ABSTRACT

As the literature on cultural capital continues to grow so too do the levels of theoretical and methodological sophistication which accompany its analysis. Initially singular in form, cultural capital has now been pluralised and diversified, and this is reflected in the qualifications and revisions that are in evidence regarding the methods through which the relations between different cultural capitals might best be measured and visualised. There has, however, been much less critical examination of what is at stake politically in cultural capital research, or of how this has changed since the concept made its initial appearance in Pierre Bourdieu’s work in the 1960s. In what follows I offer a partial corrective to this by looking at some of the mutations that have characterised the career of cultural capital as a governmental actor. Rather than engaging with the concept entirely on its own terms as a set of problems to be resolved by a conjunction of socio - logical reasoning and statistical measurement (although I shall not neglect these considerations) I shall approach it through a Foucauldian optic by considering the distinctive governmental logic associated with Bourdieu’s initial formulations of cultural capital and the shifting governmental logics that have characterised its subsequent pluralisation and diversification.1 Initially limited by Bourdieu to the forms of social and occupational advantage

associated with highly restricted forms of participation in the forms of canonised culture legitimated by the state (Bourdieu et al. 1990; Bourdieu and Passeron 1979), the concept of cultural capital had a specific set of political and civic implications in his work that derived from his re-working of the legacy of civic humanist and Kantian aesthetics (Bennett 2005). In being shaped also by Bourdieu’s commitment to the political logics of post-war welfarism, cultural capital was invested with a range of capacities which made it a plausible lever for state action directed toward the realisation of a set of closely integrated objectives: a levelling out of social inequalities not as an end in itself but as a means of qualifying all French citizens in the context of French republicanism. The forms of cultural capital referred to in the subsequent literature have multi - plied: subcultural capital, national cultural capital, physical capital, emotional capital, technical capital, cosmopolitan cultural capital, celebrity capital, middlebrow capitals, ‘emergent’ cultural capital, and the values invested in omni - vorousness and eclecticism as distinctive taste profiles – these are just some of the

plural and hybrid forms that the concept has assumed while, in the process, jettisoning the specific conjunction of aesthetic and civic value it had for Bourdieu.2 One of the questions I shall pursue, then, concerns the respects in which these varied forms of cultural capital have been informed by and helped to shape the shift from the post-war forms of state welfare that informed Bourdieu’s original formulations of cultural capital to the neoliberal focus on, as Foucault puts it, the person as the locus of so many ‘capital-abilities’ (Foucault 2008: 226). However, I also want to bring a set of technical considerations to bear on these

concerns by considering how the particular research instruments that have shaped, and been shaped by, cultural capital theory, have, in the methods they have devised for measuring cultural tastes and participation, directed analytical and governmental attention in some directions at the expense of others. I shall be particularly concerned with the methods of multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) that Bourdieu used to explore the relations between cultural and social practices, and which are now widely used in cultural capital research, and with the visual presentations of such relations in the form of the social space of lifestyles that these methods have engendered. The role of research methods and the visual representations they generate as themselves active social agents is now widely canvassed in the intersecting literatures of the social life of methods, big data, and visual sociology; and there is, within these literatures, a concern with the active social role played by the varied forms of cultural data that are produced by state and nonstate agencies, and the different ways of visualising cultural practices and their participants that these produce and put into broader social circulation.3 It is, consequently, no longer possible to treat surveys of cultural tastes as though they were neutral social scientific research instruments rather than actors in and on social worlds which shape the activities of a range of agents within those worlds. The competing ways of mapping cultural tastes that are generated by the transactional data of both commercial and government organisations and Internet search engines (Savage and Burrows 2007), and the alternative ways of acting on cultural practices these generate, highlight the relativity of cultural capital survey, statistical and visual methodologies. How ever, there has been little, if any, attent - ion paid to the respects in which visual constructions of the social space of lifestyles serve to format the social in particular ways and, correspondingly, to be predisposed to cultivate certain kinds of action on the social in the framing they give to questions of cultural participation.4 I shall, in pursuing these lines of argument, add a third string to my bow by

considering how Thomas Piketty’s (2014a) assessment of the significance of the inheritance of wealth in the increasing levels of inequality that have taken place since the 1980s suggests the need to revise Bourdieusian accounts of the class dynamics that now shape the relations between cultural capital and the mechanisms of inheritance. This will involve taking a slightly longer look at the problematics of inheritance; at the kinds of interventions into earlier eugenic con - ceptions that the concept of cultural capital made; and at the ways of modifying the influence of the past on the present that it proposes.