Cultural Capital Doesn’t Mean What They Say
‘Cultural Capital’ is a buzzword in some schools, but no-one in schools seems to know what it means. They tell you that Pierre Bourdieu came up with the phrase, but they use his phrase to mean the opposite.
They think ‘cultural capital’ can set people free; that it can be an emancipation. They think that it can even the odds up between the students in school whose social position is weak, and those whose parents are strong. The idea abroad in schools is that people without power can be got to acquire ‘capital’, through culture. They think this education has social purpose and makes society better. It will empower individuals to choose.
What Marx meant by capital (and it is his concept being adapted here) was a social force, not a personal asset. (That is the accountants’ language.) Social forces were not something in an individual’s gift, which schools could hand to them and that they could then use: they were the combined result of all individuals’ actions, the structures thrown up in the process, the decisions these then made rational; confronting individuals now, as alien. Capital is not things themselves, it is a force at work in the production and exchange of things; so it cannot be handed out. It cannot be a thing you choose to use.
On the contrary, what Bourdieu sought to show (in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste) was that when people buy art, they are picking out those art works which they think fit social groups. Bourdieu claimed to measure the extent to which people copied one another, buying art that ‘people like them’ would buy, so that the class structure replicates itself in the art world, and the art world reinforces the class power structure — not changing people, or emancipating them. ‘He has one on his walls. I must have one like that.’
In Distinction, people are not having any personal experience of an art work at all, such as might change them in ways that would change everything. They are not making art. Instead, they are already seeking the kinds of art or learning that reinforce positions that have been created for them by forces outwith their control. Cultural capital is a process in which they cooperate. Cultural capital, being a social force, not a personal property, imposes your choices. It is not about learning; it is about continuing activities you are not prepared to reconsider.
The Marxist point about capital is: it does stuff with you. It is not the money in your pocket. By the time it appears as an actual object, like gold, that you pile up in vaults, it is dead. It is not busy at expanding itself; it has no force. Depending on the economic circuit it is in, capital can take any form at all. It can be fixed as cash, or tractors. But to be capital, it must keep moving. For Marxists, the art world — as opposed to art — exists at all, only because surplus capital exists. Capital only appears to be the products through which it is at work (Marxism calls belief in this delusion, commodity fetishism). In just the same way, cultural products have no power, of themselves, to bring culture. ‘Cultural capital’ is not money in your metaphorical pocket: it is class as it appears in the cultural sphere.
What, then, leads teachers to talk of ‘cultural capital’? Why do they not simply say, ‘education’? ‘We hope that students will acquire an education’ — they could just say that. People have always had an abstract notion that poetry and music and languages, or opportunities for self-confidence, will ‘make you a better person’ or ‘set you up for life’ or ‘help you get on in the world’. The answer is that the word ‘education’ is taken.
Time was, when education did mean an acquaintance with Bach, Donne, Newton, and Faraday; Mauriac, Hardy, Mozart and Dirac. It was not ‘cultural capital’, collected like a series of things, but genuine value and power, like capital: embodied in a life changed by the encounter. The reason for calling education today something other than ‘education’ is that the term ‘education’ has been degraded to mean things it is not: ‘transferable skills’; credentialism; extrinsic aims rather than changing the mind; instrumentalism rather than purpose. It has become an industrial process, in which students are socialised into doing what makes money go round, a process which tacitly teaches the values of the society that we do have, rather than the possibilities for a better one.
Schools even have ‘enrichment programmes’ — which leave everything as it is. Extra lessons take place alongside the lessons we are not prepared to reconsider. Every time we talk about ‘cultural capital’, the training in credentialism continues. It’s not cultural capital; it’s uncultured labour. Alongside a schooling in what to choose, we bolt on activity that gives an illusion of choice. This gives schools the dignity of finishing schools, poised on top of society’s unchanged structure. Their delicacy would vary between Wester Hailes Training Centre and Eton College, but for as long as the dominant form of ‘education’ continues to be a socialisation in the process of getting and spending (credentials, debts, salaries), life trajectories continue on their course, and ‘culture’ is just a nomenclature.
Genuinely empowering people is not how people teach today. Nor is it what students today want, or will accept. If cultural capital is the model for education, if learning is like art, and if the education industry is like the art world, the notion of actual change, rather than making more money, is not currently what people are programmed to welcome. Schools will not change society because they are part of it. They want to be part of it, and to be seen to be part of it.
