Digifesto

A key idea of Bourdieusian social theory is that society’s structure is due to the distribution of multiple kinds of capital. Social fields have their roles and their rules, but they are organized around different forms of capital the way physical systems are organized around sources of force like mass and electrical charge. Being Kantian, Bourdieusian social theory is compatible with both positivist and phenomenological forms of social explanation. Phenomenological experience, to the extent that it repeats itself and so can be described aptly as a social phenomenon at all, is codified in terms of habitus. But habitus is indexed to its place within a larger social space (not unlike, it must be said, a Blau space) whose dimensions are the dimensions of the allocations of capital throughout it.

While perhaps not strictly speaking a corollary, this view suggests a convenient methodological reduction, according to which the characteristic beliefs of a habitus can be decomposed into components, each component representing the interests of a certain kind of capital. When I say “the interests of a capital”, I do mean the interests of the typical person who holds a kind of capital, but also the interests of a form of capital, apart from and beyond the interests of any individual who carries it. This is an ontological position that gives capital an autonomous social life of its own, much like we might attribute an autonomous social life to a political entity like a state. This is not the same thing as attributing to capital any kind of personhood; I’m not going near the contentious legal position that corporations are people, for example. Rather, I mean something like: if we admit that social life is dictated in part by the life cycle of a kind of psychic microorganism, the meme, then we should also admit abstractly of social macroorganisms, such as capitals.

What the hell am I talking about?

Well, the most obvious kind of capital worth talking about in this way is money. Money, in our late modern times, is a phenomenon whose existence depends on a vast global network of property regimes, banking systems, transfer protocols, trade agreements, and more. There’s clearly a naivete in referring to it as a singular or homogeneous phenomenon. But it is also possible to referring to in a generic globalized way because of the ways money markets have integrated. There is a sense in which money exists to make more money and to give money more power over other forms of capital that are not money, such as: social authority based on any form of seniority, expertise, lineage; power local to an institution; or the persuasiveness of an autonomous ideal. Those that have a lot of money are likely to have an ideology very different from those without a lot of money. This is partly due to the fact that those who have a lot of money will be interested in promoting the value of that money over and above other capitals. Those without a lot of money will be interested inn promoting forms of power that contest the power of money.

Another kind of capital worth talking about is cosmopolitanism. This may not be the best word for what I’m pointing at but it’s the one that comes to mind now. What I’m talking about is the kind of social capital one gets not by having a specific mastery of a local cultural form, but rather by having the general knowledge and cross-cultural competence to bridge across many different local cultures. This form of capital is loosely correlated with money but is quite different from it.

A diagnosis of recent shifts in U.S. politics, for example, could be done in terms of the way capital and cosmopolitanism have competed for control over state institutions.