FORMS OF CAPITAL

“Every real inquiry into the divisions of the social world has to analyze the interests associated with membership or non-membership.”

“Systems of classification would not be such a decisive object of struggle if they did not contribute to the existence of classes by enhancing the efficacy of the objective mechanisms with the reinforcement supplied by the representations structured in accordance with the classification… The fate of groups is bound up with the words that designate them.”

“With investment in a game and the recognition that can come from cooperative competition with others, the social world offers humans that which they most totally lack: a justification for existing.”

Texts by Pierre Bourdieu referred to in this lecture:

Outline of a Theory of Practice, (1977) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, (1984) Harvard University Press, Massachussetts

The Field of Cultural Production, (1993) Columbia University Press, NY

The State Nobility, (1998) Polity Press, Cambridge

Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time, (1998) Polity Press, Cambridge

Pierre Bourdieu, (2000) ‘Social Being, Time and the Sense of Existence’, Pascalian Meditations, Polity Press, Cambridge
Habitus - internalization of externality (incorporation) and externalization of internality (objectification)

Habitus describes the way we “carry” social structures as embodied dispositions towards business, culture, education, and social status.

“Systems of dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.” – Bourdieu

Doxa, heterodoxy and orthodoxy

“Every established order tends to produce … the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.”

- Bourdieu

Doxa – the ‘sense of reality’ or the correspondence between one’s aspirations and external limitations.

Eg. What Althusser describes as “know how” or Paul Willis’s classic ethnography Learning How to Labour: How Working Class Kids get Working Class Jobs (1977)

Orthodoxy – the justification of “what goes without saying” to perpetuate existing power relations.

Heterodoxy – the domain of cultural critique, of heresy and blasphemy.

The Forms of Capital

capital=power=capital=power

Economic Capital – money or its equivalents (ie: assets, shares, gold standard)

Educational Capital - Knowledge

Cultural Capital - Taste

Symbolic Capital – Status or Recognition

Educational Capital

How economic capital gets transformed into cultural capital

State Nobility – looks at how the work of students from different family backgrounds and from Paris and the Provinces is evaluated by teachers. Shows how the adjectives used to classify the students reflect their class origins.

Teachers usually not conscious of doing this. They

‘… perform [the University’s] every wish because they are the institution made man or woman and who, whether dominated or dominant can submit to it or fully exercise its necessity only because they have incorporated it, they are of one body with it, they give body to it…(3)

Rites of institution and consecration

Eg. Rituals of the graduation ceremony

Lifetime investment in the University through donations, bequests etc.

Honorary doctorates

Cultural Capital

“Taste classifies and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects classified by their classifications distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed.”

Eg. Food

Distinction discovered an antithesis between quantity and quality, substance and form, corresponds to the opposition – linked to different distances from necessity – between the taste of necessity, which favours the most satisfying and economical foods, and the taste of liberty – or luxury - which shifts the emphasis to the manner (of presenting, serving, eating etc) and tends to use stylized forms and deny function.

Eg. Art

The ‘highest’ forms of art are the most difficult and satisfy only the disinterested viewer whose understanding of the most obscure forms and cultural references make up the ‘game of art’ – the most popular forms of art offer satisfaction to viewers who expect the object to deliver ‘representation’ or ‘meaning’.

See current ABC series: Reality Bites on ‘The Art Game’

Symbolic Capital: Time and the Sense of Value

Our relationship to time regulates our investment in society. Our sense of hope – our expectation of the ‘forthcoming’ - provides us with a meaningful existence in the present.

“In losing their work, the unemployed have also lost the countless tokens of a socially known and recognized function … in the form of demands and commitments – “important” meetings, cheques to post, invoices to draw up – and the whole forth-coming already given in the immediate present, in the form of deadlines, dates and timetables to be observed – buses to take, rates to maintain, targets to meet … deprived of this objective universe of incitements and indications which orientate and stimulate action and, through it, social life, they can only experience the free time that is left to them as dead time, purposeless and meaningless.”

Groups who are excluded from ‘the game’.

· Asylum seekers locked up in detention centers or kept waiting in refugee camps

· Indigenous Australians without an economic base

· Sub-proletariat – growing number of people around the world who have only casual or intermittent employment “flexploitation”

“With investment in a game and the recognition that can come from co-operative competition with others, the social world offers humans that which they most totally lack: a justification for existing.” - Bourdieu

CONCLUSIONS

For Althusser revolution is required to challenge the social relations of power based on economic exploitation that are reproduced by Repressive State Apparatuses and Ideological State Apparatusses.

For Foucault, power is not concentrated in the state but is everywhere – both inside and outside embodied subjects and operates through knowledge that is produced through institutions and discourses.

For Bourdieu, power is also inside and outside the subject (Habitus) but he argues that in order to participate in society at all, individuals need a minimum of economic, cultural, symbolic and educational capital. Without this they’re excluded from the game itself and lack a reason for existence. Nation-states and larger political entities like the European Union are creating a global subproletariat through neo-liberal economic policies such as casualisation – or “flexploitation.”

“Casualisation profoundly affects the person who suffers it: by making the whole future uncertain, it prevents all rational anticipation and, in particular, the basic belief and hope in the future that one needs in order to rebel, especially collectively, against present conditions, even the most intolerable…The proletarian, unlike the subproletarian, does have this basic minimum of present assurances, security, which is needed in order to conceive the ambition of changing the present with an eye to the future. But… the worker is also someone who has something to defend, something to lose, a job, even if it is exhausting and badly paid, and a number of things the worker does, sometimes described as too prudent or even conservative, spring from the fear of falling lower, back into the subproletariat.”