Networks Of Capital

Cultural Capital

While he didn’t consider himself a Marxist sociologist, the theories of Karl Marx heavily influenced Bourdieu’s thinking. Marx’s influence is perhaps most evident in Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital. Like Marx, Bourdieu argued that capital formed the foundation of social life and dictated one’s position within the social order. For Bourdieu and Marx both, the more capital one has, the more powerful a position one occupies in social life. However, Bourdieu extended Marx’s idea of capital beyond the economic and into the more symbolic realm of culture.

Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital refers to the collection of symbolic elements such as skills, tastes, posture, clothing, mannerisms, material belongings, credentials, etc. that one acquires through being part of a particular social class. Sharing similar forms of cultural capital with others—the same taste in movies, for example, or a degree from an Ivy League School—creates a sense of collective identity and group position (“people like us”). But Bourdieu also points out that cultural capital is a major source of social inequality. Certain forms of cultural capital are valued over others, and can help or hinder one’s social mobility just as much as income or wealth.

According to Bourdieu, cultural capital comes in three forms—embodied, objectified, and institutionalized. One’s accent or dialect is an example of embodied cultural capital, while a luxury car or record collection are examples of cultural capital in its objectified state. In its institutionalized form, cultural capital refers to credentials and qualifications such as degrees or titles that symbolize cultural competence and authority.

Habitus

Habitus is one of Bourdieu’s most influential yet ambiguous concepts. It refers to the physical embodiment of cultural capital, to the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that we possess due to our life experiences. Bourdieu often used sports metaphors when talking about the habitus, often referring to it as a “feel for the game.” Just like a skilled baseball player “just knows” when to swing at a 95-miles-per-hour fastball without consciously thinking about it, each of us has an embodied type of “feel” for the social situations or “games” we regularly find ourselves in. In the right situations, our habitus allows us to successfully navigate social environments. For example, if you grew up in a rough, crime ridden neighborhood in Baltimore, you would likely have the type of street smarts needed to successfully survive or steer clear of violent confrontations, “hustle” for jobs and money in a neighborhood with extremely low employment, and avoid police surveillance or harassment. However, if you were one of the lucky few in your neighborhood to make it to college, you would probably find that this same set of skills and dispositions was not useful—and maybe even detrimental—to your success in your new social scenario.

Habitus also extends to our “taste” for cultural objects such as art, food, and clothing. In one of his major works, Distinction, Bourdieu links French citizens’ tastes in art to their social class positions, forcefully arguing that aesthetic sensibilities are shaped by the culturally ingrained habitus. Upper-class individuals, for example, have a taste for fine art because they have been exposed to and trained to appreciate it since a very early age, while working-class individuals have generally not had access to “high art” and thus haven’t cultivated the habitus appropriate to the fine art “game.” The thing about the habitus, Bourdieu often noted, was that it was so ingrained that people often mistook the feel for the game as natural instead of culturally developed. This often leads to justifying social inequality, because it is (mistakenly) believed that some people are naturally disposed to the finer things in life while others are not.

Field

Along with Bourdieu’s notion of a “feel for the game” came his theory of the game itself. Bourdieu understood the social world as being divided up into a variety of distinct arenas or “fields” of practice like art, education, religion, law, etc., each with their own unique set of rules, knowledges, and forms of capital. While fields can certainly overlap—education and religion, for example, overlap in many religiously-based colleges and universities in the United States—Bourdieu sees each field as being relatively autonomous from the others. Each field has its own set of positions and practices, as well as its struggles for position as people mobilize their capital to stake claims within a particular social domain. In art, for example, Bourdieu noticed that each generation of artists sought to overturn the established positions of those who came before them, only to be critiqued by the next generation of “avant-garde” artists who sought their own powerful positions within the field. Much like a baseball or football field, social fields are places where people struggle for position and play to win.

Historical Materialism

Central to Marx’s thought is his theory of historical materialism, which argued that human societies and their cultural institutions (like religion, law, morality, etc.) were the outgrowth of collective economic activity. Marx’s theory was heavily influenced by Hegel’s dialectical method. But while Marx agreed with Hegel’s basic dialectical thesis of social change, he disagreed with the notion that abstract ideas were the engine. Rather, Marx turned Hegel on his head and argued that it was material, economic forces—or our relationship to the natural, biological, and physical world—that drove the dialectic of change. More specifically, the engine of history rests in the internal contradictions in the system of material production (or, the things we do in order to produce what we need for survival).

For Marx, each economic system or “mode of production” in human history contained within it a contradiction that eventually led to its demise and replacement by another, more advanced stage of economic and social life. The contradictions inherent in feudalism, such as the necessity for states ruled by monarchs to trade with other states, thus creating a merchant class, eventually led to the advance of capitalism. Yet Marx saw that capitalism, too, had its own contradictions, particularly in the overproduction of goods. As technology advances (i.e. bigger and faster machines) and the exploitation of workers continues, too many goods are bound to be made (just take a look at the sales and bargain bins next time you are at Target or Wal-Mart). The problem, according to Marx, is that overproduction produces crises for capitalism, crises that he felt would eventually prove fatal and lead to the development of communism.

Commodity Fetishism

While Marx himself argued that the inherent exchange value of a commodity was only equal to the labor that produced it, he recognized that we often treat and experience commodities as if they were worth much, much more (sometimes even more than life itself). This habit of imagining commodities as having human or even superhuman qualities is what he called commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism takes many forms, but one of the most common ways we fetishize commodities is by identifying ourselves with the things we own—our mobile phones, footwear, automobiles, etc. Marx thought it perverse that the things that people produce end up defining them as persons, that what people owned ended up, in no small measure, owning them. Marx was highly critical of this tendency to treat our own creations as “magical” objects that then define and have power over us.

Alienation

Marx also thought that commodities and capitalism led to widespread alienation. He is well known in social theory for his argument that capitalism systematically alienates us in four distinct but related ways: it alienates us from the products of our labor (i.e. what we make), the labor process itself, our fellow human beings, and even from our own human nature or “species-being.” Take, for example, alienation from our own human nature. It is not that we don’t know we are human; rather, what we think is human is misguided, in Marx’s view. Marx wrote that what makes us human is our ability to creatively manipulate and produce our surroundings, and therefore our humanity is reflected back to us in the things we produce (think of it as that satisfying feeling you get when you’ve made something with your bare hands, such as a new sweater you knit, an outdoor deck you build, or a nice meal you cook). Marx argues that if we are locked into a system where someone else owns the commodities we produce, and when we lust after those commodities as if they had nothing to do with our own labor, then we have become alienated from our sense of our own species-being.

Labor Theory of Value

See the interactive reading for Marx’s Capital.