Page 91 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

DAVID C. CHANEY

representations of meanings and values in much the same way as units of cur-
rency are commonly taken to represent economic value. But meanings and
values for the social theorist Georg Simmel and those influenced by him have
vitality only in networks of relationships. The circulation of fashionable items is
a way of marking inclusion as well as exclusion. It is therefore a way of playing
with creativity that is equivalent to the creativity of language use (on Simmel
and fashion see Gronow 1997).
In the second perspective, most commonly associated with the French social
theorist Pierre Bourdieu, a symbolic repertoire is approached as a form of
capital (Bourdieu 1984). In the same way that mastery of a language is associ-
ated with high status and is a means of aggressively reminding inferiors of their
lack of skills, mastery of cultural or symbolic capital enables high-status groups
both to display their privileges and to manipulate cultural vocabularies to the
continual disadvantage of those with fewer cultural resources. The metaphor of
cultural capital can therefore be used to explain the persistence of established
structures of privilege through generations, and to illuminate the distinctive
expertise of new strata of intellectuals who have been generated by shifts in the
dominant modes of production from industrial goods to information and
design skills (Lash and Urry 1987, 1994).
The third perspective begins one can say with the de ficiencies of language.
In the same way that in mass society we do not have a single culture, neither do
we speak a single language. Within a general group such as English we are
forced to recognize a variety of styles and variants colored by borrowings
and adaptations so that English speakers comprise a number of speech
communities. And again these communities are no longer clearly distinct or
homogeneous. It is clear that whether or not we possess an innate linguistic
competence that enables us to grasp rules of grammar and structure, in every-
day interaction we display a communicative – or in this context we could say
a ‘cultural’ – competence so that the process of symbolic use is patterned by
loose forms or styles (the title of this third perspective is then ‘symbolic styles’).
The crucial feature of this perspective is that cultural symbols are used more or
less self-consciously in the course of which they are adapted and transformed.
It follows that meaning is not something ‘there’ in what we say or do or in the
world around us to be appreciated correctly or not, but is something made in
the politics of social practice. Although the cultures of mass society frequently
concern ‘material’ entities, for example the goods of mass consumption, in the
process of using these entities they are in important ways ‘dematerialized’,
destabilized, made into forms of representation (Chaney 1998).
The perspectives on the analogy with language for cultural symbolism I have
just outlined are not mutually exclusive. They are not set out as a set of choices
but rather to indicate how we might begin to understand the relationships
between culture and society in an era of mass communication and entertain-
ment. On the one hand I have noted how cultural symbols have become com-
modities marketed as decor and taste as well as experience (the most elaborate

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