Or to quote Newton (1676), paraphrasing Bernard of Chartres (John of Salisbury 1159)

“If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants#Attribution_and_meaning

It’s an interesting and musical topic, for sure – thanks to Tim and Allan for choosing it – but I recoiled immediately at the passage of prose included, by McIntyre. I didn’t understand it at first, a bad sign. Here’s how I would edit it if submitted by an undergraduate: my edits and comments are parentheses here; bold would be clearer. I also enclose a passage that says much the same, in my view, but more elegantly.

Best, Dai.

McIntyre’s passage with my comments and edits:

[The] possibility of [creative] action occurs within, or is produced in (is there a distinction between ‘occurs within’ and ‘is produced in’?), a field of works. The field of works is a related concept (concept related?) to the domain of knowledge in as much as it (‘it’ dangles: does it refer to ‘the field of works’ or to ‘the domain of knowledge’?) is the accumulated cultural work done to this time (‘done to this time’ is terrible!) in a particular field. For contemporary Western popular music (well, yes, three qualifying adjectives conspire to suggest that he doesn’t really know what he means!), it is the heritage of collected songs and recordings accumulated over the history of the domain of (delete ‘the domain of’?) popular music. According to Toynbee (2000), it (no idea what ‘it’ refers to by this point) also includes techniques and codes of production. For Bourdieu (1996), the ‘‘heritage accumulated by collective (what does ‘collective’ mean here?) work presents itself to each agent a space for possibles (‘possibles’? possible whats?), that is as an ensemble of probable constraints which are (‘is’ rather than ‘are’? And how does something ‘probable’ lead directly to something? Wouldn’t something ‘probable’ be ‘likely to’ lead to something?) the condition and the counterpart of a set of possible uses’’ (p. 235). (I suppose it might be the translation’s fault that Bourdieu’s sentence is so bad. Of course, the laboured use of ‘domain’ and ‘field’ is his fault.) The structure of the field of works thus provides the ground, the antecedent conditions, from which other works spring. This (banal?!) proposition works as an attempt to (delete ‘works as an attempt to’?) resolve the agency–structure dichotomy (I dislike the hyphenated phrase as an attempt to contain a dichotomy) as cultural production (a poor ‘as’ there, dangling between meaning ‘since’ and ‘solve…as a form of’. He actually means ‘since’.), from this perspective, comes about through practice that is both enabled and constrained by the structures of knowledge the creative agent engages with.

T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1917) (available on Wikipedia):

‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.’