Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 09:16:54 -0600
From: Deborah Kilgore <kilgore-AT-unix.tamu.edu>
Subject: Re: symbolic captal vs. cultural capital


Hello, Emrah.  Thanks for your comments.  I think it is interesting to point
out how the bourgeoisie "appropriates" high art.  I'm thinking of how movie
stars -- who we must remember are not usually highly educated despite the
reports of a few attending university -- can actually get private viewings
at important museums here in the US.

I get a little lost in your second paragraph, perhaps only because you use
the transitional "However" to begin it.  So I'm trying to establish
communication here, not necessarily arguing.  You discuss how the artist is
the dominated dominant, as Bourdieu points out in "Rules of Art," who
constructs the doxa.  I agree with this.  I don't think it argues with my
point that symbolic capital is a complex phenomenon; in fact you go on to
discuss how the power to name the doxa is negotiated in the field.  This
struggle for symbolic power is perhaps the most interesting of all struggles
to us, the intelligentsia.  After all, B. appeals to us at the end of that
book to preserve the autonomy of the intellectual field from the big bucks
operators.

And then I also agree that the big bucks owners of publishing houses are not
considered to be part of the field's construction of what is high art at
all.  Of course the critics are an easier target; they hold little economic
capital, and less cultural capital than the artists.  On the other hand I
will argue that economic capital is far from irrelevant, although its
relative power is still historically contingent.  Today, that convertibility
to power is pretty high.  We are seeing a lot of colonization of the
intellectual field, for example.  And your poor novelists battle with
college students, who are their readers, while the moneychangers sit back
and reap even greater profits of both readers' and writers' eroded power in
this battle.  Divide and conquer, and all that.


At 10:58 AM 11/25/1998 +0200, you wrote:
>
>Deborah, I think you are in a way right. If we confine the discussion
>within the commodity market, or, let's call it the economic field,
>certainly the ruling class/big bourgeoisie/power elite is a powerless
>player in the game in that most of this class does not possess the
>necessary cultural (or artistic) capital to determine what is high art
>what is not. They just use their economic power to "appropriate" what is
>coded inside the field as "high art". Yet they may also not be so
>helpless, they may again make investments and rent "artists", tell them
>what they want for their new house or office ("Man, I want something
>postmodern for the walls of this advertising department").
>
>However, if we expand the discussion to the field of cultural production,
>we should remember Bourdieu telling us that the artist is a member of
>the dominant class, yet in the dominated fraction of that class. Here, the
>owners of high cultural capital, as time went by, produced the "doxa" that
>this painting is high art, that exhibition is kitsch, you should bow
>before this sculpture, etc. I think art collector members of the big
>bourgeoisie, who are mostly less trained than a producer of art, are not
>very much influential on art discussions. (And remember, literary critics,
>not owners of publishing firms, were banished deep deep down Hell in Woody
>Allen's Deconstructing Harry.)
>
>A final anectode (perhaps irrelevant to the current discussion) from my
>country's (Turkey) literary wars: Nowadays, there is a debate about the
>illegal sales and publishing of best-seller books. The street-sellers,
>mostly university students in need of money and sell expensive books only
>for the half price, are called "pirates" and are being bombarded by the
>discourses of "the labor of the artist is stolen", "the publishers are
>robbed", "books are not expensive", "youngsters spend on original Levi's
>but bulshit about expensive books" etc. etc. What is interesting is the
>domination of the discussions by the most famous Turkish novelists
>and critics (that is, the definers of what is good literary work) cursing
>the Generation X, not the owners of publishing firms, pressing companies,
>or official distributors.
>
>Emrah GOKER
>

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