One of my good readers tipped me off that Daniel Allington has a post on his blog discussing some of my posts about the concept of cultural capital. His blog looks interesting, thoughtful and worth checking out. You'll be able to make your own minds up about the cogency of what he says about my views, but you probably also know me well enough to realize that I'd have a few things to say.
I think what he says is a travesty of what I wrote mainly because he seems to believe, or at least strongly imply, that my objection is to the use of metaphors per se. No, that isn't it at all and anyone that reads closely what I wrote should be able to see that. In as far as metaphors are representations of something we want to understand it is difficult to see how we could do without them. This is Toulmin's point, together with the idea that representations have a purpose. When somebody studying optics draws a ray diagram and talks about light rays "traveling" this is a useful metaphor. It helps us to understand a phenomenon like the length of a shadow cast by a wall on a sunny day. Of course the metaphor has its limits; it makes no sense to ask what kind of car is it traveling in? For the purpose of understanding the "propagation" of light it is a better metaphor than that of the eye "sweeping" the horizon, with or without a broom. The metaphor is a representation with a delimited domain of applicability.
He also seems to believe that my objective is to "invalidate" the cultural capital metaphor and thus "refute" the "theory of cultural capital", at least that is what I understand by the lines:
"Pointing out that social and
cultural resources do not behave exactly like economic capital does not,
therefore, invalidate the ‘cultural capital’ metaphor, much less refute the
theory of cultural capital."
If it were true that this was my aim, then I would be an idiot and fully deserve a bit of a pasting, but I'm afraid Dr Allington has rather firmly got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Firstly I've no idea what it would mean to invalidate a metaphor. Metaphors can be obscure, enlightening, even fruitful, but invalid...? I have a dim recollection of one of my I. A. Richards inspired english teachers inviting us to consider whether some of Milton's metaphors in Samson Agonistes were good or bad, but never whether they were invalid. Likewise I would be a bit of a klutz if I were to believe that quibbling about the usefulness of a concept would be sufficient to refute a theory. I don't really know what would refute the "theory of cultural capital" because I don't know what the theory is and strongly suspect there is no coherent theory beyond some banal essentially empirical generalizations that have been the commonplace in educational sociology for 50 odd years.
So we are left then with a bit of an impasse. Dr Allington believes that the concept of cultural capital has been fruitful and cites as his evidence Bourdieu's Distinction (and a 2008 article by some Danish social scientists). I've not read the latter, but we'll just have to agree to disagree about the former. I know it is lauded as one of the great pieces of social science of the 20th Century, but I wonder how many of those chanting the panegyrics have actually read it from cover to cover? All I can say is that even by the standards of its time the empirical work it contains is of extremely poor quality and much of the prose is so excruciatingly obscure that it is impossible to figure out what is being claimed. Moreover the bits that it is possible to understand usually turn out to be completely banal. Chacun à son goût.
Still several positive thing seem to come out of all this. Firstly I have finally found a Bourdieusian who is willing to accept that "cultural capital" = "cultural resources", or at least that is what I take the import of Dr Allington's final paragraph to be. If I'm wrong then please fill in the blank space: "cultural capital" = "cultural resources" + ______ . And secondly I find myself in the company of another unlikely ally. It seems that Geoffrey Hodgson has been voicing rather similar thoughts about Bourdieu's use of the C word.
First Richard Jenkins and now Geoffrey Hodgson, the internet is a wonder for drawing your attention to what you share with all sorts of people you thought you would have little in common with. And that must be a good thing.
Pointing
out that social and cultural resources do not behave exactly like
economic capital does not, therefore, invalidate the ‘cultural capital’
metaphor, much less refute the theory of cultural capital. - See more
at:
http://www.danielallington.net/2013/12/capital-as-metaphor/#sthash.QnnnVGiq.dpuf
Pointing
out that social and cultural resources do not behave exactly like
economic capital does not, therefore, invalidate the ‘cultural capital’
metaphor, much less refute the theory of cultural capital. - See more
at:
http://www.danielallington.net/2013/12/capital-as-metaphor/#sthash.QnnnVGiq.dpuf
Pointing
out that social and cultural resources do not behave exactly like
economic capital does not, therefore, invalidate the ‘cultural capital’
metaphor, much less refute the theory of cultural capital - See more at:
http://www.danielallington.net/2013/12/capital-as-metaphor/#sthash.QnnnVGiq.dpuf
Posts
3 comments:
Dear Dr Mills
Thank you for doing me the honour of a response to my response to your essay on the term ‘cultural capital’ – and for recommending my blog to your readers, despite my disagreement with you. On that subject, you are right that one would have to ‘be a bit of a klutz... to believe that quibbling about the usefulness of a concept would be sufficient to refute a theory’, but while I would not accuse you of such a belief, the way in which you constructed your initial argument apparently requires your readers to reject a theory purely on the basis of your critique of a metaphor: at the end of your piece, you conclude that the ‘cultural capital’ metaphor does not ‘take its place at the heart of a fruitful theory’, yet the preceding discussion relates only to the metaphor itself and not to the theory at whose heart it (or rather, the concept that it names) has a place. Perhaps this observation may explain why someone unacquainted with your intentions in writing the piece might end up holding what you consider to be ‘the wrong end of the stick’.
At the conclusion of your reply to the first comment on your essay, you imply that those who use capital as a metaphor for resources are ‘charlatans’ – or perhaps, people who’ve been taken in by charlatans (I’m not entirely sure which). Ultimately, I use terms like ‘cultural capital’ because people who research the things that I research generally understand what those terms refer to: that is, intangible, unequally-distributed resources whose possession confers advantage within particular contexts. This precise meaning would probably be conveyed less effectively if I were to invent and use alternative terms that avoided the ‘capital’ metaphor (this being the intended import of the final paragraph of my aforementioned essay). I’m not sure whether this information helps to fill in the blank space above.
With best regards
Daniel
"Intangible, unequally-distributed [cultural] resources whose possession confers advantages within certain contexts" sounds good to me though the "cultural" is surely necessary to exclude other intangible things like promises to pay at a future date which might be regarded as capital in the economic sense, and the "within certain contexts" is redundant because that must be true of all resources - all the tea in China is of no use to you if you are dying of thirst in the Sahara.
I still believe that "cultural resources" is much more transparent and less obfuscatory than "cultural capital" and I find it difficult to believe that anyone (perhaps outside of a small sociological coterie)would be genuinely confused by the former but enlightened by the latter. However I'm happy to concede that this is simply an empirical question about which, in the absence of relevant data, neither of us knows the answer.
Still, I think we've made progress, or at least I feel I have. If your "cultural capital" is just my "cultural resources" under another label with no extra je ne sais crois, then the ground is clear to ask more interesting questions like:
If cultural resources that have their origin in the family are so important for progress in the educational system how come so many people in the UK without such resources managed to succeed?
Possible answers: maybe they got them from elsewhere - school, libraries, television - maybe in some domains - science, mathematics, engineering, other things are more important.
The problem is that with regard to schools, Bourdieu wants to tell us that they are mostly about reproduction of existing inequalities. But this is just factually inadequate. For many people, at least in my generation, they also were sources of cultural resources, as were libraries and the mass media.
‘ “within certain contexts” is redundant because that must be true of all resources’
Yes, you’re right. Perhaps I should have said something like: ‘intangible, unequally-distributed resources whose possession confers advantage because they are prized within particular contexts.’ I think there might be a case for distinguishing resources whose possession is advantageous for some intrinsic reason from the resources that I’d be more likely to refer to as ‘capital’, i.e. those whose possession is advantageous because people tend to think highly of people who possess them – which is not to deny that there is considerable overlap between the two. For example, learning to speak French is advantageous for an English speaker because it directly facilitates communication with French speakers who don’t speak English, but it’s also advantageous because having learnt to speak an additional language (especially a traditionally prestigious one such as French) is often regarded as an impressive achievement. Some reference to context is necessary because it is important who prizes a given resource. Expertise in playing the latest computer game might impress some people more than fluency in French, for example, but they probably won’t be the sort of people who would be able to offer the person in question a place at a ‘good’ university, for example.
When it comes to education, I think it depends on whether we’re talking about what individual schools aim to achieve or the outcomes of the school system as a whole. All schools try to provide their pupils with advantages, and, to the extent that they all succeed, this tends to produce equality. But (for various reasons) some schools are able to provide their pupils with more advantages than others, and, to the extent that those schools are attended by the children of wealthier and higher status parents, this tends to reproduce existing inequalities.
I think you make a very good point about ‘other things’ being more important than cultural resources/capital in domains such as engineering. Although I’ve never researched this, it’s my impression that certain subjects at university level seem to be more diverse than others in terms of the social origin of those that study (and teach) them, and that this may have something to do with the sort of intangible resources with which they are associated. There is something of this in your essay from the end of January last year:
http://oxfordsociology.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/a-levels-back-to-future.html
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