Answer silenlty

1. Answer silenlty • What type of music do you listen to? (Assign a percentage – rap 20%, classical 30%, rock 20%) • What sports do you play? • What are three of your favorite meals? • Who painted “El Guernica”? • What name is associated with “The Blue • Danube”?

2. Pierre Bourdieu’s Aristocracy of culture

3. Question • What does it mean when we say that a person is cultured?

4. Cultural capital • Post-Marxist thinkers like Pierre Bourdieu have attempted to understand Marx beyond strict economic capital – to look beyond the question of who has the financial reasons to structure society. • Cultural capital, then, is the markers that solicit status in society (knowledge of music, the books you read, the films you watch)

5. slippage • Class habitus (the recurring behaviors of certain people) creates internalized norms and scripts to follow. This is why we say a person has “good breeding” – they know proper etiquette and possess “classic” knowledge. • Acquiring wealth, then, doesn’t change the fact that the person grew up in the “wrong” class. And said person lives in fear of linguistic SLIPPAGE.

6. Bourdieu’s work • Bourdieu generates a survey in which he indexes people according to class and education in order to observe their awareness of culture (paintings, music, etc.). Not surprisingly, he finds that there is a strong correlation between class and "cultural" knowledge.

7. Supply and demand • With capital, even cultural capital, the rules of supply and demand are still at play. When few people have access to culture (say the money and knowledge to consume opera), it is more highly valued.

8. Cont… • Music is considered the most spiritual of art forms and is high interest to the bourgeois: "For a bourgeois world which conceives its relation to the populace in terms of the relationship of the soul to the body, 'insensitivity to music' doubtless represents a particularly unavowable form of materialist coarseness" (19).

9. Cont… • There are two main forms of cultural capital -- academic capital and inherited capital. The educational system, then, works by attribution of status a positive (ennobling) or negative (stigmatizing) quality by including and excluding certain parts of culture in the classroom (23).

10. Cinema • Even within cinema, there is a privileging of knowing names of directors over actual experiences of cinema going (26). It’s more important that you can recognize an important artist than have anything significant to say about said artist. The best illustration of cultural capital might be the way in which we treat film in relation to literature – we say people are “well read”; we study English, not film.

11. Art • High culture art values aesthetic distance (meaning that you are not connected to the work; the book has a more abstract quality). High culture proves its legitimacy through the intellect and through inaccessibility. Low culture is seen as a "vulgar surrender to easy seduction and collective enthusiasm" (35).

12. Art • Photography is seen as a lesser art mostly because of its accessibility (39). Furthermore, the working class tend to desire more utilitarian qualities in a photograph – a photo of pebbles would be seen by the working class as a "waste of film" or people not knowing what to do with their time (41).

13. Cont… • “It must never be forgotten that the working-class 'aesthetic' is a dominated 'aesthetic' which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics” (41). • Stephen Dubner shows patterns of names for kids where once the middle class starts “stealing” upper names, the upper class begins to shift names to create distance.

14. Criticism of marx • Bourdieu criticizes Marxists for offering economic interpretations of social class. That is to say that economics can not solely explain social phenomenon. • Class differences find expression in status distinctions that rank individuals and groups on scale of social honorability rather than in terms of economic interest alone.

15. structure • Class structure defined by 3 dimensions of social space and become internalized by class habitus. Each class has different preferences for sports, interior decorating, food, clothing, and leisure. • These structures create an easy separation of classes. Uppers don’t need to exclude people from the polo fields – middle class people don’t play polo.

16. questions • Can culture capital be accumulated? Can one make up for a lack of “culture”? • In what ways do you think our educational system supports or challenges the dominance of “high culture”? • So what do schools do? Do we give you the classic text that have the most cultural capital or give you modern (“more enjoyable”) texts? • How do we apply this info to The Great Gatsby and Great Expectations?

17. journal • Got done some thoughts now, absorb the discussion, and write a 1-2 page journal entry on the following topic: • What is the purpose of an English education? Is it to absorb classic novels that are important markers of your education (in other words, English is important bc you study classics that every educated person should read)? Is it to develop skills of interpreting art, interpreting life, pondering philosophical questions? Is it to churn out better writers?

18. Usefulness of Cultural Capital • Understanding cultural capital helps us better appreciate the tension between Stanley and Blanche in Streetcar. Marx’s explanation of financial capital doesn’t fully satisfy this text – Blanche doesn’t have money, but she does have good breeding and she knows how to use it. Where do we see such examples in Streetcar?

19. Cultural Cap in Streetcar • Conversely, Stella rejects the aspirational endeavors of cultural capital. She comes from a family of wealth and breeding, but she rejects that life. As Stanley puts it, he pulled her down from the columns [of Belle Reve] and she liked it.