The fields of cultural production offer those who are engaged with them a space of possibilities (possibles) which tends to orient their research by defining the universe of problems, of references, of intellectual landmarks (often constituted by the names of guiding figures), and of “isms”, in short a whole system of coordinates which must be kept in mind – which is not to say in consciousness – in order to play the game. This is what marks the difference between, for example, professionals and amateurs, or, to speak the language of painting, “naifs,” such as the customs officer Rousseau, and a “painter object” who is constituted as a painter by the field. This space of possibilities is what makes the producers of a given epoch at once situated, dated (the problematic is the historical outcome of the field's specific history), and relatively autonomous with respect to the direct determinations of the economic and social environments. Thus, for example, in order to understand the choices made by contemporary directors, one cannot be content to relate them to the economic and social conditions affecting the theater, or to the availability of grants or conditions at the box-office, or even to the expectations of the public; one must refer to the entire history of stage direction since the 1880s, in the course of which there arose the universe of points under discussion, of those constitutive elements of the theater on which any director worthy of the name must take a position.