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Season’s Greetings: Bourdieu at Christmas

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I’m assuming that at some point with this blog all the disparate threads will eventually give a good idea of what my PhD was all about and what I found. While this blog is mostly about my research, I also want to write about different ideas that I have and use them to explain some of theory that I use So this week I’m going to talk about Christmas and introduce a little more Pierre Bourdieu!

Now, in terms of this conflict between instrumental and substantive rationality that I’ve talked about over the last couple of blogs, Christmas can be seen as losing its substantive rationale. The means of achieving Christmas (presents, food, Black Friday) have perhaps got in the way of the original ends of Christmas (Christianity, gifts in their truest sense, goodwill to all men/not chokeslamming old women in shops). So to hopefully illustrate the commercialisation of Christmas in more depth – and in a way that helps illustrate some of the theory used in my music research – I turn to Pierre Bourdieu.

Bourdieu’s key work Distinction (1984) outlined how consumption habits (taste) are linked to social class. #middleclassproblems is probably the most Bourdieusian of hashtags on Twitter, where people explicitly link their humorous consumption problems to their class position. To illustrate consumption in better detail he relied on his concepts of capital. Rather than simply economic transactions, for Bourdieu social life is the exchange and accumulation of various forms of capital. Of particular note is his notion of cultural capital which exists in three forms and very generally describes tastes (embodied form: appreciation of art, food, etc.), qualifications (institutional form: school grades and degrees), and cultural goods themselves (art, books, films). In addition people have social capital (relationships that gain access to other capital) and symbolic capital (social honour and prestige).

Bourdieu’s use of capital is a helpful way to expand on what I talked about last week with “disinterestedness”. Rather than people only being interested in money, people are interested in various forms of capital – artistic works that increase their cultural capital, friendships and networking that increase their social capital, etc. (While this is an improvement on simple economic interest, I’ll talk about some of the problems with this as well next time). Anyway, the point of bringing up Bourdieu is that it is useful to use his forms of capital to illustrate the ways gift exchange becomes economised:

‘For example, when, instead of giving a “personal” present, that is, a present adjusted to the presumed taste of the receiver, one gives, through laziness or convenience, a check, one economizes the work of looking, which assumes the attention and care necessary for the present to be adapted to the person, to his or her tastes, to arrive at the right time, etc. and also that its “value” is not directly reducible to its monetary value’ (Bourdieu, 1988: 99)

A while before Bourdieu, Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism argued that under capitalism the use-value of things is being displaced by seeing things in terms of what people can get for it (exchange-value). Bourdieu I feel takes this a step further by introducing the forms of capital to explain these differences. In this very interesting quote, Bourdieu is saying that the exchange value of a gift is incommensurate with the use-value. Someone who simply gives money as a gift is using the money to replace not just the value of the gift but the time and care to find a gift suited to the tastes (cultural capital) of the receiver. As these practices become more and more common, you could argue that this economic relationship replaces the original spirit of Christmas giving. Certainly this is what Bourdieu observed when he “created” his concepts of capital, when the Kabyle people in Algeria saw their gift-based economy progressively replaced by money as colonial Algeria was progressively industrialised (Bourdieu, 1977; 1990). In recent years we’ve seen the rise of Black Friday (black because of the colour of a positive monthly balance sheet), we’ve seen how politicians and economists have hedged their bets on GDP figures breaking even based on Christmas spending…all things which show the prevalence of economic exchange over the more symbolic gesture of gift exchange. Or even the act of giving itself superseding the Christian origins of gift giving during the festive period…

Bourdieu is really useful in helping illustrate some of these debates between value and values – whether this is in musical production or even Gaelic language. His quote there provides a good example of the commercialisation of Christmas. Well, either that or he is making a desperate plea for no more gift vouchers.

 More thoughts after the New Year.

Writing

Cultural Value, Gaelic and Bourdieu

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So, I ended the blog last week with the example of education and a video from Stewart Lee. I used the excerpt from him to illustrate his point about how education in itself was a goal in itself – it was substantively rational in the most Weberian meaning of the term. Yet another thing Stew said was the difficulty in defending the value of education or art in itself in terms of future financial gain. For those of you that didn’t see the video here’s the important quote, where they’re discussing Thatcher’s dismissal of the value of a student’s PhD in Norse Literature:

Interviewer: It’s wrong commercially though isn’t it? Because if you look at the Lord of the Rings, those films wouldn’t exist without Tolkien…

Stewart Lee: Well, yes, that made a lot of money didn’t it… But you know what, the problem of that is… then you’re being drawn into fighting the war on their terms

This is another key thread that’s occurred in my research thus far. I conducted research into Gaelic during my Masters year and I have continued to think about this research and the issues with the language ever since. As a person brought up in the Hebrides, I like most people was never far away from Gaelic whether you loved the culture or resented it. My only resentment with the language when younger was the amount of time it took me away from subjects that I was more interested in at the time (contrasted to my resentment with my younger self for rejecting it). Yet most people resent the language in terms of the money spent on it – especially in years of recession.

Over the past decade or so the Creative Industries (or formerly Cultural Industries) are now seen as the future source of economic value in the economy. Most prevalent is the “Creative Class” thesis promoted in academia by Richard Florida and advocated politically by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in the UK. Here the creative industries are described as:

“those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property” (DCMS, 2001: 5)

DCMS (2014) estimates a sector of the economy that employs over 1.7m people and contributes £71.4bn to the UK economy. Employment includes various occupations within the arts, advertising, film production, performing arts, software development, etc. Tied to this “discovery” of a “new” creative economy, there “has also been increasing interest in the whole question of language, culture and diversity as a motor for economic change” (Chalmers and Danson, 2011: 95). Instead of seeing culture as a value in itself, cultural forms (visual art, minority languages, etc) have increasingly had to be justified in terms of the potential economic benefits it may bring.

Stewart Lee: “They talk to these people as if the only point of the art were to make money for shops in the West End because people on the way to the West End were buying crisps…”

Pierre Bourdieu (someone who’ll be a recurring character in this blog) argued that the dominance of these rational action theories – or economic explanations for social behaviour – within society has seen all value-judgements (interests) assessed in terms of this economic reasoning. For Bourdieu it is illogical to consider interest in something other than money as essentially “disinterested”. Instead, to address this, Bourdieu famously adopted some of the language of economics in order to argue that social life is a game where individuals act to maximise their capital. Rather than only acting to increase their monetary capital, people act to increase their stores of cultural capital (knowledge, cultural taste and appreciation, linguistic abilities), social capital (relationships, networking) and symbolic capital (specific types of honour and prestige), etc.

Now this may seem like a slightly obvious point that people have non-financial interests – but when it comes to Gaelic, revival initiatives have been argued in terms of the economic gains it can make through tourism and Gaelic jobs. Out with language, we see how we maybe change our opinion on our favourite bands changes based on how big they make it – or rather, how more “interested” in money they seem is related to how they lose prestige and honour in our eyes. A key part of the research I’ve done has been to examine the relationship between symbolic value of recorded music or Gaelic language and more commercial concerns. I’ll come back to both subjects repeatedly over these blog posts!

More thoughts next week.