Page 39 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

30 Cultural change and ordinary life

Enthusing

I consider the idea of enthusing, by which I mean the ways in which people
invest parts of their ordinary culture with significant levels of meaning, in
detail in Chapter 9. At this point, I introduce the two main sources of the
discussion that I will pursue. These are, first, the debates on the idea of social
capital and the idea that it is in decline in advanced western democratic soci-
eties. Second, there are the now many analyses of media-based fandom. These
literatures have tended to follow rather different paths, but I will argue that
they have useful light to throw on one another.
The basic idea of social capital is both deceptively simple and historically
well known. It is that social connections are significant in binding societies
and cultures together and that the stronger these ties are, the more likely it is
that people will trust one another. In contemporary social science there are
two important sources for the way in which I will discuss these ideas in the
book. First, there is Bourdieu’s work on capitals and, second, the thesis on the
decline and changing forms of social capital that has been most significantly
developed by Putnam.
Bourdieu has been particularly influential in the English-speaking world
through his work on culture and distinction (Bourdieu 1984). Bourdieu was, as
nearly all sociologists are, concerned with the relationship between structure
and agency. One way in which he addressed this debate was through the idea
of practice, which is captured in the idea of ‘agents’ engagement with the
objective structures of the modern world, crystallized into those patterns of
relations, with their specific determining force, that we call “fields” (economic
power, politics, cultural production, etc.’ (Fowler 2000: 1). Human beings
internalize structures, and actively live them out within habitus. It is important
to retain the emphasis on practice and activity that this involves. For Bennett
and Silva (2004: 7), Bourdieu ‘wished to stress the creative, active, and invent-
ive capacity of social actors while avoiding any notion of a transcendental
subject’. Moreover:
The concept does not form a part of any generalised account of social
stasis resulting from a singular structure of repetition characterising the
everyday, Indeed, the intelligibility of such a contention is disputed as
the everyday inevitably becomes pluralised in being dispersed across dif-
ferent habituses.
(Bennett and Silva 2004: 7)
The habitus includes our habits and our dispositions to classify the
world-specific ways that relate to our social positions. The habitus or habi-
tuses (following Bennett and Silva) are not simply mentalistic or concerned
with knowledge, but also concern our bodily habits and physical modes of
movement.
For Bourdieu, class is the critical determinant of the habitus in which we
live, but it should also be theorized as conditioned by gender (e.g. Adkins and
Skeggs 2004), ethnicity and region, and so on. As has been argued, there are
clear links with Butler’s idea of performativity (see Butler 1997: 127–63; Salih
2002: 113) and the emphasis on performance that I have introduced so far.