical intermediaries » that will make a room for technicians in the sociological literature about art worlds. We will finally give exemples of results that studying technicians in arts worlds can lead to.