5 - Cultural Impact as Symbolic Capital: The Case of the Elite Intellectual Field

Summary

IN THIS FINAL CONTRIBUTION TO THE opening, theoretical section of this volume, I would like to return to the significance of impact as a metaphor through which the value of cultural products is conceptualized. As Katrin Kohl argues in the first chapter, impact is a potent and widespread image, but one that masks the complex processes involved in the reception of culture. If the illusion of a clearly definable and quantifiable imprint through which cultural worth might be measured is an alluring one for those seeking to judge culture by economic and social criteria, then it is no less appealing for those who ascribe value to works of art and literature inside the cultural field itself. Understood intuitively as the sudden collision of a natural force in motion, the impact metaphor implies that recognition for acclaimed writers requires little further explanation. The force of their creative genius and the inherent aesthetic value of their work cannot help but leave a deep crater on the surface of the cultural world.

Of course, the processes by which this cultural imprint is achieved are rather different. One need only think of the many struggles for delayed and posthumous recognition and of the essential role played by a host of mediating agents in these struggles to realize that impact operates by very different mechanisms. It is these that I intend to examine in this chapter, exploiting a theoretical framework that directly problematizes the processes by which value is ascribed to cultural objects. Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture situates cultural objects squarely within the struggle among agents in the field — not only producers, but also agents of transmission and reception. In the process, Bourdieu furnishes us with an alternative set of highly suggestive metaphors through which to understand cultural impact. Central here is the metaphor of “capital,” the currency exchanged and struggled over within the cultural field, above all in its “symbolic” form as prestige and recognition. The value of this currency is maintained only by the continuing production of belief within the field. And this “production of belief,” to draw out the key terms from Bourdieu’s essay of the same name, is seen as a process of “collective misrecognition” and of “social alchemy.”