Cultural Capital

Distinction is Bourdieu’s analysis of empirical research on French culture undertaken in the 1960s (first published in France in 1979, with the first English translation issued in 1984). Bourdieu argues that people’s aesthetic tastes are established at a young age by their socio-economic background, education, and upbringing and are enabled via cultural capital within social space, or fields. The term ‘capital’ usually has economic associations;

particularly in relation to the exchange of money with products or services.

However Bourdieu appropriated the term, and converted it into the economic metaphor of cultural capital; referring to the non-monetary caché of cultural knowledge and skills that individuals possess and express. Cultural capital is used to develop social relations, education, or employment prospects; or as

51.

Rob Moore expresses it, ’cultural capital is to all intents and purposes a synonym for “status”..’ (cited in Grenfell, 2012 [2008]: 99).

Bourdieu uses cultural capital to describe a ‘competence in ‘legitimate’ cultural codes…which is unequally distributed among the social classes, although it has the appearance of an innate talent, a ‘natural gift’’ (cited in Bennett et al., 1999: 10). According to Bourdieu, there is a power struggle between the ruling class and its subordinate classes (he was influenced by Marxist theory) and this is indicated in people’s cultural tastes. Cultural capital has three subtypes according to Bourdieu: embodied, objectified and institutionalised (Bourdieu, 1986a). Embodied cultural capital is knowledge or behaviour that is inherited and acquired over time through socialisation – this can be manifest in the accent, dress, general appearance and behaviour of an individual. Objectified cultural capital refers to physical objects that are owned, which signify judgements of taste (e.g. cars, jewellery, works of art). Institutionalised cultural capital is that which takes the form of academic qualifications and credentials. In one of his latter publications, Bourdieu also introduced the concept of ‘technical capital’ in line with the other subtypes (Bourdieu, 2005 [2000]: 29); this refers to vocational skills that male working class members of society pass on to family members through socialisation in the home. Feminist academics (Reay, 2000; Silva, 2000) have taken this a step further to suggest that a further subtype of cultural capital, usually conveyed by mothers to children in the home is that of ‘emotional capital’. This constitutes ‘soft skills’

such as empathy, communication, and team-working that can be also be transferable to professional success. Another sub-type of cultural capital;

‘subcultural capital’ was introduced in the 1990s by Sarah Thornton to interpret the distinctions made by ‘hip’ young people involved in club culture situating themselves in opposition to the ‘mainstream’ (Thornton, 1995) (see also Skelton and Valentine, 1998). These sub-types of cultural capital are relevant concepts to consider during my analysis of teen audiences, and in the case of subcultural capital, enable me to be alert to claims about subcultural group membership and discourse relating to non-mainstream practices, knowledge and tastes.

52.

Bourdieu identifies a number of other forms of capital of which cultural capital is just one: economic (financial), social (group membership) and symbolic capital (prestige, honour or recognition). Although these other forms of capital have varying different levels of societal influence (economic being the most powerful), he argues that those with the most cultural capital – usually in the upper classes in society – influence or even dictate what is culturally tasteful and therefore of most value in the field of art, culture, and entertainment. For Bourdieu, the lower classes accept this state of play as natural and normal and, and through processes of distinction by the elite, are denied access to the upper echelons of society due to their lack of cultural capital. This could be manifest in a working-class person not possessing the vocabulary to describe a work of art, due to features of their habitus. Bourdieu states on this issue; ‘working–

class people expect every image to explicitly perform a function’, whereas the bourgeoisie can afford to apply a ‘pure gaze’ (2010 [1984]: xxviii). This relates to the concept of film as art, an idea that was applied to cinema in the 1950s and championed by French film theorists and filmmakers such as

François Truffaut and André Bazin, but also adopted by a section of the middle and upper classes in the USA and the UK (Wilinsky, 2001; Tudor, 2006).

Sociologist Tony Bennett is a scholar who has utilised Bourdieu’s concepts in multiple research projects on cultural taste and class. Here he concisely synthesises the concept of cultural capital:

For Bourdieu the culture/power nexus consisted chiefly in a conception of culture as a possession – an asset that some social agents have at the expense of others – that is mobilised to competitive advantage in a series of power-games played in different fields whose relations are structured by the dominance of the economic and political fields over the cultural field.

(Bennett et al., 2009: 20) Although, as Bennett argues, the economic and political fields dominate over the cultural field, a hierarchy also exists within the cultural field. At the top are the ‘fully consecrated’ high arts of theatre, art, classical music, and literature and at the bottom are ‘vulgar’ cultural practices such as sport and cookery (Bourdieu, 1990 [1965]: 95). Cinema is categorised by Bourdieu as inhabiting the same ‘middle-brow’ rung in the cultural hierarchy as jazz and photography:

53.

it is an ‘expressive form with the potential to be become recognised as ‘art’

(cited in Hill, 2004: 30). Film buffs or ‘avids’ (Donovan and Garey, 2007), film studies academics, film reviewers, and film industry professionals are the chief proponents of specialist knowledge on films. The skillsets that these types of people possess can be viewed as cultural capital in the cinema field.

Certainly in the past at least, art-house cinemas would have depended on this specific cultural capital to be present with their audiences in order for their programmes of specialised films and supporting marketing material to be understood and appreciated. However, current advice for cinema marketing from the Independent Cinema Office (ICO) is to use plain English to encourage maximum accessibility for those that have had ‘minimal formal education’.¹²