Subject: re: More questions on 'capital'
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 22:14:04 +0200


> Is masculine domination an example of symbolic capital - apprehended
> symbolically by a shared system of meanings and values, the
> arbitrariness of
> its efficacy and possesion being misrecognized?
> Or, is masculine domination a form of 'embodied' cultural
> capital, which is,
> nonetheless, still a form of symbolic capital?


I'm am also interested in this question, but I really haven't read
_Masculine Domination_ (and it's not available in the library system where I
stay), so could you elaborate a little bit more on (how you perceive) this
concept?

Just looked up a description of symbolic capital in _The Field of Cultural
Production_. B. gives me the jitters sometimes. Anyone else feel
uncomfortable reading B.?

==
"The question can be asked in its most concrete form (which it sometimes
assumes in the eyes of the agents): who is the true producer of the value of
the work -- the painter or the dealer, the writer or the publisher, the
playwright or the theatre manager? The ideology of creation, which makes the
author the first and last source of the value of hos work, conceals the fact
that the cultural businessman (art dealer, publisher, etc.) is at one and
the same time the person who exploits the labour of the 'creator' by trading
in the 'sacred' and the person, who, by putting it on the market, by
exhibiting, publishing or staging it, consecrates a product which he has
'discovered' and which would otherwise remain a mere natural resource; and
the more concerated he personally is, the more strongly he consecrates the
work."

The art trader "is the person who can proclaim the value of the author he
defends (cf. the fiction of the catalogue or blurb) and above all 'invest
his prestige' in the author's cause, acting as a 'symbolic banker' who
offers as security all the symbolic capital he has accumulated (which he is
liable to forfeit if he backs a 'loser')."

('The Market of Symbolic Goods', _The Field of Cultural Production_, 76-77)

==
Best,
tor
http://home.no.net/torgfje/utopos/

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