Reading Symbolic Capital
I. SYMBOLIC CAPITAL
Roughly speaking, and according to terms set out by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1970s and 1980s, “symbolic capital” (co-extensive but not equivalent to “social capital”) is work (labor) that is leveraged for gaining traction or other tangible and intangible benefits in an increasingly inscrutable knowledge commons that is, ultimately, a capitalist ecosystem that privileges “use value” for intellectual property. “Use value,” in this case, means how works (e.g., literary or artistic works) are positioned in the prevailing ecosystem of any particular episteme (with “episteme” reducible to a minor epoch within the greater trajectory of what once was called a “zeitgeist”). These terms are generally intractable (or slippery), insofar as they denote a reductive positivist philosophy of cultural production aligned with the shifting fortunes of capitalist production. It was Michel Foucault who famously demoted the zeitgeist to episteme, in a somewhat cynical attempt to also trouble or question how subjects are generally enslaved by systems associated with punishing subjects on behalf of overlords. Both Bourdieu and Foucault, however, could be accused of a type of high-handed or feigned anomie, at least in terms of how they positioned their arguments in the then-fashionable takedown of authorized culture and what has been called authorial presence since the Enlightenment. Both might…
