Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies

The University of British Columbia

797-1873 East Mall

Vancouver, BC

Canada V6T 1Z1



jon.beasley-murray@ubc.ca

This is a draft: please do not cite without author's permission

a version of this article was published in Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture . Ed. Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. 100-119.

"Value and Capital in Bourdieu and Marx"

The concept of "cultural capital" is among Pierre Bourdieu's most distinctive contributions to critical theory. [1] The term has found remarkable success, and has probably been taken up and disseminated more than has any other item from his critical terminology; "habitus," for instance, has scarcely demonstrated such widespread appeal. Cultural capital has even inspired a book of its own (Guillory, Cultural Capital ). Faced with this reception of the term, Bourdieu himself would no doubt be the first to see this as a distortion and to agree with Loïc Wacquant's criticism of the way in which his work "has typically been apprehended in 'bits and pieces'" (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 4). Moreover, he would be likely to ascribe such an imbalanced reception of his work to limited reading (as he does in "A Reply to Some Objections" 107) or " fast-reading ("The Economy of Symbolic Goods" 93) on the part of critics and followers alike. But such criticism of Bourdieu's readers would be unfair and, more to the point, would fail to account sufficiently for the seductions that the term undoubtedly exerts. Moreover, it would also miss the fact that Bourdieu himself is arguably equally seduced by what the concept promises, and that even in his own work, Bourdieu fails to make the concept fully live up to its promise.

This paper will examine the concept of cultural capital within the framework of Bourdieu's project to construct a "general theory of the economy of practices" ( The Logic of Practice 122). I am sympathetic to this project, but argue that it requires that we examine Bourdieu's understanding of capital more closely, and that Bourdieu's neglect of the strictly economic is a serious weakness in his attempt to construct this general economy. In particular, and comparing Bourdieu's analysis of capital with that of Marx, I note that despite Bourdieu's gestures towards something like a Marxist labor theory of value, in fact his use of the concept "cultural capital" fits badly with the Marxist conception. More strikingly still, it appears that Bourdieu's "capital" is in practice closer to the economic category of "wealth," and as such fails to enable an account of the accumulation of surplus (and hence either profit or exploitation). However, I propose a means by which to conceive of a theory of cultural capital along lines suggested but not followed by Bourdieu, to incorporate a theory of exploitation and to resolve what is a significant ambivalence that runs through Bourdieu's work as a whole. This draws on Moishe Postone's emphasis on the importance of time within Marx, to supplement Bourdieu's own analysis of the role of time's productivity, and to understand capital in general as a particular form of the regulation of time.

the effect of cultural capital

The strange effect of the term "cultural capital" among practitioners of cultural theory is largely a matter of its apparent capacity to bridge the constitutive divide between the humanities and the social sciences: at a stroke it seems to reintegrate economics with the study of culture. At the same time, the term also seems to encapsulate the specific object of study for Left social criticism, that is, the inter-relations between the economic or material and the cultural or abstract. In that it both crosses anxiously patrolled disciplinary borders, and also offers a new center to a project of political investigation, the term both troubles and soothes. However, given the current (particularly US) context in which a Humanities-based yet purportedly political cultural studies has long forgotten to take seriously social scientific disciplines, let alone political economy, "cultural capital" may provide only the soothing fantasmatic seal of political rigor without ever provoking anxiety over the disciplinary and epistemological stakes of this terminology. [2]

While this may be the danger, Bourdieu adamantly denies the suggestion that "cultural capital" is an empty metaphorical gesture towards scientificity and radicalism, just as likewise he denies the term's purely literalist tendencies towards economism. In response to such criticisms, Bourdieu answers that cultural capital is a particular "form" of capital, convertible with but irreducible to economic capital, itself only another form of capital. He argues that this generalized usage of the concept of capital:

is not a metaphoric usage . . . one can use the concept in its generality so long as one specifies, very precisely, the logics of the different forms of capital, their specific functions, etc. . . . One important argument, of a primary pragmatism in favor of this usage, is that it was not born from theoreticist speculation, and that if one challenges this concept one is no longer able to understand a certain number of important things. (Wallerstein 1993, 53-4) [3]

For Bourdieu it is, then, simple observation that shows that cultural capital is fully capital; understanding its logic as a logic of capital (if specific to a particular field) offers direct analytical gains. On this basis, it is possible to understand both the structure of the social field and the various position takings within it in terms of the differing absolute volumes of capital held by particular agents and of the differing composition of particular agents' capital assets, which will be made up of varying proportions of cultural and economic capital (as in the chart in Distinction 128-129). Class hierarchy (and class alliances or disputes) can therefore be understood in terms of multi-dimensional space, rather than in terms of simple linearity. The notion of cultural capital's convertibility with economic capital also enables struggles within a particular class to be understood now as struggles over "the conservation or transformation of the 'exchange rate' between different kinds of capitals" ("Social Space and Field of Power" 34). Pragmatically, one could imagine that political phenomena such as populism, in which agents appear to contradict their class interests, could now be understood without reference to theories of "false consciousness" that simply reintroduce an absolute (yet, ironically, reductionist) account of the distinction between the economic and the cultural.

However, it is not mere pragmatism that determines Bourdieu's unmetaphoric use of the concept "cultural capital." Pragmatically, after all, interdisciplinary metaphorical slippages can sometimes seem to work wonders, and it is this careless use of economic language Bourdieu wishes to refute. Rather, the argument for cultural capital as capital crucially underpins his social analysis, even if this fact remains undertheorized in Bourdieu's work. For it is upon the basis of his analysis of different but convertible forms of capital--its "three fundamental guises" (Bourdieu, "The Forms of Capital" 243) of economic, cultural and social capital--that he outlines his over-arching project of a "general theory of the economy of practices . . . [requiring us] to abandon the economic/non-economic dichotomy [in favor of] . . . a science capable of treating all practices" ( The Logic of Practice 122). The concept of cultural capital enables this general theory's articulation; were cultural capital categorically distinct from other forms of capital (were it not fully capital), the "economic/non-economic dichotomy" would resurface and a general theory be unthinkable.

I will argue that such a general theory is possible--and therefore that cultural capital is indeed a form of capital--but that there are serious flaws in Bourdieu's own version of this general theory. Moreover, these flaws derive, ironically, from his inconsistent use of the term "capital." In other words, Bourdieu does more or less outline a general political economy of practices and capitals, one that encompasses the specific political economy of strictly economic capital, but he is unable to account for all sectors of this economy. Rather, in Bourdieu's understanding of the general economy, the market subsumes all other sectors at the expense of an understanding of production and so, most crucially, of surplus. After all, capital is distinguished from value or wealth, for instance, in so far as it implies surplus and therefore exploitation. To reintroduce the concept of surplus, I argue for a critique of Bourdieu's general political economy, one that might then historicize the specific modes and mechanisms of production and capitalization, and thus enable us to conceive of alternative ways in which this general economy might be structured. I hope to move towards such a critique through Marx's similar critique of the political economy of capitalist economic relations, in which Marx identifies the form and means of capital's exploitation as resting in a specific form of alienation. [4]



Bourdieu and Marx: capital and surplus

The relation between Bourdieu and Marx is somewhat fraught. On the one hand, Bourdieu is usually taken--particularly if not exclusively in the Anglophone world--to be working within a Marxist or post-Marxist paradigm. Thus, for instance, Bridget Fowler is quite prepared to claim that in his analysis of culture "there is an equivalence between Bourdieu's approach and Marx's method in Capital . . . . Bourdieu's method is to use Marx's critique in another sphere of production in the bourgeois period, that of cultural goods" (43). Equally, John Guillory states that "the theory of cultural capital belongs to the general field of what in France goes by the name of 'post-Marxist' thought" ( Cultural Capital viii). After all, work such as his and Jean-Claude Passeron's Reproduction bears striking similarities to the Althusserian critique of schools as "ideological state apparatuses;" in a book such as Distinction he seems clearly to be advocating a Marxist reading of the political field (397); while even the simple mention of capital as a means by which to understand culture conjures up a Marxist appeal to the priority of the economic--as he himself often enough seems to confirm. Bourdieu may even have been a member of the French Communist Party cell at the Ecole normale (see Lane, Pierre Bourdieu in Context 20, note 3). On the other hand, Jeremy Lane notes the diversity of interpretations placed on Bourdieu's politics, from the attack mounted on his work on education by former student Christian Baudelot who deserted him to join the Althusserians ("'Un Etrange Retournment'?" 21) to his characterization as either postmodernist or as anti-postmodern rationalist ( Pierre Bourdieu in Context 2-7). Lane himself argues persuasively that "the tendency to locate Bourdieu's work on education and culture within a Marxist or marxisant tradition . . . has overlooked the central importance . . . of a classically French Republican political vision to Bourdieu's thinking in this area" ("'Un Etrange Retournment'?" 4).

I would argue that, again, these different receptions of Bourdieu's work are less misreadings than they are symptomatic of a fundamental ambivalence exhibited by Bourdieu himself. It is true that most recently he has seemed to lean towards the classical Republican tradition with a series of declarations in favor of "universaliz[ing] the conditions of access to the universal" ( On Television 66; see also Acts of Resistance and, earlier, the conclusion to The State Nobility ). Still, it is hard to see this as any resolution of the questions he himself poses elsewhere, and the claim for example that "the highest human products . . . were all produced against market imperatives" ( On Television 27) is rather the suspension of an earlier ambivalence over the relation between cultural capital and value rather than its transcendence. Once the "highest human products" are also seen as products destined for a market system, albeit a "market of symbolic goods" (Bourdieu, "The Market of Symbolic Goods") obeying the specific logic of cultural rather than economic capital, such goods can only be definitively regarded as produced "against market imperatives" if markets in which cultural capital is dominant are regarded as qualitatively distinct from markets in which economic capital is dominant--if, in other words, "cultural capital" is once more taken as a metaphoric term.

Indeed, Bourdieu's ambivalence centers around the concept of cultural capital, which seduces by offering on the one hand a democratizing equalization of cultural value (all cultural practices are instances in which the same form of value is at stake, if in differing quantities) and on the other a measure of the degrees of difference between cultural values (all cultural practices are instances in which differing quantities of the same form of value are at stake). If the theory of cultural capital is unable to encompass equally a theory of exploitation (as an indication of the difference that such differences make) then it is unable to adjudicate between the claims of distinction and equality. Republicanism, then, steps in to offer an apparent resolution by claiming that cultural value can be made available to all in equal measure--but only by denying any real relation between cultural and economic capital.

Given that Republicanism cannot resolve the questions raised by the use of the term cultural capital, I suggest that making sense of the concept must involve a further investigation of its compatibility with a theory of economic capital that does also involve a theory of exploitation. Thus we will be taking up the traces of Bourdieu's Marxism (however ambivalently he may hold to it) and forced also to look at economics (however much Bourdieu, strangely, shirks the subject). For there are various moments at which Bourdieu gestures towards a more or less straightforward Marxist account of social structure. It is significant also that he never offers any clear non -Marxist account of the relations between economics and culture.

Thus several times, and in quite conventional Marxist terms, Bourdieu asserts the general primacy of the economic, in the Althusserian turn of phrase that economic capital is "always at the root in the last analysis" (Bourdieu, "The Sociologist in Question" 33). It is true that elsewhere he is more circumspect, as where he admits that "in advanced capitalist societies, it would be difficult to maintain that the economic field does not exercise especially powerful determinations" while simultaneously asking "should we then for that reason admit the postulate of its (universal) 'determination in the last instance'?" (Bourdieu and Wacquant 109). This, however, may still be in accord with a developed theory of cultural capital once it is realized that the economic field is but a part of the general economy of practices (and hence "economic theory . . . [but] a particular instance, historically dated and situated, of the theory of fields" [120]). If there is a parallelism between the cultural and the economic marked by the presence of specific forms of capital in both fields, rather than a dependency of the former on the latter, then what is at issue is the determination of the economic within the cultural, in other words the nature of cultural capital itself. [5] Thus the economic could be seen as determinant in particular situations even if this were an economic logic proper to the field of culture. [6] Again, however, this argument could only be sustained so long as cultural capital were clearly also fully capital.

At the one point at which Bourdieu theorizes the general nature of capital, he seems remarkably close to Marxist orthodoxy as he provides what is essentially the labor theory of value:

Capital is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its "incorporated," embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor. ("The Forms of Capital" 241)

But the proximity to orthodoxy is misleading. Indeed, it is startling that Bourdieu here provides what in the labor theory of value is, precisely, a definition of value rather than a definition of capital. For the essence of the labor theory of value is that it defines value as accumulated labor. But value is quite distinct from capital (even if capital depends upon value) in that capital, for Marx, is the result of a process in which "value . . . becomes value in process . . . and as such capital" (Marx, Capital 256; my emphasis). Bourdieu does mention such a process of valorization or exploitation in his adding a description of appropriation to his definition. But this is an addition : he here defines capital as contingently rather than necessarily related to appropriation. Appropriation, in other words, is exterior (and as such other) to capital: "Capital is accumulated labor . . . which, when appropriated . . ." (my emphasis) rather than that is appropriated. As such, this definition of capital, cultural or otherwise, forestalls any understanding of surplus value or valorization, which is what "converts [value] into capital" (Marx, Capital 252). For Marx, this process whereby capital is produced is the production process itself; in contrast, what Bourdieu outlines here is rather a theory of (unequal) distribution of capital effected through appropriation. As John Guillory points out, then, Bourdieu's definition here "reproduces certain features of a Marxist account of capital without grounding the concept in the cycle of production or 'productive capital'" ("Bourdieu's Refusal" 382). [7] By subsuming capital into a definition of value, Bourdieu passes over the passage between value and capital, and between capital and value, and hence production and valorization disappear from his framework. [8]



value: use value and time

If Bourdieu's own definition of capital leads to a consideration of value, [9] it should prove useful to re-investigate the theory of value in political economy. From a consideration of value we may then be able to return to capital; for the moment, however, it is clear that "cultural capital" as used by Bourdieu unsettles value theory more than it has (yet) to add to any understanding of capital. Moreover, this accords with the general reception of Bourdieu's work in as much as it is taken as a critique of (aesthetic) value by means of a critique of the school system's legitimation of middle class culture (in Reproduction ) and by means of a critique of taste (as in Distinction ). However (again), if cultural capital is to be a concept appropriate to a general theory of economic practices, in which there would be no clear dichotomy between the aesthetic and the strictly economic, then the use of the term must also imply an analysis of the relation between value in political economy and value in aesthetics.

John Guillory attempts such an analysis. He argues that the concept of cultural capital forces a reconceptualization of the relations between the two components of value--use value (value realized in use) and exchange value (realized in exchange)--and therefore of the law of value within capitalist economies, understood as the dominance of exchange over use in the pursuit of profit. Both use value and exchange value are implied in any economic exchange. Marx points out that consumers exchange in order to obtain goods (food, clothing) whose value lies in the use that the consumer can make of them; the capitalist, on the other hand, exchanges in order to realize capital, expressed in the exchange value of the goods sold. [10] In capitalism, the economy is organized around and driven by exchange rather than use. Guillory points out that, in line with this law of dominance, "political economy relegates use value to a domain of subjectivity, which it cannot enter into the equation of exchange value." Guillory goes on to establish the connection between value in culture and in economics as constituted by the fact that " both aesthetics and economics were founded in contradistinction to the concept of use value" (Guillory, Cultural Capital 302). The aesthetic disposition demands a disavowal of utility--and hence what Bourdieu will criticize as the cult of disinterest. Thus both Kant in aesthetics and Adam Smith in economics bracketed utility to establish their fields of study. [11] Bourdieu, however, refuses to bracket utility in this way.

Bourdieu's innovation is to reintroduce use value through the concept of cultural capital into the discourses of both aesthetics and economics, unsettling and potentially "debasing" each. The introduction of "cultural capital" to analysis of the cultural field enables the argument that cultural appreciation is far from disinterested, that indeed taste conforms to a market system if with its own logic and its own specific form of capital. But while he is prepared to enact the rupture of aesthetics in his critique of Kant, emphasizing the ways in which cultural products are used for particular interests, Bourdieu remains strangely loath to discuss economics strictly speaking: "I shall not dwell on the notion of economic capital" (Bourdieu and Wacquant 119); "As regards economic capital, I leave it to others; it's not my area" ("The Sociologist in Question" 32). No doubt in part it is this reticence that preserves Bourdieu's ambivalence over his relations to Marxism on the one hand and French Republicanism on the other. [12] Yet surely it is time equally to consider Bourdieu's possible effect upon political economy. I suggest that the most profound effect of his work is its enabling us to reintegrate and reconceive use value within the circuits of both cultural and economic capital. Bourdieu shows that common to utility in both spheres is the particular role of time ; equally, then, I will argue that common to the exploitation involved in both cultural and economic capital is a particular operation performed upon "concrete time."

As Loïc Wacquant notes, "Bourdieu's interest in time is a long-standing one, going back to his days as a student of philosophy in the 1950s. . . . It is in good part by restoring the temporality of practice that Bourdieu breaks with the structuralist paradigm" (Bourdieu and Wacquant 137, n. 91). In other words, central to any general economy of practices would be this restoration of temporality: "practice unfolds in time and it has all the correlative properties . . . that synchronization destroys" ( The Logic of Practice 81). Thus Bourdieu's analysis of the gift exchange in Outline of a Theory of Practice argues that Lévi-Strauss collapses time in his account, and is therefore unable to understand the "misrecognition of the reality of the objective 'mechanism' of the exchange, a reality which an immediate response brutally exposes" (5-6; my emphasis). The economy of symbolic capital analyzed here depends upon the intervention of time to be effective--time that separates discrete practices, allows room for strategy, and enables the nature of the exchange to be misrecognized. Bourdieu argues that this same logic of practice (and denial of interest), now "expelled" from the "area of 'economic' transactions . . . finds its favoured refuge in the domain of art and 'culture,' the site of pure consumption--of money, of course, but also of time" ( The Logic of Practice 133-134). In other words, cultural capital operates according to this same logic of delay, denial and misrecognition made possible above all by the intervention of time. [13] By contrast, Bourdieu makes clear that in economic exchange, and thus in exchange value, the "temporality of practice" is eliminated.

This "concrete time" of strategy, of the interval, opposed as it is to the synchronization of exchange, marks the specificity of use and of use value. [14] In both the cultural and economic fields, concrete time defines utility, and thus has to be bracketed. In and for the field of culture, a consideration of time threatens to reveal the workings of calculation and of interest--determining the appropriate and most profitable moment to reciprocate in the gift exchange, for instance--and has therefore to be denied. Aesthetics suggests that the appreciation of culture is immediate and hence disinterested and leads to what Bourdieu terms the "ideology" or "cult of the 'gift'" that denies the time-consuming labor of "apprenticeship" required to accumulate cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction 129, 130). In and for the field of economics, on the other hand, it is the moment of calculation that is instantaneous. Even though economics is an art of forecasting and perhaps long-term investment, its time is abstract and is measured out in increments (discount rates and APRs). Payment has to be punctual while, as Michel de Certeau observes, the unpredictable time and rhythms of use in consumption, the " ways of using" commodities, "paradoxically . . . become invisible in the universe of codification and generalized transparency" (35). Concrete time, then, can be contrasted to the "abstract time" of the contract instituted in and through exchange.

This is clear in any analysis of simple commodity exchange and use: whereas a given commodity can be exchanged (can realize its exchange value) at any time and in a legal instant, it is used (it realizes its use value) according to a temporality or a set of rhythms that may be determined by the particularity of the commodity itself, or of its user(s). Let us examine such a simple exchange. If I buy Great Expectations at a bookstore, I pay for it at the cash register and its exchange value is realized in an instant. As far as the bookstore is concerned, they will total all such exchanges made on a given day or during a given quarter to determine the total balance of transactions more or less irrespective of which particular book I have bought and when except in so far as they are concerned with replacing their stock and whether their profits are increasing or decreasing. On the other hand, I may take the book home and read it, or not, at my leisure according to a temporality determined both by the structure of the novel and by the interruptions of my everyday life.

Traditionally, only the exchange at the cash register and its attendant calculations concern economics. In Marxist terms, the price paid is related to the book's value which is a combination of: the value of its means of production; the value of the variable capital (wages) required for the reproduction of the socially necessary labor time; and the value of the surplus, which is more or less equal to profit. Everything else in the exchange concerns use value--why I should want to read Dickens rather than William Gibson, say, or whether I enjoy the book or not--and does not enter into the calculations of traditional economics. On the other hand, for Bourdieu this is only the beginning of the story: selecting and then reading the book require a certain amount of cultural (particularly linguistic) capital, and the benefits of such investment yield an amount of cultural capital which may acquire a new form of exchangeable value at an academic dinner party or job interview, or if I pass an exam or am granted an educational diploma. This is the case even (and especially) if in buying the book I am not considering that it might bring me such temporal benefits: my attitude to it is likely to be that much more casual and thus "natural" if I deny interestedness; if I am already familiar with other Dickens novels, it is that much more likely that I will be able to adopt such an attitude.

Thus whereas for an orthodox economist the choice of Great Expectations over Neuromancer or the reading history of the customer are of no concern, for the economist of cultural capital such distinctions are the essential points of analysis. Indeed, Bourdieu appears to overturn the common economistic conception that use is the immediate and uncomplex satisfaction of need: Bourdieu restores time and strategy (thus, concrete time) to a consideration of the exchange process. He points to the fact that the initial, economic, exchange only initiates a process as a result of which use value may be transformed into a new form of value, and thus may produce cultural capital, at a scene removed from the initial, economic exchange. It is important to note that the realization of cultural capital on my part is not guaranteed and depends not only on the book I have chosen but also on my use of the book and my ability to put it to use. Use value is not equivalent to cultural capital. [15] Cultural capital and economic capital, and the processes that produce them, may in some sense mirror each other, but this is far from saying that all aspects of social exchange that are ignored by political economy are then taken up by cultural economy, or vice versa . The question now then is that of the relation between these two processes: is the first, economic, realization of capital (on the part of the bookseller) really equivalent to the second, the realization of cultural capital (at the job interview or wherever)?



socially necessary labor time and surplus value

Here we return to Marx. For the erasure of use value from economics has been far from absolute. Marx's essential difference from classical economics lies not only in his recognition of the role of surplus (and hence exploitation), but also and concomitantly in his acceptance of use value as an economic category in certain decisive circumstances. [16] Marx argues that "nothing is . . . more erroneous than to assert that the distinction between use value and exchange value, which falls outside the characteristic economic form in simple circulation . . . falls outside it in general" ( Grundrisse 646). Moreover, his stress on use value and his stress on exploitation are part of one and the same argument: Marx understands the process of capitalist production and exploitation itself in terms of a contradiction between use value and exchange value--a contradiction that is also, as we have seen, one between abstract and concrete time.

In the Grundrisse , Marx notes: "Does not use value as such enter into the form itself, as a determinant of the form itself . . . in the relation of capital and labour?" (267). Marx is particularly concerned with the exchange between capital and labor, and with the special property of labor power as a use value. In the labor process, capital takes advantage of the fact that the use value of labor power is distinct from its exchange value. The use value of labor power for the capitalist consists in the fact that it is able to valorize more capital than is necessary for its own subsistence:

the value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power valorizes in the labour-process, are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference was what the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing the labour-power. . . . it is a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself. (Marx, Capital 300-1)

It is this discrepancy between the use value of labor and its exchange value that is the source of surplus value and hence profit: surplus value arises as the difference between the capital input to the production process (the combination of constant capital and variable capital, the latter paid as wages and hence as labor power's exchange value) and what is produced (as realized in the sale of the produced commodities, which incorporate constant capital valorized by labor power in the production process). As the commodities produced in this process are sold by capitalists to realize this surplus, the labor they incorporate is alienated from the workers, presented to them (in the market) as an object for consumption; the total value of the commodities is measured in terms of the amount of dead labor time they incorporate.

Most important for our present analysis is that this process of exploitation is enabled through positing abstract time as the measure of value. In other words, the exchange of labor power for its value as the wage is an abstraction of value measured in terms of socially necessary labor time. Hence the labor theory of value: value is not merely accumulated labor, but rather an accumulation of quantifiable labor, with socially necessary labor time as its measure. It is this abstraction that enables both the extraction of surplus, and its mystification as an alienated, fetishized relation. The phrase "socially necessary labor time" signifies not only that the quantity of labor time is socially determined to be "necessary," but more importantly still that the very form of quantification as labor time is also (socially and thus systematically) determined as "necessary." Socially necessary labor time is not simply a quantification of time, but in this very quantification constitutes a change in time's quality. As Moishe Postone argues, "this category represents the transformation of concrete time into abstract time in capitalism" (301). This is the essence of alienation and hence exploitation, which results from the fact that the concrete time characterizing the use of labor power (the rhythms and particularities of the working day) is transmuted into the quantifiable abstract time deemed socially necessary for its reproduction (so many hours per week at so much per hour). Moreover, reciprocally capitalism's abstract time comes to dominate and influence the concrete time in so far as the rhythm of events (or practice) comes to be determined increasingly by the dictates of abstract time. For example, capitalist demands for efficiency may involve speeding up the labor process (and so a densification of concrete time) or a particular mode of time regulation outside of the production process (in schools or hospitals or even holiday camps) thus generalizing social alienation and determining in part developments within the field of culture. As Postone puts it: "It is the temporal dimension of the abstract domination that characterizes the structure of alienated social relations in capitalism" (191).

Yet however much abstract time may tend to influence or determine concrete time, the two forms of time are permanently in contradiction. This is a contradiction that parallels the contradiction between labor power's use value and its exchange value and likewise (and as an integral part of the same process) is made productive for capital. For the abstract quantification of time is socially constituted as insufficient to represent the full amount of concrete time (use value) expended over the working day: a surplus is produced, less or more according to the working day and the socially determined productivity of the branch of production in which the labor process is taking place. The surplus, which is essentially surplus time, time wasted, from the point of view of the worker, is then the source of surplus value and the transformation of value into capital. While it is true that all his or her working time is alienated from the point of view of the worker, it is so only thanks to the specific surplus labor-time in which "the worker does indeed expend labour-power, he does work, but his labour is no longer necessary labour, and he creates no value for himself" (Marx, Capital 325). It is this surplus, as we have seen, that drives the whole system. The fact that this contradiction determines that all labor-time is alienated (and, in influencing concrete time more generally, tends towards the alienation of everyday life) marks capitalism's distinction from other modes of production such as feudalism, in which there is a separation between necessary labor-time (in which the peasant works for him or herself) and surplus labor-time (in which he or she works for the feudal landlord). It is in this sense that capital is a "social relationship" (Marx, Capital 998) that thus permeates the social world. I want to suggest that exactly the same process of valorization, determined by a specific contradiction between concrete time and abstract time, constitutes cultural capital. Cultural capital arises from the fact that only a certain proportion of the activities that make up the concrete time of use value are valorized by the agents of cultural accreditation.



the struggle against valorization

Just as economic capital is a result of the constitutive under-valorization through abstraction of concrete laboring (that is, sensuous) activity, so cultural capital has to be understood not in terms of productive or unproductive activity (for consumption through use is only secondarily productive) but in terms of precisely this mechanism of under-valorization. By "under-valorization" I mean the process by which activity is not rewarded according to what it is worth. The fact that labor struggles have consistently been fought over the wage and the length of the working day demonstrates the ways in which workers have focussed on precisely this index of valorization, asserting their own mechanisms of auto-valorization in contradistinction to the abstract and constitutively exploitative valorization of capital. As Marx notes, "The establishment of a normal working day is the result of centuries of struggle between the capitalist and the worker" ( Capital 382). But we should also note that this struggle has not merely been to reduce the absolute amount of labor-time or the proportion of surplus to necessary labor; rather at stake has also been precisely the "normalization" of the working day and the imposition of socially necessary labor time as measure of value. Peter Linebaugh describes the struggles against the institutionalization of the wage on the part of the eighteenth-century British working class: as the "customary appropriation" which workers had taken to be part of their legitimate remuneration was criminalized, so "money rationalized class society" and the "monetary abstracting of human labour as wages" (440) instituted a new regime of discipline (in which the efforts of Jeremy Bentham, inventor of the panopticon, were instrumental). This, Linebaugh argues, "foreshadowed the discipline of the industrial order: punctuality and obedience to the factory clock; . . . a continuous working day; . . . a new language in refraining from profanity; . . . and . . . the punctilious recognition of meum et tuum even when property was socialized in production" (441). None of this was imposed without a fight, as is evidenced by the constant attempt to discipline London's "many-headed multitude" through the "thanatocracy" of Tyburn's gallows (42).

Likewise, cultural struggles over valorization for "non-canonical" works or subaltern cultural practices are also struggles over the proportion of surplus to "socially necessary" activity in the everyday lives of the masses of the population. They are struggles over the mode and extent of the conversion of the concrete time of use into the abstract time of exchange. Attempts to expand the canon or to introduce to it works or practices that are more widely read or seen or performed are thus attempts to ensure their valorization. They are a demand that the time that these practices entail should be recognized, above all by the institutions of accreditation charged with the consecration, and as such valorization, of cultural production. In other words, struggles over multiculturalism and so on that express themselves as a demand that hitherto un- or undervalued cultural practices should be valorized are an indirect recognition of the productivity of consumption--of the productivity of what aesthetics and political economy demean or ignore by bracketing as simple utility.

After all, consumption and production are immediately the same activity: Marx recognized that production can also (and simultaneously) be described as the process by which the worker "consumes the means of production with his labour, and converts them into products with a higher value than that of the capital advanced. This is his productive consumption" ( Capital 717). What Marx did not recognize, however, was that what he called the worker's "individual consumption," outside the labor process, should also be seen as productive. Marx saw this individual consumption as taking up "the time in which he belongs to himself, and performs his necessary vital functions outside the production process" (717). However, this depiction implies that the worker as absolutely without culture, a creature of necessity alone. [17] Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital (if not, admittedly, always his practice of cultural analysis) enables us rather to see consumption outside the workplace as likewise productive consumption and not simply as need-driven utility. The concept of cultural capital makes this process visible--even as political economy and aesthetics occlude and ignore the practices that occupy this concrete time in which we take the otherwise dead labor and accumulated as cultural capital in books, videos, and other products of earlier cultural production and "awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into real and effective use-value . . . infused with vital energy" (Marx, Capital 289). In short, as de Certeau argues, far from locating production only in the process that produces economic capital:

In reality, a rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and clamorous production is confronted by an entirely different kind of production, called "consumption" and characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation (the result of the circumstances), its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless but quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility, since it shows itself not in its own products (where would it place them?) but in an art of using those imposed upon it. (31)

Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital enables us to see de Certeau's description of consumption as a "different kind of production" as no metaphor, for it shows that this production takes place within an entire system of valorization, to which the struggles over cultural value also point.

Bourdieu points out that the State and, particularly, its educational system are key agents in the valorization of cultural capital. Bourdieu is thus right to insist that institutions such as the school not the sites of cultural capital's distribution, but the sites of its valorization. Guillory, like others, confuses the issue by claiming that "the school . . . regulates and thus distributes cultural capital unequally " ( Cultural Capital ix) and that "the school's historical function [is that] of distributing, or regulating access to, the forms of cultural capital" (vii) and by defining capital in terms of this unequal distribution (61). Many things are distributed unequally (from freckles to snow showers) but that does not make them capital. Bourdieu might elsewhere, as we have seen, define capital in terms of distribution (though at least he describes this uneven distribution as appropriation), but for very pragmatic reasons, perhaps the same pragmatic reasons that lead him to insist that "cultural capital" is no metaphor, he does not see the school system's primary function in terms of distribution. Rather, Bourdieu emphasizes that the school that the school operates upon pre-existent inequalities, "legitimating the reproduction of the social hierarchies by transmuting them into academic hierarchies" (Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction 153). Were the school system to work through simple unequal distribution, this would be all too soon and all to easily recognized as simple injustice. The State school system in particular, with which Bourdieu is always above all concerned, does not and cannot discriminate through unequal distribution as on the whole it has to treat all students alike in order to maintain the aura of objectivity and disinterest that then allows misrecognition of the fact that, owing to pre-existent inequalities in inherited capital, not all students are in a position to respond alike to this uniform treatment, and not all cultures that they bring to the school are valorized alike by the same uniform process of valorization. Moreover, the school is especially ruthless in devaluing the dispositions it itself distributes--for example by "denigrating a piece of academic work as too 'academic' [and thereby] . . . devalu[ing] the culture it transmits" (Bourdieu and Passeron, The Inheritors 21)--in favor of those that are gained outside of the formal education system. It is true that Bourdieu's use of the term "consecration" rather than valorization is often ambiguous, as when he suggests that the school "awards qualifications durably consecrating the position occupied in the structure of the distribution of cultural capital" ( The Logic of Practice 125; translation modified), but this would lead to a truly functionalist and circular account in which the school would be fully dependent upon a prior distribution of capital, and its legitimation (consecration) would be a matter of simply passive recognition. If the school, rather, is seen as the site of valorization--where students can never be certain of the extent to which their dispositions (expressing their experience and habitus) will be valorized--then we can better understand the way in which it also becomes a site for struggle over, precisely, its mechanisms of valorization.

The State, then, which Bourdieu terms "the central bank of symbolic credit" ( The State Nobility 376), is crucial to the valorization process. The " state magic " of " validation " (376) indicates its the role in the creation of cultural capital; here the market--or the "free market" at least--is much less important than it is in the valorization of economic capital. [18] Paradigmatically (if not uniquely), through its institutions, concrete cultural wealth (to use Postone's distinction between wealth and value) is subject to the abstract and seemingly objective social transformation into value. As a result of such operations, it will turn out that cultural activity--concrete time--spent reading Great Expectations may be socially determined as necessary activity, while the time spent reading Neuromancer may remain relatively undervalued, or as completely surplus. The State, then, tends to anchor the market of symbolic and cultural goods, indirectly providing a capital fund and so defining and regulating cultural flows and exchanges. It is true that the State does not have a complete monopoly (nor are its institutions monolithic), and that there are other, more or less competing, institutions of accreditation and valorization: the time spent with Neuromancer may be valorized at one site of accreditation more than it is elsewhere, and there is a certain amount of reversibility or play possible within the system. Moreover, valorization is not identical with sale, and the price of cultural goods or competences may still vary. In other, less centralized, markets, the gap between cultural value and price may enable negotiation according to supply and demand: this then opens up a new form of transformation problem, as also a relatively fluid space for speculation, quick profits, advantageous conversions into other forms of capital and so on.

However, the fact remains that Bourdieu consistently focusses his attention on the ups and downs of these more or less volatile cultural markets at the expense of analyzing the mechanisms of valorization itself, as the source of exploitation and surplus. Though, as Marx acknowledges in volume three of Capital , the market has real effects in value formation, especially in so far as the composition of value varies across different sectors, his critique of political economy is formulated to demonstrate that attempting to equalize demand with supply alone is impossible reformism, and that such minor disequilibria are not the source of value. Rather, a critique of the general political economy of practices shows that what is at issue is the form of the law of value itself, as a process of conversion or valorization through abstraction, which Bourdieu too uncritically accepts as when in Distinction he effectively negates the very idea of the dominated class's cultural wealth on the basis that it is not valorized in this way. Perhaps Bourdieu in the end (and as a consequence of his Republican impulses) simply sets too much stock by the way in which the State valorizes cultural capital, and hence fails to investigate other modes of valorization and other institutions that provide compensatory or even completely alternative valorization for the concrete time of subaltern or other otherwise disenfranchised subjects. Nor, then, does he look at what could be termed the auto-valorization of cultural practices that expresses a refusal to labor or work for cultural capital.

Yet, contrary to his apparent functionalism, much of Bourdieu's work must also be seen as structured around the possibility precisely of a crisis in this law of cultural value. Both Distinction and Homo Academicus are effectively traumatized by the experience of 1968--both books were researched before but written after this date, and amount at least in part to a retrospective attempt to understand this generalized revolt against precisely the law of value as a determination of socially necessary time--time to wait for a degree, to wait for a job. In describing "the collective disillusionment which results from the structural mismatch between aspiration and real probabilities" Bourdieu sees, if only temporarily, an

anti-institutional cast of mind... [that] points towards a denunciation of the tacit assumptions of the social order, a practical suspension of doxic adherence to the prizes it offers and the values it professes, and a withholding of the investments which are a necessary condition of its functioning. (Bourdieu 1984, 144)

Working more fully through a critique of the general political economy of practices towards which Bourdieu points us, and attempting to understand better the inter-relations between and mutual determinations of the various forms of capital--now understood as immanently implicated rather than in any relation of exteriority--it might now also be possible to analyze moments of rupture such as the events of 1968 in France, Italy and elsewhere as assaults on the general law of value. In the end, after all, socialism is not about struggles over the proportion of socially necessary labor time to surplus labor time. Rearranging the canon (for instance) does not in itself threaten the law of cultural value; if anything, it legitimates the institutions of valorization and consolidates the dominance of cultural capital. Socialism, rather, is about an attack on the law of value itself. In the cultural sphere, this would imply an affirmation of all the ways in which we use and live our everyday life. Taking seriously Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital might, then, be one approach to understanding what is at stake in such a struggle.

[1] I would like to thank Imre Szeman and Nicholas Brown for providing me with the opportunity to present an earlier version of this article at the conference "Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Philosophy" at Duke University in April 1995, and Fredric Jameson for his response to the paper on that occasion. Many people have read and commented on this paper in its various drafts. My thanks go especially to the following: Susan Brook, Sabine Engel, Kathy Green, David Harvie, Jeremy Lane, Alberto Moreiras, Tom Schumacher, and Imre Szeman. Also to the economists: Steve Keen for his very helpful suggestions on the dialectic of use value and exchange value (and for discussing theories of marginal utility); and Massimo de Angelis for originally pointing me in this line of enquiry by asking me what I meant by capital in discussing Bourdieu. Massimo, I hope you're happy now!

[2] Calls for analysis of political economy by cultural studies theorists such as Meaghan Morris and Lawrence Grossberg make them exceptions that prove the general rule that cultural studies has long since discarded serious study of economics. Grossberg writes that "cultural studies must explicitly return to questions of economics, to questions that were strategically bracketed at various moments of its history." My argument would be that an unexamined use of terms such as "cultural capital" may introduce the aura of economics all the better to bracket off the real questions it poses.

[3] Translation my own. This quotation comes from discussion of a paper by Bourdieu later published as "On the Fundamental Ambivalence of the State," though the discussion itself remains unpublished.

[4] It is important to note--and I thank David Harvie for this reminder--that economic capital is of course not essential for exploitation. There is exploitation in non-capitalist modes of production (feudalism, for example), and there are non-capitalist forms of exploitation within capitalism (women's unpaid domestic labor). It is then immediately obvious that an expanded notion of capital, that might account for such non-capitalist exploitation, could also entail a significant revision of what is meant by "capitalism" itself.

[5] Of course, the Althusserian approach also appears indefinitely to postpone that "last" analysis. Bourdieu's incorporation of the economic into the cultural, via the concept of cultural capital, could be seen as making the economic equally determinant in the first analysis.

[6] This could be said to be the case in Bourdieu's analysis of Kabylia in so far as he demonstrates the economic logic that underlies gift exchanges, even though that logic is the logic of symbolic rather than financial (or "strictly" economic) capital. Bourdieu describes the way modernization processes entail the abstraction of strictly economic logic from the realm of symbolic capital to constitute a separate, economic field. This then leaves culture as a sphere apart in which economic calculation remains hidden. Complicating this analysis of the genesis of the economic field, however, is that Bourdieu appears to offer a quite different (in fact, diametrically opposed) analysis in "The Market of Symbolic Goods."

[7] Guillory therefore suggests that "it may be better to invoke the paradigm of 'mercantile' capital . . . to account for how embodied labor, in Bourdieu's sense, might enter into a cycle of accumulation (and therefore become capital)" (382). As I argue below, however, such an approach would ignore the importance of the State for Bourdieu's analysis, especially for Bourdieu's account of capital's valorization.

[8] Another way of putting this is that Bourdieu here implies that capital always pre-exists appropriation (rather than being its product). For Marx, too, capital may, and almost always does, pre-exist a given production process--in the form of fixed capital such as machinery or materials. However, the point is that that capital does not produce value; it merely remains constant. Marx, moreover, understands primitive accumulation as the process that lies outside capitalism but also founds it to initiate the production process; Bourdieu, on the other hand, seems to have no place for primitive accumulation as he seems to imply that capital is simply always already present. Where he does discuss "the primitive accumulation of cultural capital" he does so in terms of "the total or partial monopolizing of the society's symbolic resources" ( The Logic of Sense 125), which again hardly explains how these resources become capital.

[9] And Bourdieu understands value itself, we can now see, in a framework reminiscent more of Ricardo than of Marx: Bourdieu defines value in terms of labor but not labor power .

[10] The distinction between these two perspectives upon exchange is expressed in the difference between the circulation C-M-C, for which "consumption, the satisfaction of needs, in short use-value, is . . . its final goal" and M-C-M (or, more properly, M-C-M', given that the capitalist hopes to make a profit by realizing surplus-value in exchange value) whose "driving and motivating force, its determining purpose, is . . . exchange-value" (Marx, Capital 250).

[11] Obviously, utility is defined differently in each field, and indeed the fields are (as Guillory argues) something like mirror images of each other "separated at birth" ( Cultural Capital 303). Within the cultural field, utility is defined in terms of calculation, distinguished from the natural and unmediated appreciation of the work of art; in economics, utility is defined in terms of natural and unmediated consumption of the commodity, distinguished from the calculation associated with exchange value.

[12] The question as to why Bourdieu should opt for silence on economics is interesting, if somewhat outside the scope of this paper. What seems clear, however, is that the stake of this decision lies as much in the analysis of culture as in the analysis of the economy: in other words, the effect of a silence on economics is equally, and with perhaps more important implications for Bourdieu, a silence on aspects of culture. By ignoring the question of exploitation, and focussing rather on appropriation as extrinsic to the capital relation, Bourdieu also keeps his relative silence on popular culture. Or, as Jeremy Lane suggests,

Couldn't it be argued that this relates to his desire, when all is said and done, to retain some notion of the inherent value of 'legitimate' culture, so that changing the contingent conditions of unequal distribution and appropriation of cultural capital, rather than attacking what it is that is counted as 'legitimate' culture, remains Bourdieu's ultimate goal? This, of course, would relate to Bourdieu's constant hostility to the notion that popular cultural forms, rather than legitimate culture, should be valorised. (personal communication)

At the same time, it should be noted (as I argue below) that Bourdieu's analysis of the school system recognizes that schooling cannot simply be the site and means of cultural capital's unequal distribution . But Bourdieu's silence on economics in part prevents him from recognizing the consequences of that insight.

[13] The specificity of cultural capital vis-à-vis symbolic capital is that the former can be accumulated; literacy, for instance, therefore "ensure[s] the perpetuation of cultural resources which would otherwise disappear with the agents who bear them" ( The Logic of Practice 125).

[14] Moishe Postone defines concrete time as "the various forms of time that are functions of events. . . . The modes of reckoning associated with concrete time do not depend on a continuous succession of constant temporal units but either are based on events . . . or on temporal units that vary" (201).

[15] Just as exchange value is not equivalent to economic capital. But this is a misleading parallel, because the point is that both use value and exchange value enter into the production of both cultural and economic capital; in both cases, what is important, as I argue further on, is the contradiction between use value and exchange value (as expressed in the abstraction of concrete time).

[16] Though it is true that this remains unrecognized by a long line of traditional Marxists (as Steve Keen argues).

[17] Ironically, of course, this is also something like the attitude Bourdieu takes in Distinction ; were he to have resolved his ambivalence over the precise nature of cultural capital, however, he would not be able to take such a position.

[18] Here then I would quibble again with Guillory when he talks of "the commanding position of the market at the center of [Bourdieu's] social universe" ("Bourdieu's Refusal" 387). The point at least is that the cultural market bears very little resemblence to the free market envisaged by orthodox economics, and the State plays a much greater role. Indeed, as I suggest further on, Bourdieu should probably be criticized for adhering over-much to the State's role in the valorization of capital, which thus blinds him to the effectivity of subaltern practices.



works cited



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-----. "A Reply to Some Objections." In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology . Trans. Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. 106-119.

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-----. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power . Trans. Lauretta Clough. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.

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----- and Jean-Claude Passeron. The Inheritors: French Students and their Relation to Culture . Trans. Richard Nice. Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1979.

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Lane, Jeremy. Pierre Bourdieu in Context: Ethnology and Sociology in the Era of French Late Capitalism . Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Stirling: June 1998. London: Pluto, forthcoming.

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Wallerstein, Immanuel, moderator. Colloquium on "L'Avenir des Ideologies, les Ideologies de l'Avenir." Session V with Pierre Bourdieu, Toni Negri and others. 13 March 1993. Typescript transcription courtesy of Pierre Bourdieu.





JON BEASLEY-MURRAY

University of British Columbia

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last updated October 31, 2004