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Over-rationalizing a general movement in the sociology of art, which is undoubtedly more "Brownian" and less clearly oriented in reality, we will organize the display of recent evolutions in the social studies of arts around the notion of mediation. If the concept remains ambiguous, it clearly points out a strong new trend shared by very diverse approaches: a focus on objects and devices, on local situations, on reflexive and politically critical analyses of the social and artistic values, all this requiring to pay more attention to the materiality of intermediaries, to acknowledge their opacity regarding social determinations or aesthetic effects, to analyse the active role they play in the definition of art works and tastes.

Over-rationalizing a general movement in the sociology of art, which is undoubtedly more "Brownian" and less clearly oriented in reality, we will organize the display of recent evolutions in the social studies of arts around the notion of mediation. If the concept remains ambiguous, it clearly points out a strong new trend shared by very diverse approaches: a focus on objects and devices, on local situations, on reflexive and politically critical analyses of the social and artistic values, all this requiring to pay more attention to the materiality of intermediaries, to acknowledge their opacity regarding social determinations or aesthetic effects, to analyse the active role they play in the definition of art works and tastes.

This article reviews sociology's uneasy engagement with creativity, using the lens of recent critiques of Bourdieusian art sociology and the call for a more nuanced understanding of the agency of art objects and trajectories of artistic production. I develop and apply an anti-humanist ontology to assert that creativity is profoundly sociologically interesting, and key to the production of human culture, from science and technology to the arts to social forms and institutions. Analysis of auto-ethnographic data on the production of a painting of Australian mallée woodland establishes three propositions for an anti-humanist sociology of creativity: that creative production is part of an open-ended flow of affect between assembled human and non-human elements; that affective flows produce creative capacities to act, feel and desire in bodies; and that products of creativity such as artworks are themselves affects that themselves contribute to the production of social life, the world and human history.

Bourdieu describes the structure of society as a result of class conflicts and status competition. Art in general, and the literary field in particular, is interpreted as a differentiated social field that is autonomous in the sense that it follows its own logic - the competition for cultural legitimation. What literature has in common with other social systems is the stratification of its internal structure into a hierarchical arrangement. Thus the literary field can be described as a horizontally differentiated system that is, however, vertically differentiated internally. The concern of the paper is to test Bourdieu's theoretical considerations empirically. Data for the analysis and interpretation are based on interviews of Cologne writers. The data are analysed with the aid of blockmodel and correspondence analysis. As far as the data allows us to operationalise the thesis that the literary field is an autonomous differentiated system, Bourdieu's thesis is confirmed. The internal structure can be described more precisely: the first line of demarcation is, in fact, the difference that Bourdieu described between legitimate and illegitimate art: high-culture literature and low-culture literature are the two poles of the literary field. The realm of the legitimate literature is further differentiated into three blocks (elite, junior elite, periphery). The elite and the periphery differ in terms of the different degrees of success. The junior elite occupies an intermediate place. Bourdieu's sociology of literature is supported by the empirical material at hand.

Zangwill's recent article offers a provocative and compelling account of the alleged deficiencies of the sociology of art. However, his main targets—christened, respectively, `production and skepticism' and `consumption skepticism'—are, in fact, only decontextualised and one-sided caricatures of the leading theories in this area. Zangwill has misrepresented some of the discipline's leading theorists including Bourdieu, Eagleton, Pollock and Wolff. His own `aesthetic' explanation of artistic acts appears, at first glance, attractive, not least for its repudiation of radical sociological reductionism. But it turns out to be altogether too simplistic an alternative. Zangwill is a sociological `primitive' who understands adequately neither how society exists in the mind itself, nor, paradoxically, in artists' embodied sense of the right feel for the game. A less `enchanted' approach toartists' practices is required. This needs to stress both artists' role in the public sphere and also their specific interests in the artistic field.