Tuesday 29 April 2014

(daily double!) Unwinding the trade between economic and cultural capital

God I love being back on Blogger, it's almost better than the first time around because I used to collect ideas for posts, craft them in my head etc (content!!!), now I just feel in the mood for a bit of a blog and I just open the spigot, it's lovely. I mean I'll try to keep it readable! But less pressure to polish it is great, really great. My mind still feels open, with a natural irregular shape, like a heritage English apple.

When I was a proper Twitter and Facebook user, broadcasting my life, offering up tasty moments and thoughts to no-one in particular, my mind was reformatted and I became like a journalist covering my own life, living became a form of work. I quit both in a drunken impulse during the Day of the Broom Twats and I swear my head, my peripheral vision, my consciousness immediately felt physically different, like it had expanded from some kind of vice. I felt like I had got back in touch with my 19-year-old self, not that there's anything particularly special or true about that guy, but I liked feeling reconnected to some sense of continuity. Anyway, Blogger! I was worried I might go back to journalist mode if I started blogging again but so far I'm staying loose.



(haven't totally forgot rules of content, breaking it up with some visuals!!)

I read a lot of Pierre Bourdieu during my MA. He developed the notion of cultural capital. He redefines it a few times over his career, but in Distinction,  his seminal work, he defines it as a mix of a) exposure to / ownership of cultural artefacts, b) a propensity to detect or ascertain distinctions between high (legitimate) and low culture and c) a propensity to produce distinctions between high and low culture.

This propensity to produce distinctions is what is supposed to make the "capital" metaphor work - that once your cooler older brother teaches you that the Velvets are better than the Monkees, you then pick up a sort of knack that allows you to pronounce authoritatively on new stuff. You are not discerning essential distinctions between good/bad or high/low, you are producing what are actually arbitrary distinctions in order to further your own social goals. This is sort of like how capital works, in a "rich-get-richer" kind of way. Cultural capital begets cultural capital. The metaphor doesn't stand up to too much scrutiny, but it's a good "intervention", or certainly was in 1970s France - he was trying to show that the "legitimate" culture of opera blah blah blah was a just a tool for socioeconomic elites to shore up their own positions.

Picture of Bourdieu:



(He was a scholarship boy from the sticks, a Marxist meritocrat, who was utterly enraged that his posh classmates seemed to "do better" than him in intangible, slippery ways, even though he got better marks. Taste seemed like a weapon.)

(It might seem fucking obvious that people use cultural taste as a social strategy, but it wasn't then, at least in 1970s France.)

(Some people think post-modernism made Bourdieu redundant just after he was published - 1979 in French, 1984 in English. Stephen Fry's asinine quote about it being OK to like opera and darts gets quoted a lot. But obviously these postmodern taste collages of high/low are still very carefully curated. There is still "good" low culture.) 

Um so where was I? Yes - in N+1's book What was the hipster? one of the writers attempts a sort of Bourdieusian analysis of the hipster, running along the lines of: some graduates choose to pursue economic capital and become boring bankers, while some choose to build up stocks of cultural capital, taking low-paid jobs at social enterprises or what have you and living in gentrifying but still edgy neighbourhoods.

The idea, though, is that cultural and economic capital can be exchanged. The banker can buy his/her way into being a weekend hipster (the moustache was an attempted barrier against such 'weekenders', Movember smashed it down), while the people with the cultural savvy to enjoy living in 2005 New Cross or 1995 Shoreditch etc can covert this to economic capital through home ownership or starting higher-end, "safe-hipster" businesses.

(Stefan has a good thing on this - if you make a lot of money in London you probably don't have a great deal of time to spend figuring out what's cool or taking risks on finding good new things, so you end up just doing the pre-packaged, Time Out-approved overpriced version)

Quick vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opf1D2Eut60




But as exchange markets go, it's dicey and prone to bouts of illiquidity. To skip to the conclusion, cultural capital is a fucking terrible bet. There are loads of opportunities to convert economic capital to cultural capital but very few opportunities to convert the other way. And cultural capital perishes - this is kind of where the whole "capital" metaphor breaks down. It requires constant work (as Bourdieu says, the production of distinctions) to continue to distinguish yourself from the boring rich, to convince them you have access to something they don't. Eventually they just stop indulging you, and you're left trying harder and harder to carve out some interesting pose that makes up for your zero bucks. Living abroad works for a bit, that's low hanging fruit. What next? How do you back out of that trade in a dignified way?



5 comments:

  1. This is tremendous. You've already surpassed your TUPNews peak.

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  2. thanks man! You'd love Bourdieu.

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  3. Yeah, I've only come to him indirectly. "Let's Talk About Love" is full of his influence (and terrific). http://www.amazon.co.uk/Celine-Dions-Lets-Talk-About-ebook/dp/B001O2S9QU/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398867505&sr=1-1&keywords=celine+dion+let%27s+talk+about+love

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  4. Enjoying your return to blogging tremendously. Just catching up after being ill. Love that you haven't linked it to twitter.

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    1. Cheers, and I encourage you not to automatically "follow" this blog - forget it exists, then remember and "physically" check it!!

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