FUN THREAD:

I’ve read this, he’s right (about the book, not the quality of my notes in the margin).

Here are some more thoughts about the alleged ‘slipperiness’ of ‘cultural capital’. The only ‘slipperiness’ emerges from it not meaning what many might want it to mean...

1/20 https://twitter.com/philbeadle/status/1278762223503126528

‘Beware of words’, said Bourdieu.

Words do not always do the work we need - or want - them to do. This is a real pain for sociologists because, even when we try to understand the world beyond words, words tend to mediate everything.

This is why sociology is proper hard. 2/20

...and so we invent terms that might, on the face of it, look a lot like metaphors. These words are, in fact, specialised terms intended to reflect the myriad complexities of social life as it actually exists - all the love, pain, struggle, suffering, and other abstract nouns.

These words are accompanied by a great deal of conceptual huffing and puffing.

This huffing and puffing and bluffing constitutes a vast portion of academic sociology and it is mostly ignored, with immense justification, by the sane and healthy. 4/20

Problems sometimes arise when sociological terms magically gain the attention of policymakers.

They are often presented as empty metaphors. Stripped of huff and puff, they are inflated with whatever alternative or contradictory thing anyone wants them to mean.

5/20

In technocratic hands, where everything looks a bit like a metric, ‘cultural capital’ is reanimated as !CULTURE SCORE!, measured by how many lines of Tennyson pupils can recite.

6/20

Things get very tricky when you try to pair pedagogic practices driven by disembodied and monistic understandings of human cognitive architecture, with the quasi-phenomenological ideas of an ethnologist who was literally a student of Merleau-Ponty and critical user of Heidegger.

Things become truly parodic when an Arnoldian definition of culture appears from nowhere.

In the service of knowledge, we arrive at a profound ontological mess.

Things get slippery. 8/20

In reality, ‘cultural capital’ is not an empty metaphor.

It refers to the internalised practical logic of ‘culture’, where cultural consumption is framed as a game with shifting stakes. It is underpinned by Bourdieu’s dispositional view of learning and social experience. 9

In much the same way a batsman plays a hook shot when a ball is pitch short, your reception of culture is pre-reflective. Like a blink or a flinch in response to a loud clap, your response to a symphony or painting - or even a sneeze - reveals dispositions formed early in life.10

These dispositions form the bedrock of social competency. This, in part, is a reflection of ‘embodied cultural capital’.

So, there are no ‘views from nowhere’ when it comes to culture. Any view you have is relational and embedded, deep, in your skin, altered by your upbringing.

What does that mean?

All capital - cultural, social, or economic - can only be understood in terms of its practical consequences i.e. how does it serve to separate some actors as symbolically inferior or superior to others.

Whose voices are legitimate, and whose are not? 12

That’s the ‘capital’ bit.

And, because the rules of the game are always shifting, ‘cultural capital’ is not a static object that can be distributed equally to all pupils at once. That’d ignore the fact that there’s a class-based economy at play. We ain’t all equal players...13

...with an equal chance of succeeding in this game. ‘Sweetness-and-light’ does not easily yield to a redistributive logic, and quantitative easing doesn’t work with cultural capital.

The stakes are subject to permanent revision. This is a game of distinction, after all. 14/20

Uncritical exposure and training in the ways of an elite does not lead to cultural equality. For Bourdieu, who experienced something similar himself, it leads to strain and shame.

Once we’ve all read Agamemnon, the stakes - the game, the water around the fish - will shift. Why?

The conversion rate between the different types of capital is the product of a permanent social struggle for symbolic legitimacy (‘symbolic power’; who gets to speak and be heard; who is ‘fit’ to rule)

Like all such struggles, it is personal and collective - as are our tastes.16

At any one moment, the dominant strata seeks - without thought - to impose the hierarchy of capital that best plays into their own pre-existing endowment. This reaffirms their claim to symbolic legitimacy. These are the terms of the game. They are arbitrarily decided, over time.

This is why, for Bourdieu, ‘culture’ constitutes a hidden yet ‘fundamental dimension of class struggle’.

The struggle isn’t necessarily about who holds economic capital, it’s about symbolic power: looking the part, and being (mis)recognised as naturally superior. Born to rule.

Think: In terms of symbolic legitimacy, who is best positioned to benefit from an uncritical presentation of the cultural offer of the private school as naturally superior; ‘the best’?

What attitude towards ‘culture’ does it encourage?

What inequalities might it legitimise?19

The imposition of a specific set of cultural practices - manners, tastes, deportment, comportment, lifestyle - is a key prong in the fight to appear legit. We, as social actors, engage in a fight for distinction every day.

Twitter is an insane and undiluted version. 20/

..but it also reveals how there is not one route to legitimacy. There are alternative ways to live and be heard.

For now, there is more to life than the suit, the boot, the right accent, the white face, the reverential, the disinterested, and the right.

Do our kids know this?

Ultimately, whole point of Bourdieu’s use of ‘cultural capital’ is to illustrate how certain social stratas have a very clear interest in appearing disinterested.

This is the source of any slipperiness. The concept satirises the very thing to which it is meant to apply. 22/20

This is why you can’t pair an Arnoldian ‘view from nowhere’ understanding of culture with ‘cultural capital’.

If you do, you end up pairing the most sacred of cows with its most famous and adept slaughterer.

What should we do instead?

It’s all in the book. 23/20