Pierre Bourdieu

Famous and beloved sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher. How much do you reckon one would earn from being those three things? Off topic. Bad

Pierre Bourdieu is another referenced a lot by fan scholars. He has a lot of theories so it might be hard to get through them all and trying to adapt them to fan culture.

Main theories for consumption:

• Economic, social and cultural capital: 
  • Economic capital: command over economic resources (cash, assets).
  • Social capital: resources based on group membership, relationships, networks of influence and support. Bourdieu described social capital as "the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition."
  • Cultural capital: forms of knowledge, skills, education, and advantages that a person has, which give them a higher status in society. Parents provide their children with cultural capital by transmitting the attitudes and knowledge needed to succeed in the current educational system.
  
  
  • Cultural capital has three subtypes: embodied, objectified and institutionalised (Bourdieu, 1986:47). Bourdieu distinguishes between these three types of capital:
    • Embodied cultural capital consists of both the consciously acquired and the passively "inherited" properties of one's self (with "inherited" here used not in the genetic sense but in the sense of receipt over time, usually from the family through socialization, of culture and traditions; a meme). Cultural capital is not transmissible instantaneously like a gift or bequest; rather, it is acquired over time as it impresses itself upon one's habitus (character and way of thinking), which in turn becomes more attentive to or primed to receive similar influences.
      • Linguistic capital, defined as the mastery of and relation to language (Bourdieu, 1990:114), can be understood as a form of embodied cultural capital in that it represents a means of communication and self-presentation acquired from one's surrounding culture.
    • Objectified cultural capital consists of physical objects that are owned, such as scientific instruments or works of art. These cultural goods can be transmitted both for economic profit (as by buying and selling them with regard only to others' willingness to pay) and for the purpose of "symbolically" conveying the cultural capital whose acquisition they facilitate. However, while one can possess objectified cultural capital by owning a painting, one can "consume" the painting (understand its cultural meaning) only if one has the proper foundation of conceptually and/or historically prior cultural capital, whose transmission does not accompany the sale of the painting (except coincidentally and through independent causation, such as when a vendor or broker chooses to explain the painting's significance to the prospective buyer).
    • Institutionalized cultural capital consists of institutional recognition, most often in the form of academic credentials or qualifications, of the cultural capital held by an individual. This concept plays its most prominent role in the labor market, in which it allows a wide array of cultural capital to be expressed in a single qualitative and quantitative measurement (and compared against others' cultural capital similarly measured). The institutional recognition process thereby eases the conversion of cultural capital to economic capital by serving as a heuristic that sellers can use to describe their capital and buyers can use to describe their needs for that capital.
• Habitus: Habitus is the set of socially learned dispositions, skills and ways of acting that are often taken for granted, and which are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life.The particular contents of the habitus are the result of the objectification of social structure at the level of individual subjectivity. The habitus can be seen as counterpoint to the notions of rationality that is prevalent within other disciplines of social science research.It is perhaps best understood in relation to the notion of the 'habitus' and 'field', which describes the relationship between individual agents and the contextual environment. 
• [Thank you Wiki]
• I've realised that I spelt 'Bourdieu' wrong in my labels.....

Michel de Certeau part 2: Summary Points

Ok this is the only short summary I could find that I understood to an extent:

http://recombinant.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/the-practice-of-everyday-life-michel-de-certeau-summary-points/

For more in depth but easy-to-understand explanation (not referenced in this post):

http://www.arasite.org/decwalk.htm

The Practice of Everyday Life – Michel De Certeau – Summary Points

General Introduction

- an investigation into how ‘users’ operate
- traditionally considered to be passive and guided by established rules

- last 300 years has focused on the idea that the individual is an elementary unit of society
- groups are form out of individuals and are always reducible to individuals
- purpose of the study is to make systems of operational combination explicit
- expose the actual everyday actions of consumers
- “Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.”

Consumer Production

- studies of popular culture and marginal groups
- did not locate cultural differences in groups associated with ‘counter-culture’

Usage, or Consumption

- many studies have looked at the representations of a society on one hand and how it behaves on the other
- analysis of tv broadcast images (representation) and time spent watching tv (behaviour) should be complemented by studies of what the cultural consumer ‘makes’ or ‘does’ with these images during this time

- production vs consumption – the latter is devious, silent and invisible

- example of Spanish colonizers forcing their culture upon indigenous Indians; they did not reject or alter them but rather subverted them by using them for ends and references that the Spanish could not relate to or understand
- comparison with consumer culture; the ‘common people’, like the Indians, have a foreign culture imposed upon them by the Elites, but often subvert this culture by using it in ways the producers did not intend

- the presence and circulation of representations tells us nothing about what they mean to people
- we must analyse the manipulation of cultural objects by ‘users’ other than its makers
- difference or similarity between the production of the image and the secondary production hidden in its use

- performance vs competence; the act of speaking is not the same as having a knowledge of the language
- language is “an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its speakers”
- users make countless transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules

The Procedures of Everyday Creativity

- Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault – instead of analyzing the ‘apparatus exercising power’, he focuses on ‘the mechanisms that have sapped the strength of these institutions’
- ‘grid of discipline’ becoming more widespread; how does society resist this? how do people manipulate the mechanisms of discipline or conform to it so they can evade it?

- micro-politics as everyday tactics of evasion from the imposed dominant cultural order
- consumers who are pushed to the limit and who resist social norms form a sort of network of ‘anti-discipline’

The Formal Structure of Practice

- assumption that everyday operations conform to certain rules
- what is an art or ‘way of making’?
- popular culture = arts of making
- an art of combination that is intertwined with an art of using

- two types of investigation, 1) descriptive analysis of readers’ practices, urban spaces, everyday rituals, resues of collective memory. 2) tracing the origins of the forms of these operations, e.g. the recomposition of a space by familial practices and the ‘art of cooking’

- sociologists, anthropologists and historians have examined mixtures of rituals and makeshifts (bricolages), manipulations of spaces, operators of networks (e.g. Goffman, Bourdieu, Mauss, DÈtienne, Boissevain, Laumann)
- linguistics: analysis of everyday interactions in relation to structures of expectation, negotiation, and improvisation of ordinary language. (e.g. Garfinkel, Labov, Sachs, Schegloff)

- formal logics, analytical philosophy: action, time and modalisation
- Noam Chomsky’s study of the oral uses of language

The Marginality of a Majority

- an exploration of the types of operations that characterize ‘consumption’
- to find the origin of the creativity via appropriation that this hypothesis says is inherent in the act of ‘consuming’ culture

- mass marginality: marginal groups have now become the silent majority

- the practice of re-use or adaptation of products is related to social situations and power relationships

- “The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, lends a political dimension to everyday practices”

The Tactics of Practice

- consumer vs producer dichotomy; the collected material, a limited number of practices (e.g. reading, talking, cooking), the extension of the analysis of these everyday operations to seemingly unrelated scientific fields

Trajectories, Tactics, and Rhetorics

- consumers as ‘unrecognised producers’ and ‘poets of their own acts’
- comparison between consumers and autistic children in terms of what they produce

- limits of statistical analysis; captures material of consumer practices but not their form
- statistical analysis of this kind finds only the homogenous, missing out on the reality of the ‘artisan-like inventiveness’ of common consumers

- differentiation between ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’

- strategy: the overarching plans of large institutions or power structures
- tactics: belongs to the ‘other’; depends on time; always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized on the spur of the moment; kairos

- many everyday activities are tactical in nature, e.g. talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, as do ‘ways of operating’

- tactics: intelligence is inseparable from them; strategies: based on objective calculations from a collective power or institution; tactics do not seek to take over or win and does not engage in sabotage

- rhetoric: ‘ways of speaking’; manipulations are related to the ways of persuading the will of the audience

- connection between the Sophists and tactics
- Sophist position: make the weaker position seem the stronger
- claimed to have the power of turning the tables on the powerful by making use of the opportunities in any given situation

Reading, Talking, Dwelling, Cooking, etc.

- focus on reading as an example of an everyday practice that produces without capitalizing
- production vs consumption; writing vs reading; consumer as a voyeur in a ‘show-biz society’

- reading as an act of production that is not recorded; akin to a once-off silent performance

- the reader interprets the writer’s words subjectively, making them their own; thus, ‘the viewer reads the landscape of his childhood in the evening news’

- the text is like a rented apartment where the occupier makes changes in the same way that a speaker changes a text by using their native tongue, accent or turns of phrase.

- reading is an art that is anything but passive, resembling the art whose theory was developed by medieval poets

- the art of conversation creates a collective communication that belongs to no one and everyone

- the possibility of establishing a reliability within the situations imposed on an individual
- making it possible to live in these situations by reintroducing into them an art of manipulating and enjoying

Extensions: Prospects and Politics

- analysis of tactics extended to two areas, 1) prospects / futurology, 2) the individual subject in political life

- futurology: falls short of adequately analysing ‘space’, focus on ‘simulation’
- relationship between rationality and imagination; the tactics of practical investigation vs the strategies offered to the public as the product of these practical operations

- the ‘split-structure’ of so many organisations requires a rethink of all the ‘tactics’ neglected by traditional scientific enquiry

- Freud’s civilization and its discontents; the microscopic connections between manipulation and enjoyment
- “the fleeting and massive reality of a social activity at play with the order that contains it”

- Quote from John Everyman: “When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has”: “I have had, you see, to resort more and more to very small, almost invisible pleasures, little extras…. You’ve no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it’s incredible how one grows.”

Fandom: Identities & Communities in a Mediated World

edited by Johnathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss and C.Lee Harrington
afterword by Henry Jenkins
New York University Press, 2007

"Most people are fans of something. If not, they are bound to now someone who is...fandom matters because it matters to those who are fans. However beyond this, the contributions fan studies have made varied in the course of what we, in retrospect, can summarise as three generations of fan scholarship over the past two decades."

First wave: power, inequality, discrimination

• de Certeau's theory (1984)
• John Fiske - fans are "associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class and race"
• Bi-polar struggle between hegemonic culture industries and fans
• FANS IN MAINSTREAM
• Era of broadcasting changed to narrowcasting (niche marketing, target marketing; dissemination of information to narrow audience, no general public. Includes television and radio. Aiming media messages at specific segments of the public defined by the values, preferences o demographic attitudes)
• Deregulation of media markets and reflected rise of new technologies, the fan as a specialised yet dedicated consumer has become centrepiece of media industries' marketing strategies. Rather than ridicule, fan audiences are now wooed and championed by cultural industries. 
• Mainstream appreciation of being a fan
• Changing representation of fans in mass media
• Became more than mere act of being a fan of something, it was a collaborative strategy, a communal effort to form interpretive communities
• Fan studies: negative protrayal/imagery/stereotype of fans by authorities, media and other non-fans. Low on social/cultural hierarchy
• Tactics of fan audiences in their evasion of dominant ideologies
• Camille Bacon-Smith, Henry Jenkins, Roberta Pearson, Constance Penly, John Tulloch

Second wave:

• Leitmotif in the sociology of consumption by PIERRE BOURDEIU
• Replication of social, cultural hierarchies within fan - and subcultures, as the choice of fan objects and fan practices of fan consumption are structured through out habitus as a reflection and further manifestation of our social, cultural and economic capital
• Interpretive communities of fandom (as well as individual acts of fan consumption) embedded in the existing economical, social and cultural status quo. 
• Gender, the taste hierarchies among fans themselves are described as the continuation of wider social inequalities. 
• Conceptual shift of fan studies to fans seen as not a counterforce to existing social hierarchies and structures but, in sharp contrast, as agents of maintaining social and cultural systems of classification and this existing hierarchies
• Bourdieuvian perspective to unmask false notion of popular culture as a realm of emancipation

• 1&2 wave = focus of particular audience groups: fan communities, subcultures, interaction between members of such group either as interpretive and support networks, on in terms of cultural hierarchization and discrimination through distinction. Focus primarily on only one, possible the smallest subset of fan groups on wide spectrum spanning regular, emotionally uninvolved audience member to petty producers. 

3rd wave:

• Increasingly diverse in conceptual, theoretical and methodological terms. 
• Fans = common mode of consumption
• Cyberfandom (online) is the shift/migration to the internet for fans and fandom. Specialised sites for specific fandoms, congregational sites for multiple fandoms in one (Television Without Pity; TWoP), accessible via Blackberries, iPods/iPhones, PUPs, laptops and cell phones
• Off the web: celebrity, television and film gossip magazines, entertainment programs on television for people who want latest news and updates (cable, radio, satellite channels)
• Chnging communication technologies and media texts contribute to and reflect increasing entrenchment of fan consumption in structure of our everyday life
• MICRO = fan, intrapersonal, pleasures & motivations, relationship between fans and fan objects
• MACRO = readings, tastes and practices are tied to wider social structures yet extends the conceptual focus beyond questioning of the hegemony and class to the dearching social, cultural and economic transformations of our time. (dialect between global and local; rise of spectacle and performance in fan consumption)
• Fan patterns, behaviour, types of consumption and interaction are becoming more integrated/integral in every day life in modern societies (global phenomenon)
• Sybiosis: cultural practice and perspective of being a fan + industrial modernity at large
• Fan studies = key mechanisms through which we interact with the mediated world at the heart of our social, political and cultural realities and identities.