Symbolic Capital
Symbolic Capital
Definition
Symbolic capital names the social credit or prestige that arises when economic, cultural, or social capital is misrecognized and euphemized into a form that "conceals the fact that it originates in 'material' forms of capital." Bourdieu introduces it in Outline of a Theory of Practice as the disguised form of accumulation that operates through recognition, honour, and the "good-faith economy," and extends it in his account of fields of cultural production, where it confers the power to define what is legitimate and to "define objects as rare." In this wiki, symbolic capital is the theoretical link between the sociology of practice and the star/icon economy: the signature or "label" of the star architect converts accumulated reputation into the power to confer value on a building.
Key Thinkers
- Pierre Bourdieu — the originator; symbolic capital as misrecognized economic capital; the power to "define objects as rare by means of their signature."
- (Related: Paul Knox — "symbolic capital of world cities" in starchitecture; Charles Jencks — the icon's symbolic dimension.)
Related Concepts
- Habitus — the incorporated disposition that yields and deploys symbolic capital within a field.
- Star Architecture — the star architect's symbolic capital as the engine of star commissioning.
- Iconic Architecture — the building as a locus of accumulated symbolic capital.
- Authorship — the signature/label as the carrier of symbolic capital.
- Everyday Architecture — ordinary, unauthored production that lacks the symbolic capital of the star system.
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
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Starchitects, Starchitecture, and the Symbolic Capital of World Cities (Knox 2016)
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Bourdieu and Marx: Practices of Critique (Paolucci ed. 2022) — symbolic capital as one pole of Bidet's "bipolar domination" thesis (property-power vs. competence-power); Fowler on symbolic violence as the "orchestration of unconscious minds" that complements, but risks obscuring, Marx's exploitation.
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'House Beautiful': Style and Consumption in the Home (Madigan & Munro 1996/2006) — symbolic capital's furniture-scale case, via Bourdieu as the authors cite him: "the upper classes have always had a preference for antique products which may directly represent family continuity through inheritance, and may also be seen as investment" (p. 222) — the antique as capital in all three forms at once (economic investment, social continuity, cultural distinction); the class ladder it organizes — "These values have been reiterated by the professional and managerial middle classes' choice of reproduction furniture, old rather than antique, or real wood (the history of stripped pine would tell a tale), though the language of craft production is also used to promote even cheaper ranges of furniture" (pp. 222–223); and the craft rhetoric as the misrecognized form's marketing: "made by the finest craftsmen," "upholstered by hand" "when in fact most three-piece suites are constructed from the roughest of frames (hand made) and covered with foam and fabric using nothing more refined than a staple gun" (p. 222) — symbolic capital manufactured at the staple gun and sold as solidity, continuity and honesty, "the familial values which are central to ideas of 'home'" (p. 222). Where the page's other sources track symbolic capital in the star system, Madigan & Munro show it running through the three-piece suite (see taste, respectability, the-antique).
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Decorating Culture (Tang 1998/2006) — symbolic capital's interior-scale cousin: display and conspicuous consumption establishing "a distinctive hierarchy of taste, status, and identity" (p. 331); wealth "splendidly displayed" and read as social success (pp. 330–331); brand progressions and "costly designer attire" as the misrecognized capital's worked example — with the twist that the display is finally consumed by its owner alone ("read the sign of his own success," p. 330), symbolic capital addressed to its holder (see sign-value, conspicuous-consumption, fashion).
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Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's field-theoretical systematization and its architecture-profession audit: symbolic capital as "what every kind of capital becomes when it is misrecognized as capital" (Bourdieu quoted, p. 35); "denied capital… Its potency in practices of power lies in this masking effect of aesthetic autonomy"; "a fixed resource, a zero-sum game. There is only so much distinction and prestige to be distributed. If everyone gets 'good' architecture, no one wins the symbolic capital" (p. 35); the avant-garde's structural role — "the apparent autonomy of the avant-garde is geared to its structural role in keeping the field supplied with a stream of new images" (p. 38), with deconstructive architecture and the 1990s "folding" vogue as the appropriated cases (p. 37); the media circuitry — monographs "funded by architects who exercise editorial control over their own critique," photographs "cropped, framed and digitally altered" (pp. 40, 50–51); Dovey's Murcutt/BHP and Docklands fieldwork as the lived experience of the field's enforcement (pp. 50–52); and the informal-settlement register — images of underdevelopment as "the symbolic resource for aesthetic production" (p. 97). See complicitous-silence, aestheticization-of-poverty, critical-architecture.
Open Questions
- Does the misrecognition that generates symbolic capital make it inherently conservative — an instrument of social reproduction — or can the symbolic capital of the iconic building be redirected or refused in the critical/projective debate?
