PART THREE—
CULTURE, INEQUALITY, AND LIFE-STYLE

9—
The Production and Reproduction of Inequality:
A Theoretical Cultural Analysis

Richard Münch

Structures of social inequality are a traditional object of sociological research and theory building and have always received a good deal of attention. In the relatively recent past, empirical studies have been able to provide increasingly subtle insights into the changes occurring in these structures. This makes social inequality a well-researched sociological subject. Yet theoretical explanation has now been left behind by developments in empirical research. In many cases, the same tools that were most used during the 1950s and 1960s are still being bandied about: functionalistic approaches vie with conflict-theoretical ones or some combination of the two is used. However, the development of sociological theory has changed since the 1950s and 1960s. What is lacking is a link between the two developments. To change this latter situation is the purpose of a project upon which this paper reports. The objectives in carrying out the project are as follows:

—To formulate a sociological theory of the production and reproduction of structures of social inequality (by this I also mean the transformation of such structures).

—To formulate ideal-typical models of the various processes in which structures of social inequality are produced and reproduced.

I am grateful to Neil Johnson for his help in translating the German original of this article. Many thanks also to Claudia Flümann and Willy Viehöver for the bibliographical work.

—To clarify the ideal-typical models by taking selected societies as examples.

I begin with the premise that social structures of inequality, in terms of income, power, education, and prestige, are produced, reproduced, and transformed in interaction with the cultural code of a society, which entails the language, values, and norms used in discourses on questions of equality and inequality. This interaction is where culture meets social structure, exerts its influence on it, and is itself influenced by it. The cultural code sets the frame within which structures of inequality are produced, reproduced, and transformed into legitimate ones. The social structure of inequality, which exists at a certain place and time, sets the conditions from which any reproduction and transformation of inequalities starts.

The effects of the cultural code and of the existing social structure of inequality on each other are set in motion and mediated by processes of social interaction, which I differentiate analytically into four basic types according to my interpretation of the Parsonian AGIL-schema as an action space composed of four fields: market exchange (A), political struggle (G), processes of communal association (I), and cultural legitimation (L).^[1]

An action space can be construed in terms of the interrelation of two basic elements: symbols (meaning constructions, norms, expressions, cognitions) and actions guided by these symbols. The sphere of symbols can be more or less ordered according to the number and interrelations of symbols: their complexity. The sphere of actions can be more or less ordered according to the number of actions that could possibly occur: their contingency. The complexity of symbols and the contingency of actions vary independently of each other. This makes possible four extreme combinations:

A. Adaptation. Opening of the scope for action. High symbolic complexity and high contingency of actions. In market exchange no limit to the wishes and actions could be imagined.

G. Goal attainment. Specification of the scope for action. High symbolic complexity and low contingency of actions. In political struggle the application of power restricts actions to what is commanded, though an unlimited set of alternatives could be imagined.

I. Integration. Closing of the scope for action. Low symbolic complexity and low contingency of actions. In communal association

the horizon of imagination and the alternatives of action are limited to a self-evident life-world. Within the field of communal association solidarity relationships exert the greatest closing effects on action. Beliefs and life-styles provide for generalization, rites for opening, and cults for specification within the boundaries of the closed life-world of communal association. Generalization is extended by defining the legitimacy of beliefs and lifestyles, opening by the change of associations, and specification by the settling of group conflict.

L. Latent pattern maintenance. Generalization of the scope for action. High symbolic complexity and high contingency of actions. In discursive cultural legitimation a broad set of different actions is subsumed under one single value or a small set of general values.

There are the basic fields of social interaction in which corresponding processes of interaction link the cultural code with existing structures of inequality. The latter are located in the solidarity relationships, the association and dissociation of people in society. The structure of inequality is a structure of solidarity relationships that initially limits access to associations and then to income, power, education, and prestige.

As indicated, this structure of inequality is reproduced and transformed in interaction with the cultural code of society. The latter provides the language for legitimating and delegitimating equality and inequality. Its relation to the structure of inequality is primarily one of symbolization, which is guided by the law of symbolic abstraction. This means that talking about structures of inequality in terms of the language of the cultural code tends toward abstraction in the sense of defining concrete inequalities in more general terms, for example, in terms of general rights to equality instead of particular wishes for equality. The more the reproduction and transformation of structures of inequalities is guided by symbolic abstraction, that is, by a system of general ideas, the more the particular interests will be channeled into the frame of general rights.

In addition to being guided by symbolic abstraction, the reproduction and the transformation of existing structures of inequality are also guided by cultural legitimation according to the law of discursive generalization, by market exchange according to the law of economic achievement, by political struggle according to the law of political accumulation, and by communal association according to the law of inertia and

Figure 9.1.
The production and reproduction of structures of inequality.

seclusion. The processes of communal association, political struggle, and market exchange are related to the cultural code via processes of cultural legitimation and symbolic abstraction, which are closest to the cultural code. The processes of symbolic abstraction, cultural legitimation, market exchange, and political struggle are related to social structures of inequality via processes of communal association, which are also closest to the cultural code (see figure 9.1).

Communal association is governed by the law of inertia and by communal exclusiveness:

The more people are linked together in a community, the more they will confine the circle in which they live to that community, and the greater will be the barriers that are reciprocally erected between different self-contained life-circles.

This communal exclusiveness then leads to a corresponding cultural exclusiveness reflected in common cultural symbols, ideas, and lifestyles, in the regular renewal of these via common rituals, and in their orientation to common goals via common cults. In turn, these common symbols, rituals, and cults also contribute to the reproduction of social exclusiveness. If the law of inertia and social exclusiveness were to be the only factor having an effect on society, its structure of classes, strata, social groupings, and social milieu would continually reproduce itself in the same way. This would be a traditionalistically determined society in which nothing ever changed.

The process of market exchange is governed by the law of market success (achievement):

The more people seek economic success and enter into market exchange and competition with one another, the more they will change the circles in which they live to suit changing degrees of success and the lower will be the barriers between different circles.

Because market success is the factor that decides to which life-circle one will belong and because it is a factor relatively prone to change, the membership of different life-circles changes rapidly, but this does not mean a change in the way society is differentiated according to variations in market success. Society is constantly characterized by inequality between those who are more successful and those who are less, yet a person's particular position of success is subject to continual change as long as market success is the only law in operation.

A precondition for the operation of the law of market success, however, is the existence of ideal market conditions, that is, of equal competitive opportunities for all. Yet because in practice market successes can be

converted into advantageous starting positions for the continuing competition, there is a tendency for the successful to form an exclusive circle. This is the law of economic accumulation:

The more success someone has, the more successful he/she will be in future, and the converse for anyone who is less successful, provided that the available resources are deployed optimally.

Despite these conditions, the market is where the greatest mobility is permitted compared with any other social field, because the race to success is run afresh day after day, even if the starting conditions are not actually equal. In comparison with the market sphere, the communal, political, and cultural spheres are characterized by greater inertia, a greater tendency toward persistence, or a slower rate of change.

The process of political struggle is governed by the law of political accumulation:

The more people are determined to reach one particular goal and the more any one individual's actions have consequences for others, the more frequently one person's goal attainment will be at others' expense, or, in other words, the more frequently the various individuals come into conflict and the more frequently they have to mobilize power in order to achieve their aims.

In the event that the goal involved is to attain or retain a relatively high position within society, under these conditions the result will be a political struggle for the higher societal positions. Persons and groups higher up the scale use the power available to them to keep others away from their positions, while persons and groups occupying lower positions mobilize power (by forming coalitions of the relatively weak to confront the strong, for example) in a bid to gain access to the higher positions. Under these conditions, the law of political accumulation comes into effect:

The more power people already possess, the more they are able to augment their power in the political struggle.

Consequently, one can expect structures of social inequality to become proportionately more stable as the powerful become still more powerful and the weak still weaker. This naturally only applies to the extent that social inequality truly is reproduced by political struggle and other laws do not come into play. If the weaker parties make more intelligent use of the power available to them and/or if they form coalitions, they may succeed in overcoming the stronger ones after all. This is the point where changes can be made in social inequality, and these then take the form of revolutionary upheavals and shifts in power.

The process of cultural legitimation is governed by the law of discursive generalization:

The more the allocation of a position is subject to discursive reasoning, the more likely the allocation of a position is considered legitimate only if it is justified by generally valid principles.

Any person's or group's possession of more income, power, cultural competence (in the sense of "authoritativeness"), or prestige than others is no longer taken without question but has to be justified on generally accepted grounds. This means that inequality of income is only counted as legitimate if it flows from a corresponding inequality in achievement. Likewise, inequality of power is only taken to be legitimate if it is necessary for the attainment of common goals, inequality of competence or authoritativeness only if it is based on unequal levels of knowledge, and inequality of prestige only if it derives from the unequal realization of common values. These ideas—the apportionment of income according to achievement, power according to the need for leadership in order to attain common goals, cultural competence according to knowledge, and prestige according to the realization of common values—are the universal ideas through which inequalities need to be justified in modern society.

To the above must be added justification by the idea of equality. In a radical interpretation, this would give all inequalities the taint of illegitimacy. In a less radical view which acknowledges the previous requirements of the unequal allocation of positions, the idea of equality is narrowed down to the idea of equality of opportunity. If income is to be differentiated according to achievement, everyone must then be given an equal chance to achieve. If power is to be differentiated according to the need to attain common goals, everyone should be offered the same chance to be a candidate for the corresponding positions of power. If cultural competence (authoritativeness) is to be attributed with knowledge as the decisive standard, everyone should have the same opportunity to acquire that knowledge. If prestige is to be apportioned in line with the realization of common values, everyone should have the same opportunity to participate in realizing those values. In this sense, the effect of the compulsion to legitimate social inequality in modern society is the dismantling of inequalities of opportunity. This must not be confused with dismantling social inequality itself. It does not change the differentials in income, power, cultural competence, or prestige in the slightest. Moreover, the pressure of legitimation working toward reducing inequality of

opportunity need not necessarily or immediately signify any actual reduction in such inequality. The wrong measures are often taken, and many attempts fall short of the goal or lose their effectiveness over time because the other sets of laws—the laws of inertia and social exclusiveness, of market success, and of political accumulation—act as countervailing forces to the equality of opportunity. However, this in its turn does not mean that the law of discursive generalization remains completely ineffective. Had it not exerted its effects, we would still be in a pre-Enlightenment society in which traditionally established inequalities of opportunity would be taken as self-evident. Modern society can at least be distinguished from such a situation insofar as inequality of opportunity now bears a stigma of illegitimacy.

The four laws discussed above that govern the production and reproduction of social inequality are ranked with different priorities in different societies and are combined in different ways. This gives rise to a complex structure composed of both basic laws and derived laws resulting from combinations of these laws. For example, in the struggle between classes and strata, the law of political accumulation combines with the law of inertia and social exclusiveness, whereas in the struggle for legitimation the former law combines with that of discursive generalization, and in the competitive struggle it combines with that of market success.

The four basic laws dominate to different degrees in different societies, taking the lead from and working in conjunction with the remaining basic laws in each case. That is, no society is determined exclusively by the working of one law; rather, a society is determined by a set of laws interrelated in a specific ranking. The ranking of laws may change during the historical development of a society. However, if we contrast societies to each other, then we may discern the primary effects of a specific leading law and the secondary effects of the other laws in a specific rank order in particular societies over the period of historical development since the onset of industrialization. In the following section, I illustrate the workings and interrelationships of the above laws with an example of the development of structures of inequality in German society since the nineteenth century, when the basic formation of its cultural code and social structure and their unique interrelationship took shape.

In doing so, I briefly describe the cultural code that underlies the structure of inequality and that, via the value conceptions and the language it embraces, represents the basis for processes that legitimate social inequality. Then follows a description of the structure of inequal-

ity and the symbols and life-styles, rituals and cults belonging to it, this being complemented by an identification of the unique characteristics of the legitimacy, change, and conflict associated with that structure of inequality. Finally, the structure and its unique characteristics are explained with reference to one particular law and the interplay between it and the other laws.^[2]

A Historical Illustration:
German Society

The cultural code of German society took shape during the nineteenth century under the leadership of the cultured, educated middle class (Bildungsbürgertum ), comprising professors, teachers, and clergy, and its alliance with the state.^[3] In this process, three ideas took on an especially significant role: the classical idea of education, the idea of a person's office, and the idea of synthesis, the latter two as an attempt to close the split between established bourgeois society and industrial society and as a specific form in which the postulate of equality established during the Enlightenment could be realized. Social rank is determined by the type and level of education people have received and the level of responsibility attached to the offices people hold within society. The differentiation of society into classes, strata, and groups is supposed to be overcome by a synthesis that leads to a new unity. Hegel saw this synthesis embodied in the state, Marx saw it in Communist society, the revisionists saw it in the social welfare state (Sozialstaat ), and the National Socialists saw it in the popular state (Volksstaat ). Following World War II, the role of synthesis has been played by the concepts of the social market economy, the leveled middle-class society and affluence for all.

By tradition, the structure of inequality in German society is characterized primarily by the differentiation of classes and status groups according to the type and level of education they have received.^[4] In accordance with this tradition, which dates back to the nineteenth century, it has never been possible for those rising socially through economic or political success to claim the same legitimacy as those rising by way of education. The second traditional criterion for the allocation of status is the vesting of a person with an "office." The closer this office is located to the center of the state, the higher its rank. In the nineteenth century, the alliance between the cultured, educated middle class and

the state allowed the well-read professor, the grammar school (Gymnasium ) teacher, the pastor, lawyer or doctor, the civil servant, and the officer to emerge as and to remain for a long period the best respected status groups. In contrast, the classes and strata belonging to the business, industry, technology, and agriculture spheres were valued unfavorably because they possessed neither a classical education nor any kind of office. Officialdom itself is again differentiated according to the level of education attained, the categories being top-level, senior, middle-level, and junior officials. From the 1870s on, however, the alliance between heavy industry and the state, together with the overall economic and political ascendancy of the commercial, industrial, and technical strata, began to question the claims to higher status of the Bildungsbürgertum and officialdom, creating a situation of status insecurity.

In the postwar period, the flourishing of material consumption has encouraged the social advancement of higher-earning commercial, industrial, and technical strata.^[5] Status today is no longer acquired solely via education or tenure of office, but it is also a function of the food, dress, living accommodations, furniture, automobiles, and vacations that people can afford. In this sense, society in West Germany has moved closest—among the European societies—to the principle of market success and the demonstrative consumption this implies, and hence it has also achieved the closest resemblance to U.S. society. In this situation, we see the traditional apportionment of status via education and office tenure existing side by side with the apportionment of status according to economic success and demonstrative consumption.

That is not to say, then, that the criterion of education has become totally insignificant. Rather, it also has penetrated the commercial and industrial strata as they have grown in importance and it determines internal differentiation within these strata. Training and academic certificates also determine social status here: occupational schools, technical schools, and technical degree colleges, together with advanced training and informational courses of all kinds, ensure that members of these strata are better trained and qualified than ever.

The manual working population, too, is typically divided into groups of unskilled, semiskilled, and skilled workers. Both trends—the greater significance of qualification in training overall and the constant increase in the level of consumption—have led to the traditional differentiation of society being replaced by a society in which the large majority of households can participate both in a relatively high level of consumption and in a constantly rising level of education and training. In comparison with

other Western European countries, Germany exhibits the least hierarchical differentiation of society. Status is granted according to four criteria, with the first two increasingly pushed into the background by the latter two: (1) classical education before technical training, (2) civil service or "official" positions placed before self-employed, employees, and workers, (3) level of qualification within one's occupation, including technical training, and (4) level of consumption.

As more and more households attain relatively high levels of training and consumption, the society increasingly corresponds to what Schelsky termed the leveled middle-class society (nivellierte Mittelstandsgesellschaft ).^[6] This would appear to be the synthesis that has always been sought in Germany. It is now a society with a highly diffuse social structure in which, as a result of the change in criteria for the apportionment of status, one no longer really knows who belongs where. The place of collective groupings on different levels of rank is taken instead by individual destinies: factors such as occupational or economic failure, illness, divorce or separation, and unemployment influence the course of life far more than social stratum class does. A broadly cast center is taking shape that includes all those able to participate in consumption and education or training. It is surrounded by a periphery of marginal groups either unwilling or unable to participate in consumption and/or education and training. The term the two-thirds society has been coined to depict this situation.^[7]

The same diffusivity found in the overall social edifice also characterizes general attitudes to life and life-styles. Whereas one might traditionally have relied on a clear differentiation between attitudes to life and life-styles, the lines have become increasingly blurred over time. The pride taken by the government official in serving the state, by the Bildungsbürgertum in its level of education, by the self-employed in their independence, by white-collar employees in the services they provide, by the industrial and technical strata in the usefulness of their work, by manual workers in the value of their physical effort, and by farmers in their tilling of the soil has since given way to an overall relativizing of these values and to efforts, regardless of the stratum to which one belongs, to reach a satisfying level of education or training, to work with a likeable team of people, and to enjoy a good life with time for consumption, vacations, and leisure activities. The same is true of the interpretational patterns with which people view society. The workers' dichotomous view of society is blurred by the diffuse notion that they, too, can join in the general process of consumption. Anyone who can

afford the things that all others can afford will not have the feeling of being near the bottom of any social scale.^[8]

Life-styles have converged to a tremendous extent, primarily because of the general improvement in education and income levels. This emerging cult of upgraded consumption may seem surprising for those who know Germany from its traditional class hierarchy. However, tremendous changes have occurred that began in the fifties and attained a very high level in the eighties. The recent literature on consumption styles and the "individualization" of life chances now pays overwhelming attention to this development.^[9]

It is now so thoroughly widespread for people to participate in consumption of more "luxurious" goods and services—the home itself, household appliances, furniture, television, stereos, videos, personal computers, automobiles, good food, clothing, entertainment, sporting activities, vacations, and so on—that hardly any difference is visible between the household of a skilled worker couple, who between them may have monthly earnings of about DM 6,000, and the households of teachers, clergy, professors, business people, technicians, and engineers, for their disposable income will frequently not be so much higher. All of these groups share the same pleasure in consuming semiluxury and luxury goods.^[10] Those who are unable to participate in this celebration of consumption are students, young trainees and apprentices, senior citizens with low pensions, those dependent on social assistance, low-income families with a single earner, the unemployed, and those who have consciously chosen an alternative, less materialistic life-style. These are the marginal groups who are unable or, in some cases, unwilling to be included in the overall celebration of consumption.^[11] On the other hand, the ideals of high culture have also become part of widespread demonstrative consumption. Wherever they do still fulfill a demarcating function, they represent the life-style of marginal academics who are no longer able to claim any higher status for their love of literature, theater, or art. Therefore, there is no longer a hierarchical differentiation of value attitudes, worldviews, and life-styles, but there is the dominance of one broad and central complex of relatively luxurious consumption and a narrow periphery of marginal groups comprising poor and/or nonconforming people. This peculiar quality of value attitudes, worldviews, and life-styles has feedback effects on the apportionment of status. An ever-broader center develops when the internal differentiation of status becomes less pronounced because everyone has a similar opportunity to participate in education and consumption. Marginal groups

remain excluded and, because they abstain from consumption either intentionally or unintentionally, are denied the status of belonging by the two-thirds majority.

An examination of the rituals that serve to renew the social structure shows developments similar to those that can be observed among value attitudes, worldviews, and life-styles. The tradition dating back to the nineteenth century gave rise to numerous rituals for the inward unification and outward demarcation of social classes, strata, and groups. A visit to the theater, the opera, or a classical concert, eating in restaurants, shopping in large stores, playing golf or tennis, riding, playing football, going on vacation, dinner parties—these are all activities in which particular classes, strata, or groups would stay among their own kind. In this sense, they did represent rituals of inward unification and outward demarcation. Though it is still possible to observe these rites today, they are on the decline. Engaging in these activities more frequently involves stepping beyond the confines of one's own class, stratum, or group. They are less often reserved for members of any particular class, stratum, or group, which in turn means that they rarely can function as demarcation rituals. Instead, they tend to serve as rituals of unification across a broader front. Other rituals in which class, stratum, or group boundaries are unknown can be added, such as strolling down the shopping streets and visiting a supermarket or shopping complex.^[12] This decline in demarcation rituals, coupled with a simultaneous increase in rituals of unification beyond class, stratum, or group boundaries, is a development stemming from the changes in social structure, but it also has a positive feedback effect on those changes toward increasing diffusivity in the social structure. Traditionally, rituals of synthesis have made a decisive contribution to unification independent of class, stratum, or group, including large-scale events such as the German Festival of Gymnastics, the biannual national congress in the Lutheran church, choral festivals, and carnival processions in the main Rhineland centers. All of these events are open to anyone to take part.

Cults lend a specific identity to classes, strata, and groups, and to society as a whole. The cult that has traditionally fulfilled this function is that of education. Abitur ceremonies (the highest examination in secondary education), master's ceremonies in the craft trades, and graduation ceremonies of whatever kind publicly document the identity of the corresponding educational stratum. The modern cult is that of semiluxurious and luxurious consumption. To belong, it is essential to join in this cult. By this means, the vast majority of the population confirms

its membership not in any particular stratum, but in the mainstream, the center of society.

The traditional basis for the legitimacy of the structure of inequality described was the unequal distribution of educational certificates. Given this tradition, any status differential has to be justifiable in terms of different educational levels. Anyone with a poor education attaining a higher position or earning a higher income, or conversely anyone well educated taking up a low position or earning very little, will awaken doubts as to his or her legitimacy. This criterion for legitimacy has been accompanied increasingly by the criterion of participation in semiluxurious or luxurious consumption. The latter is normally a precondition for attaining prestige in the neighborhood.

In light of the idea of equality, the legitimacy of unequal access to educational institutions has increasingly been questioned. This situation, combined with a widespread desire for advancement, has led to a tremendous increase in the number of people with advanced educational qualifications. Hence, we are a little closer to the synthesis we had always dreamed of now that the number of higher educational qualifications has grown, but there has also been a counteracting consequence: the traditional link between a high degree of educational qualification and a higher status is being loosened. There is a growing number of people who, although they have achieved advanced educational qualifications, have not attained any higher status. This phenomenon is felt to represent, and is criticized as, status inconsistency and gives rise to doubts as to the legitimacy of existing status differentiation in light of traditional ideas. Yet as these developments continue, the old idea of status being accorded in terms of educational qualification will be undermined. Together with the general increase in the level of consumption, the vast number of people with advanced educational qualifications is leading to the differentiation of status being broken down in its entirety. The market, and hence the short-term allocation of status and income, is gradually replacing the long-term allocation of the two on the basis of having attained a given level of education.^[13]

Traditionally, people's association in neighborhoods, political communities, and group leisure activities was differentiated along class and status-group lines. Accordingly, the cities are divided into workers' neighborhoods and those for the middle and upper strata. However, this picture has been substantially changed by the enormous growth in residential areas on the edges of the cities and outside the cities altogether. The groups mix together to a far higher degree in these new

residential areas. Business people, various grades of white-collar employees or civil servants, and skilled workers all live next door to each other. The same can be increasingly said of sporting and other leisure activities. Thus, there is an increase in the number of associations that form as a result of the coincidental convergence of private interests and private decisions, and these associations accordingly introduce a greater dynamism into the structure of classes, strata, and groups and act as a countervailing force to the traditional differentiation of associations along status lines.^[14]

Beginning with social legislation enacted during Bismarck's time, attempts have been made to solve the conflict between classes, strata, and groups by achieving a synthesis. However, Bismarck's policy of persecuting the socialists prevented the inclusion of the working class into society. Following the approaches to inclusion made during the Weimar Republic, which granted the Social Democrats access to government, and by the National Socialists, with the synthesis inherent in their idea of the popular state (Volksstaat ), the inclusion of working people has progressed further in the Federal Republic of Germany, with the development of the social welfare state and the idea of social partnership, than in most comparable industrial nations. The class struggle has been displaced by class synthesis on a scale that surpasses even the dreams of the revisionists within the early socialist movement.^[15] Together with the synthesis achieved by the welfare state and social partnership, the continual increase in the number of advanced educational qualifications has led to a growing educational synthesis. The decline in individual attachment to class or stratum and the traditionally high value placed on education indicate that more and more people have set out to gain a higher level of educational qualifications. As a consequence, competition to gain better occupational positions is greatly intensified. Even to belong to the center that comprises those able to participate in more luxurious consumption, it is absolutely essential to strive for higher educational qualifications. The traditional class struggle has long since been displaced by a universal struggle for educational and training certificates and for the qualified jobs that have now become so scarce. Traditionally, the three-class secondary education system—comprised of the Hauptschule, which is the most elementary form of secondary schooling, the Realschule, which provides a more thorough preparation for technical and practical careers, and the Gymnasium, with its classical academic education to prepare future university students—had the effect of securing the perpetuation of the old hierarchical status

differentiation because family background exerts a major influence on students' success at school at the age of eleven years, when pupils are allocated to the various types of secondary schools. With the broadening of access to the Realschule, the Gymnasium, and later to universities and other institutions of further education, this tradition has been counteracted, but one consequence has undoubtedly been intensified competition in the labor market and a corresponding devaluation of advanced educational qualifications as a prerequisite to higher-placed careers. The struggle to gain educational qualifications and then qualified jobs is something that embraces the whole of society.

The law that primarily explains the production and reproduction of the structure of social inequality described above and its specific hallmarks is the law of discursive generalization. This law states that discourse on the legitimacy of social structures leads to a process in which the ideas underlying those structures are increasingly generalized, and this gives rise to increasing pressure on social structures to approach the more comprehensively interpreted ideas. Since the establishment of the alliance between the Bildungsbürgertum and the state in the nineteenth century, the ideas that have been used as a standard against which to measure structures of inequality in Germany are those of education and the holding of an "office." These ideas were used in societal discourse to justify social status. In light of these ideas it is only when there is a congruence between education and the responsibilities of office on the one hand and cultural competence (authoritativeness), power, income, and prestige on the other that this can be considered legitimate.

The Bildungsbürgertum's alliance with the state gave these ideas and the discourse associated with them such a priority that they decisively influenced the approach of the entire social structure during the nineteenth century as to what was conceived to be an ideal hierarchy of education and office. However, the economic and political ascendancy of the commercial, industrial, and technical strata, as well as the working class, also gave the value attitudes of these strata and classes a place in societal discourse. This meant that increasing significance was attached to the usefulness of education and material consumption when it came to the legitimation of status differentials. Advanced education in the classical sense then had to compete with the most varied, utility-oriented educational qualifications and could no longer claim higher status as a right. In this way, the understanding of education became discursively generalized: whereas education was traditionally under-

stood in terms of classical education, it currently embraces everything from training received by skilled workers via the master's certificate and various technical schools and college diplomas to university degrees. Insofar as any hierarchy is still visible in this spectrum, it would appear to be a relic of classical education's traditional claim to élite status. However, this tradition has been so revised that society no longer has the appearance of being clearly divided according to an educational hierarchy, but it now contains a diffuse complex of improved educational qualifications that represent a broad center from which marginal groups without such qualifications are set apart.

Another effect of discursive generalization derives from the idea of equality as interpreted during the French Revolution, which was understood as a form of synthesis in nineteenth-century Germany and, hence, as a solution to the division of society into classes, strata, and groups. The idea of synthesis was in accordance with the worldview of an educated stratum allied with the state. Thus Hegel saw a synthesis of society's dissipation into particularized interests as being achievable by pledging the state to the general good. Through various stages of development, this idea of synthesis has retained its significance. It is possible to see the synthesis of present-day society in the constant broadening of education and in the integration of many educational qualifications into a more general understanding of the term education . A wider interpretation of the postulate of equality requires that the entire population be involved via a comprehensive concept of education.

The law of discursive generalization exerts strong pressure to change upon the structure of classes, strata, and groups, and it restricts the effectiveness of the law of inertia and social exclusiveness. The social structure began by developing a hierarchy of education and office tenure in the nineteenth century, which was later displaced more and more in the current century, especially since 1945, by a societal pattern in which a broad center where all kinds of educational qualifications exist is surrounded by a narrow periphery where the level of education is low. The consolidation of the hierarchy of education and of office tenure in the nineteenth century was made possible by the secondary role played by the law of inertia and social exclusiveness. The different educational levels formed delineated social milieus, each with its own type of school. Later on, however, the law of inertia and social exclusiveness was increasingly pushed into the background. While the hierarchy of education and office tenure is still supported by delineated value attitudes,

worldviews, life-styles, rites, and cults, these are now being increasingly replaced by ones that at least embrace society's broad center.

The combination of the law of discursive generalization with that of market success has made a major contribution to the change from a society of education to one of both education and consumption. Through the commercial and industrial strata, material consumption has been admitted to the cultural horizon of values. This trend has evolved into the principle of "affluence for everyone" by the process of discursive generalization. Accordingly, a unique, generally high level of consumption has developed in Germany. Moreover, the higher value now placed upon market success has been accompanied by the trend for associations to form on the basis of individual interests rather than on the basis of any collectivity to which those individuals might belong. Because it is more and more usual to choose one's companions according to one's current interests, changes in the overall edifice of the social structure are being infused with a growing dynamism.

In conjunction with political processes, the law of discursive generalization has assigned to the state the task of bringing peace to the class struggle by removing class distinctions. Typical of the ideas with which this synthesis has been expressed are those of the Kulturstaat (Kultur in the sense not only of "culture" but also of education), the Rechtsstaat (state of law and justice), and the Sozialstaat (state of social welfare). To the extent that these ideas have been successfully realized, the law of political accumulation has been relegated to its proper place. The apportionment and deployment of power are only determined by the law of political accumulation within the limits marked by the above types of order. Now that the social welfare state and the concept of social partnership in industry have been developed, the class struggle has been led into peaceful channels governed by annual negotiations over pay and conditions. The broadened access to advanced education and the overall increase in the level of educational qualification have replaced the class struggle by a universal struggle to obtain educational certificates.

This chapter was written during a time when German reunification was inconceivable. Reunified Germany is now struggling with a new type of inequality between the affluent western Germans and the poorer eastern Germans. The country is attempting to correct this inequality as soon as possible. Such rapid transformation produces new strains and conflicts, which display an overall tendency toward the model of market success. This transformation, however, is an entirely different subject matter and is not elaborated on here.

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10—
Cultural Production, Consumption, and the Development of the Cultural Sphere

Mike Featherstone

Max Weber's theory of cultural rationalization and differentiation is well known. For Weber the development of modernity not only involved a long process of differentiation of the capitalist economy and the modern state but also entailed a cultural rationalization with the emergence of separate scientific, aesthetic, and moral value spheres. Weber's (1948) discussion of the differentiation of the cultural sphere from a more rudimentary, holistic, religious cultural core is conducted at a high level of abstraction. Although Weber provides brief glimpses of the way in which each aspect of the cultural sphere is relentlessly driven by its own logic, the way in which values relate to life-style and conduct, and the tensions experienced by intellectuals, the "cultivated man" and the cultural specialist, his prime purpose was to sketch out a typology (Weber 1948:323–24). While we do find fuller discussions of the cultural sphere in the writings of Bell (1976) and Habermas (1981), we need to build on these sources if we seek to understand the particular conjunction of culture in contemporary Western societies. In effect we need to investigate the conditions for the development of the cultural sphere by focusing on particular historical sequences and locations. First, we need to understand the emergence of relatively autonomous culture (knowledge and other symbolic media) in relation to the growth in the autonomy and power potential of specialists in symbolic production. We therefore need

I would like to thank Peter Bailey, Jose Bleicher, David Chaney, Mike Hepworth, Stephen Kalberg, Stephen Mennell, and Bryan S. Turner for commenting on an earlier version of this chapter.

to focus on the carriers of culture and the contradictory pressures that are generated by changing interdependencies and power struggles of the growing fraction within the middle class toward dual processes of (a) the monopolization and separation of a cultural enclave and (b) the demonopolization and diffusion of culture to wider publics. Second, we need to focus on the development of separate institutions and life-styles for cultural specialists and examine the relation between value complexes and conduct in the various life orders, not only in terms of a cultural sphere conceived as the arts and the academy ("high culture") but also in terms of the generation of oppositional countercultures (bohemias, artistic avant-gardes). Third, we need to comprehend the relational dynamic of a parallel development to that of the cultural sphere: the general expansion of cultural production via "culture industries" and the generation of a wider market for cultural and other symbolic goods to produce what has been termed a mass culture or a consumer culture . Both tendencies have contributed to the increasing prominence of culture within modern societies—tendencies that threaten to erode and domesticate everyday culture, the taken-for-granted stock of memories, traditions, and myths.

This suggests that cultural specialists are often caught in an ambivalent relationship toward the market that may lead to strategies of separation and distancing to sustain and promote the autonomy of the cultural sphere. At the same time, in terms of their interdependencies and power struggles with other groups (notably economic specialists), this may dispose them to use the marketplace to reach wider audiences to bolster their general societal power and increase the prestige and public value of their specialist cultural goods. Conditions that favor the autonomization of the cultural sphere will better allow cultural specialists to monopolize, regulate, and control cultural production, to seek to place cultural production above economic production, and to place art and intellectual pursuits above everyday life, popular uneducated tastes, and mass culture. Alternatively, conditions that threaten the autonomy of the cultural sphere, the demonopolization processes that discredit the "sacred" intellectual and artistic symbolic hierarchies, will tend to allow outsider groups of cultural specialists to endorse alternative tastes and to seek to legitimate an expanded repertoire that may include the formerly excluded popular traditions and mass cultural goods. Without an attempt to comprehend the rising and declining fortunes of particular groups of cultural specialists, it may be difficult to make sense of those who mourn or applaud present-day assertions, such as "the end of art,"

"the end of the avant-garde," "the end of the intellectuals," and "the end of culture" (Featherstone 1988, 1989a, 1989b, 1991).

In this paper we will look at various approaches that have addressed these issues. This will be done via an examination of three major conceptions of the development of an enlarged field of cultural production, which entails analyzing the interrelationship between the development of the cultural sphere and a mass consumer culture. First, we examine the production of culture perspective in which a mass culture that is presented as threatening to engulf and debase the culture sphere is seen as the logical outcome of the process of capitalist commodity production. Second, we examine a mode of consumption approach that draws on anthropological perspectives to argue that there are similarities in the consumption of culture in all societies and that we should refrain from negatively evaluating mass-produced culture. Rather, the classification of cultural goods and tastes (be they everyday consumer durables, life-style practices, or high cultural pursuits), must be understood as operating relationally within the same social space. This sociogenetic perspective focuses on how the symbolic aspects of goods and activities are used practically to draw the boundaries of social relationships. Third, we explore a psychogenetic perspective on cultural consumption that examines the genesis of the propensity and desire to consume new goods and experiences. Such a perspective, which focuses upon the middle class and draws upon Weber's notion of ideal interests, also raises the issue of the long-term process of the generation of habitus, dispositions, and means of orientation in different interdependent and competing groups of people. Finally, we return to a discussion of the cultural sphere and suggest some of the conditions that favor its formation and deformation and the generation of particular evaluations of mass culture by a set of cultural specialists. This attempt to identify how such issues should be addressed can help us to better understand the process of cultural development and to move beyond statically conceived notions of the cultural sphere, market culture, mass culture, consumer culture, everyday culture, and deeply ingrained cultural traditions and codes.

The Production of Consumption

The study of consumption has long been regarded as the province of economics, and, although Adam Smith argued that "con-

sumption is the sole end and purpose of all production" (Minchinton 1982:219), the analysis of consumption has been largely neglected in favor of production and distribution. This neglect may have resulted from the assumption that consumption was unproblematic because it was based upon the concept of rational individuals buying goods to maximize their satisfaction. That rational choice might be modified by social pressures such as the customs and habits of the people was given only minor acknowledgment. In the late nineteenth century we find some interest in external effects on utility, such as conspicuous consumption, the snob effect, and the bandwagon effect (Minchinton 1982:221). In general, sociological interest in the move to mass consumption in the second half of the nineteenth century has been restricted to indicating the limitations of strictly economic or market explanations of human behavior. This sociological critique of economics has sometimes been coupled with a concern that mass consumption brought about social deregulation and a threat to the social bond. The move to intensified mass production, mass consumption, and the extension of the market into more areas of life is thus generally seen as harmful to culture. The new culture produced for mass consumption, then, was often viewed negatively, especially by neo-Marxist critics, who regarded advertising, the mass media, and the entertainment industries as logical extensions of commodity production in which markets were monopolized to produce mass deception and a debased consumer culture. The tendency has been to deduce the effects on consumption of culture from the production of culture and, within the neo-Marxist framework, to follow variants of the base-superstructure model. From this perspective it is possible to regard the logic of capitalist mass production as leading to a more extensive mass society.

One of the clearest statements on the power of the productive forces in society to harness consumption to fit with its designs is the Frankfurt school's theory of the culture industry. Nonwork activities in general become subsumed under the same instrumental rationality and commodity logic of the workplace, and artistic and cultural goods become subjected to the same standardization and pseudoindividualization used in the production of other goods. Hence Horkheimer and Adorno (1972:137) state that "Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work." Art, which formerly supplied the promesse de bonheur, the yearning for the otherness that transcends the existing reality, now openly becomes a commodity. As Horkheimer and Adorno remark, "What is new is not that it is a commodity, but that

today it deliberately admits it is one; that art renounces its own autonomy and proudly takes its place among consumption goods constitutes the charm of novelty" (157). The culture industry offered the prospect of a manufactured culture in which discrimination and knowledge of culture (the high culture of the literati) was swamped and replaced by a mass culture (the prestige seeker replacing the connoisseur) in which reception was dictated by exchange value. For Adorno the increasing dominance of exchange value obliterated the original use value (in the case of art, the promesse de bonheur, the enjoyment, pleasure, or purposiveness without purpose with which the object was to be approached) and replaced it with exchange value (its instrumental market value or "currency"). This freed the commodity to take on a wide range of secondary or artificial associations, and advertising, in particular, took advantage of this capacity.

From this perspective advertising not only used, transformed, or replaced traditional high culture to promote the consumption of commodities and further mass deception but also drew attention to the symbolic aspect of commodities. The triumph of economic exchange need not just entail the eclipse of traditional culture and high culture, but a new "artificial" culture was generated from "below," via the logic of commodity production, to replace them. Hence, a number of commentators have focused upon the centrality of advertising in the genesis of a consumer culture (Ewen 1976; Ewen and Ewen 1982; Leiss et al. 1986).

Another example of the interpretation of the culture of consumption in terms of the commodification of everyday life is found in the work of Fredric Jameson. Following the capital logic approach, which points to the profusion of a new artificial culture with the extension of commodity production, Jameson (1982:139) emphasizes that "culture is the very element of consumer society itself; no society has ever been saturated with signs and messages like this one . . . the omnipresence of the image in consumer capitalism today [means that] the priorities of the real become reversed, and everything is mediated by culture." This perspective is central in his influential paper "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," in which he outlines the contours of postmodern culture (Jameson 1984:87).

A similar emphasis upon cultural profusion and disorder, which threatens to obliterate the last vestiges of traditional popular culture or high culture, is found in the work of Jean Baudrillard, on which Jameson draws. Baudrillard (1970) builds on the commodification theory of

Lukács and Lefebvre, arguing that consumption involves the active manipulation of signs and that what is consumed is not objects but the system of objects, the sign system that makes up the code. Baudrillard draws on semiology to develop the cultural implications of commodity analysis and argues that in late capitalist society sign and commodity have fused to produce the commodity-sign. The logic of political economy for Baudrillard has therefore involved a semiological revolution entailing not just the replacement of use-value by exchange-value, but eventually the replacement of both by sign-value. This leads to the autonomization of the signifier, which can be manipulated (for example, through advertising) to float free from a stable relationship to objects and establish its own associative chains of meaning.

In Baudrillard's later writings (1983a, 1983b), references to economics, class, and mode of production disappear. Indeed at one point in Simulations, Baudrillard (1983a) tilts at Bourdieu when he argues that social analysis in terms of normativity or class is doomed to failure because it belongs to a stage of the system that we have now superseded. The new stage of the system is the postmodern simulational world in which television, the machine of simulation par excellence, endlessly reduplicates the world. This switch to the production and reproduction of copies for which there is no original, the simulacrum, effaces the distinction between the real and the imaginary. According to Baudrillard (1983a:148), we now live "in an 'aesthetic' hallucination of reality." The ultimate terminus of the expansion of the commodity production system is the triumph of signifying culture and the death of the social: a postsociety configuration that escapes sociological classification and explanation, an endless cycle of the reduplication and overproduction of signs, images, and simulations that leads to an implosion of meaning. We are now in the increasingly familiar territory of the transformation of reality into images in the postmodern, schizoid, depthless culture. All that remains on the human level is the masses, the silent majority, which acts as a "black hole" (Baudrillard 1983b:9), absorbing the overproduction of energy and information from the media and cynically watching the fascinating endless play of signs. Baudrillard's conception of mass has taken us a long way from mass culture theory, in which the manipulation of the masses through the popular media plays a central role. For him the logic of commodity development has seen the triumph of culture, a new postmodern phase of cultural disorder in which the distinctions between levels of culture—high, folk, popular, or

class—give way to a glutinous mass that simulates and plays with the overproduction of signs.

Today the high culture/mass culture debate arouses little passion in academic life. Since the mid-1970s the attacks on the distinction between high culture and mass culture have proceeded apace. Particularly influential in the British context has been the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (see Hall et al. 1980) and the Open University (see Bennett et al. 1977; Bennett et al. 1981). One finds a wide range of criticisms. There is the alleged elitism of the Frankfurt school's pro-high-culture distinction between individuality and pseudo-individuality, which condemns the masses to manipulation (Bennett et al. 1977; Swingewood 1977). Other criticisms include the puritanism and prudery of those arguments that favor notions of creative production against the right of the masses to enjoy its consumption and pleasures (Leiss 1983; New Formations 1983); the invalidity of the distinction between true and false needs found in the critiques of consumer society and its culture in the work of Marcuse (1964), Debord (1970), and Ewen (1976) (see Sahlins 1976; Leiss 1983; Springborg 1981); and the neglect of the egalitarian and democratic currents in mass culture, the process of leveling up and not down, that finds one of its strongest statements in Shils (1960) (see also Swingewood 1977; Kellner 1983). There have also been criticisms that the foundation of the critique of mass culture is to be found in an essentially nostalgic Kulturpessimismus perspective on the part of intellectuals who were entrapped in a myth of premodern stability, coherence, and community (Stauth and Turner 1988) or a nostalgia for a premodern, precommodity form of symbolic exchange or a presimulational reality such as we find in Baudrillard's work. The critics of mass culture theories also have neglected complex social differentiations (Wilensky 1964), the ways in which mass-produced commodities can be customized or signs can be reversed with their meanings renegotiated critically or oppositionally. See the work on youth subcultures by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, especially Hebdige (1979 on punk; also de Certeau 1981). In addition there is Raymond Williams's (1961) pronouncement that "there are no masses, only other people." Such critiques point to the importance of transcending the view that uniformity of consumption is dictated by production and emphasize the need to investigate the actual use and reception of goods in various practices. Such critiques also entail a revaluation of popular practices, which are no longer to be seen as

debased and vulgar. Rather, the integrity of the culture of the common people is defended and suspicion is cast upon the whole enterprise of the construction of an autonomous cultural sphere with its rigid symbolic hierarchies, exclusive canons, and classifications.

Modes of Consumption

Focusing on the consumption of culture rather than on production points us toward the differential reception and use of mass-produced cultural goods and experiences and the ways in which popular culture has failed to be eclipsed by mass culture. Indeed, if we take a long-term process approach to cultural formation it is clear that cultural objects are continually redesignated and move from popular to high to mass and vice versa. In this sense, popular and folk culture cannot provide a pristine baseline for culture because they have a long history of being packaged and commodified. Hence, the emphasis should switch from more abstract views of cultural production to the actual practices of cultural production on the part of particular groups of cultural specialists and the ways in which they relate to the actual practices of consumption on the part of different groups.

Considerable insight into this process is gained by analyzing anthropological research on consumption that focuses on the symbolic aspect of goods and their role as communicators. From this perspective, goods are used to mark boundaries between groups, to create and demarcate differences or communality between figurations of people (see Douglas and Isherwood 1980; Sahlins 1976; Leiss 1983; Appadurai 1986). Leiss (1978:19), for example, argues that, while utilities in all cultures are symbolic, goods are in effect doubly symbolic in contemporary Western societies: symbolism is consciously employed in the design and imagery attached to goods in the production and marketing process, and symbolic associations are used by consumers in using goods to construct differentiated life-style models.

The work of Douglas and Isherwood (1980) is particularly important in this respect because of their emphasis on how goods are used to draw the lines of social relationships. Our enjoyment of goods, they argue, is only partly related to physical consumption. It is also crucially linked to their use as markers; we enjoy, for example, sharing the names of goods with others (the sports fan or the wine connoisseur). In addition, the

mastery of the cultural person entails a seemingly "natural" mastery, not only of information (the autodidact "memory man") but also of how to use and consume appropriately and with natural ease in every situation. In this sense the consumption of high cultural goods (art, novels, opera, philosophy), must be related to the ways in which other, more mundane, cultural goods (clothing, food, drink, leisure pursuits) are handled and consumed, and high culture must be inscribed into the same social space as everyday cultural consumption. In Douglas and Isherwood's (1980: 176ff.) discussion, consumption classes are defined in relation to the consumption of three sets of goods: a staple set (for example, food), a technology set (travel and capital equipment), and an information set (information goods, education, arts, and cultural and leisure pursuits). At the lower end of the social structure the poor are restricted to the staple set and have more time on their hands, but those in the top consumption class require not only a higher level of earnings but also a competence in judging information goods and services. This entails a considerable investment in time, both as a lifelong investment in cultural and symbolic capital and as an investment in maintaining consumption activities (it is in this sense that we refer to the title of Linder's [1970] book, The Harried Leisure Class ). Hence the competition to acquire goods in the information class generates high admission barriers and effective techniques of exclusion.

The phasing, duration, and intensity of time invested in acquiring competences for handling information, goods, and services as well as the day-to-day practice, conservation, and maintenance of these competences are, as Halbwachs reminds us, useful criteria of social class. Our use of time in consumption practices conforms to our class habitus and, therefore, conveys an accurate idea of our class status (see the discussion of Halbwachs in Preteceille and Terrail 1985:23). This points us toward the importance of research on the different long-term investments in informational acquisition and cultural capital of particular groups. Such research has been carried out in detail by Bourdieu and his associates (Bourdieu et al. 1965; Bourdieu and Darbel 1966; Bourdieu and Passeron 1971; Bourdieu 1984). For Bourdieu (1984) particular constellations of taste, consumption preferences, and life-style practices are associated with specific occupation and class fractions, making it possible to map the universe of taste and life-styles with all its structured oppositions and finely graded distinctions that operate within a particular society at a particular point in history. Yet within capitalist societies the volume of production of new goods results in an endless struggle to

obtain what Hirsch (1976) calls "positional goods," goods that define social status. The constant supply of new, fashionably desirable goods, or the usurpation of existing marker goods by lower groups, produces a paper-chase effect in which those above have to invest in new (informational) goods to reestablish the original social distance.

It is therefore possible to refer both to societies in which the tendency is for the progressive breakdown of the barriers that restrict the production of new goods and the capacity of commodities to travel and to societies with the countertendency to restrict, control, and channel exchange in order to establish enclaved commodities. In some societies, status systems are guarded and reproduced by restricting equivalences and exchange in a stable universe of commodities. In other societies with a fashion system, taste in an ever-changing universe of commodities is restricted and controlled, and at the same time there is the illusion of individual choice and unrestricted access. Sumptuary laws are an intermediate consumption-regulating device for societies with stable status displays which face the deregulation of the flow of commodities, for example, premodern Europe (Appadurai 1986:25). The tendencies noted by Jameson, Baudrillard, and others toward the overproduction of symbolic goods in contemporary societies suggest that the bewildering flow of signs, images, information, fashions, and styles would be impossible to subject to a final or coherent reading (see Featherstone 1988, 1989a, 1991).

Examples of this alleged cultural disorder are often taken from the media (as does, for example, Baudrillard), yet, apart from grand statements such as "television is the world," we are given little understanding of how this disorder affects the everyday practices of different figurations of people. It can be argued that as long as face-to-face encounters continue between embodied persons, attempts will be made to read a person's demeanor for clues as to his or her social standing. The different styles and labels of fashionable clothing and goods, however much subject to change, imitation, and copying, are one such set of clues. Yet as Bourdieu (1984) reminds us with his concept of symbolic capital, the signs of the dispositions and classificatory schemes that betray a person's origins and trajectory through life are manifest in body shape, size, weight, stance, walk, demeanor, tone of voice, style of speaking, sense of bodily ease or discomfort, and so on. Hence culture is incorporated, and it is not just a question of what clothes are worn but of how they are worn. Advice books on manners, taste, and etiquette—from Erasmus to Nancy Mitford's "U" and "Non-U"—impress on their subjects the need

to naturalize dispositions and manners, to be completely at home with them. At the same time the newly arrived may display signs of the burden of attainment and the incompleteness of their cultural competence. Hence the new rich, who often adopt conspicuous consumption strategies, are recognizable and assigned their place in the social space. Their cultural practices are always in danger of being dismissed as vulgar and tasteless by the established upper class, the aristocracy, and those "rich in cultural goods"—the intellectuals and artists.

From one perspective, artistic and intellectual goods are enclaved commodities whose capacity to move around in the social space is limited by their ascribed sacred qualities. In this sense the specialists in symbolic production will seek to increase the autonomy of the cultural sphere and to restrict the supply and access to such goods, in effect creating and preserving an enclosure of high culture. This can take the form of rejecting the market and any economic use of the goods and adopting a life-style that is the opposite of the successful economic specialist (disorder versus order, the cultivation of transgressions strategies, the veneration of natural talent and genius against systematic achievement and work, and so on). Yet as Bourdieu (1984, 1979) indicates, there is an interest in disinterestedness, and it is possible to chart the hidden and misrecognized economy in cultural goods with its own forms of currency, rates of conversion to economic capital, and so on. The problem of the intellectuals in market situations is that they must achieve and retain this degree of closure and control that enables artistic and intellectual goods to remain enclaved commodities. Indeed, as many commentators have pointed out, this is the paradox of intellectuals and artists: their necessary dependence on, yet distaste for and desire for independence from, the market. Within situations of an overproduction of symbolic goods, there may be intensified competition from new cultural intermediaries (the expanding design, advertising, marketing, commercial art, graphics, journalistic, media, and fashion occupations) and other "outsider" intellectuals that have emerged from the postwar expansion of higher education in Western societies. This competition may lead to the inability of established intellectuals to maintain the stability of symbolic hierarchies, and the resultant phase of cultural declassification opens a space for the generation of interest in popular culture on what is proclaimed to be a more egalitarian and democratic basis.

We have therefore moved from considering the production of culture from a mode of production perspective to one that, following Prete-

ceille and Terrail's (1985:36) depiction of Bourdieu's work, we can call a mode of consumption approach. From this point of view, demand and cultural consumption are not merely dictated by supply, but they must be understood within a social framework, that is, as sociogenetically induced. A perspective that emphasizes that "consumption is eminently social, relational, and active rather than private, atomic, or passive" (Appadurai 1986:31).

Romanticism, Desire, and Middle-class Consumption

The mode of consumption perspective emphasizes the continuities in the socially structured handling and use of goods between contemporary capitalist and other types of societies. The "psycho-genetic" perspective, like the production of consumption approach, focuses on explaining the proliferation of new goods. In contrast to the latter's emphasis on supply, the psychogenetic approach concentrates on the problem of the demand for new goods. This entails a move from economic centered analysis to questions of desire—to the puzzle of the genesis of the propensity to consume anew, the motivational complex that develops a thirst for pleasure, poverty, self-expression, and self-realization through goods. In a manner reminiscent of Weber's Protestant Ethic, Campbell (1987) argues that the rise of consumption, like that of capitalist production, requires an ethic, and in this case it is romanticism, with its focus on imagination, fantasy, mysticism, creativity, and emotional exploration, and not Protestantism, that supplies the impetus.^[1] He writes: "The essential activity of consumption is thus not actual selection, purchase or use of products, but the imaginative pleasure-seeking to which the product image lends itself, 'real' consumption being largely a result of this 'mentalistic' hedonism" (Campbell 1987:89). From this perspective, the pleasure derived from novels, paintings, plays, records, films, radio, television, and fashion is not the result of manipulation by the advertisers or an "obsession with social status," but it is the illusory enjoyment stimulated by daydreaming. The disposition to live out desires, fantasies, and daydreams, or the capacity to spend a good deal of time in pursuit of them, may vary among different social groups. Campbell locates its origins in relation to consumerism within the eighteenth-century English middle class. Groups

that have achieved a high degree of literacy are likely to be more disposed to take ideas and character ideals seriously and, as Weber pointed out, to seek to achieve consistency in conduct. Yet how far can we understand mass consumption by focusing solely upon the development of a romantic ethic in the middle class? To understand the consumption habits of the middle class in the eighteenth century we need to locate the habits of this group in relation to those of the lower and the upper classes.

We have already referred to the contrast between societies that restrict the exchange of commodities in order to reproduce a stable status system and societies that have an ever-changing universe of commodities and a fashion system with the appearance of complete interchangeability which actually can be considered in terms of socially structured taste. Consumption in the upper class or aristocracy tends more toward the reproduction of a stable status system, which also includes phases of liminal excess and transgression (carnivals, fairs, and so on.) Mennell (1987) reminds us that the aristocracy in court society became "specialists in the arts of consumption entrapped in a system of fine distinctions, status battles, and competitive expenditure from which they could not escape because their whole social identity depended upon it." Here the fashion code was restricted rather than elaborated and the courtier had to conform to strict rules of dress, manners, and deportment (Elias 1983:232). In court societies such as Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV, consumption was highly structured in terms of the regulation of etiquette, ceremony, taste, dress, manners, and conversation. Every detail was perceived as an instrument in the struggle for prestige. The ability to read appearance and gestures for slight giveaway clues and the time spent in decoding the demeanor and conversation of others indicate how a courtier's very existence depended on calculation.

These tight restrictions on behavior in court society produced a number of countermovements that sought to compensate for the suppression of feeling and court rationality by the emancipation of feeling. We are generally inclined to perceive these contrasting positions as involving class differences between the aristocracy (the dissimulating, artful, false courtier) and the middle class (the virtuous, sincere, honest citizen) and to formulate them in terms of other-directed and innerdirected qualities. Elias (1978:19), in the early part of The Civilizing Process, shows how the German middle class venerated Kultur with romantic ideals of love of nature, solitude, and surrender to the excitement of one's own heart. Here the middle-class outsiders, spatially

dispersed and isolated, can be contrasted to the established court with its ideals drawn from French civilisation . From this a further series of contrasts can be made between the middle-class intelligentsia and the aristocratic courtier: inwardness and depth of feeling versus superficiality and ceremony; immersion in books and education and the development of personal identity versus formal conversation and courtly manners; and virtue versus honor (see Vowinckel 1987).

Yet there are also links between the middle-class romantic emphasis upon sincerity and the development of romantic tendencies within the aristocracy. Elias (1983:214ff.), in "The Sociogenesis of Aristocratic Romanticism," argues that one of the influential forerunners of bourgeois romanticism, Rousseau, owed some of his success to the ways in which his ideas were perceived as a reaction to court rationality and the suppression of "feeling" in court life. The idealization of nature and the melancholic longing for country life is found in the early eighteenth-century nobility at the court of Louis XIV. The sharp contrast between court and country, the complexity of court life, and the incessant self-control and necessary calculation contributed to a nostalgia for the idealized rural existence described in the romantic utopias filled with shepherds and shepherdesses in novels such as L'Astrée by Honoré d'Urfé. Elias (1983) can detect both clear discontinuities and similar processes in the sociogenesis of bourgeois and aristocratic romanticism. He refers (262) to the middle classes as "dual-front classes" that are exposed to social pressures from groups above who possess greater power, authority, and prestige and from groups below who are inferior in these qualities. The pressures for self-control in relation to the codes of professional life, coupled with pressures of being in a dual-front class, may help to generate an ambivalence toward the system of rules and self-constraints that nourish a dream-image of a more direct, spontaneous expression of emotion.

The implications of the role of the romantic ethic in the genesis of consumerism should now be clearer. Romanticism cannot be assumed just to work as a set of ideas that induced more direct emotional expression through fantasies and daydreaming and that translated into the desire for new commodities to nourish this longing. Rather, we need to understand the sociogenesis of romantic tendencies that were generated in the rivalries and interdependencies between the aristocracy and the middle classes. These pressures may have nourished a romantic longing for the unconstrained, expressive, and spontaneous life that was projected onto commodities and manifest in fashion, novel reading, and

other popular entertainments catered for in the burgeoning public sphere. Yet the practicalities of everyday life, the social demands of sustaining one's acceptability, were also important forces. Social constraints demanded from middle-class professionals careful attention to etiquette, dress, demeanor, and an ordered, measured consumption. Unlike the courtier class, the middle classes enjoyed a private life in which they could be "off stage." Yet it is easy to overestimate the freedom and independence of the private sphere. The pressures to maintain a style of social life concomitant with one's status led to increasing pressures to codify and regulate domestic consumption, artistic taste, food, and festivities (see Elias 1983:116).

When we look more specifically at the middle class, we need to consider the different situations in particular nations in the eighteenth century. The situation of the English middle class was very different from that of the French and the German. England provided a middling case in which closer links existed between court life and country life and between a more differentiated aristocracy, the gentry, and the middle classes (Elias and Dunning 1987:35; Mennell 1985:119). In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, landed London society was a reference group for those in the rising middle-class strata who emulated its tastes, manners, and fashions (Mennell 1985: 212). Davidoff (1973:13) has noted in early nineteenth-century housekeeping manuals, etiquette books, and magazines how increased expenditures on ceremonial displays to maintain an expected life-style became requisite (see Mennell 1985:209).

Evidence suggests that the middle class in eighteenth-century England encountered increasing pressure for consumption from below. What has been referred to as the "consumer revolution" in the eighteenth century involved increased consumption of luxury goods, fashion, household goods, popular novels, magazines, newspapers, and entertainment and the means of marketing them through advertising to an enlarged buying public (see McKendrick et al. 1982). The lower classes were drawn into this expansion of consumption by adopting fashions that emulated the upper classes, and fashion diffused down the social scale much more widely in England than in other European countries (McKendrick et al. 1982:34ff.).

One important reason why emulation was possible and new fashion was transmitted so rapidly was that they took place within an urban milieu. London was the largest city in Europe in the eighteenth century and it exercised a considerable dominance over other European coun-

tries. Changing fashions, the display of new goods in shops, and conspicuous consumption were clearly visible and were topics of everyday conversation. The narrowing of social distances and the swing toward informal relations between the classes also became manifest in a new use of public space within London, which has come to be called the public sphere . The public sphere was comprised of social institutions: periodicals, journals, clubs, and coffeehouses in which individuals could gather for unconstrained discussion (see Habermas 1974; Eagleton 1984; Stallybrass and White 1986:80ff.). The emergence of the public sphere is closely tied to the development of the cultural sphere. The profession of literary criticism and the independent specialists in cultural production who wrote for newspapers and magazines and produced novels for their newly enlarged audiences developed dramatically by mid-eighteenth century (Williams 1961; Hohendahl 1982). The city coffeehouses became centers where people gathered to read or to hear newspapers and magazines read aloud and to discuss them (Lowenthal 1961:56). Not only were the coffeehouses democratic domains for free cultural discussion (cf. Mannheim 1956), but also they were spaces of civility, a cleansed discursive environment freed from the low-others, the "grotesque bodies," of the alehouses (Stallybrass and White 1986:95). The coffeehouses replaced "idle" and festive consumption with productive leisure. They were decent , ordered places that demanded a withdrawal from popular culture, which was increasingly viewed from a negative perspective.

While there was therefore a movement toward a democratization of cultural interchange and a differentiation of culture between the respectable, decent, and civil and the ill-controlled lower orders in the eighteenth century, this was a part of a long-term process. Burke (1978:24) argues that in the sixteenth century there were two traditions in culture: the classical tradition of philosophy and theology learned in schools and universities and the popular tradition contained in folksongs, folktales, devotional images, mystery plays, chapbooks, fairs, and festivals. Yet the upper levels directly participated in popular culture, and even in the early eighteenth century not all were disengaged from the culture of the common people. Burke (286) suggests that in 1500 the educated strata despised the common people although they shared their culture. Yet by 1800 their descendents had ceased to join spontaneously in popular culture and were rediscovering it as something exotic and interesting. The culture of the lower orders remained a source of fascination, and the symbolism of this tradition remained important as a strand within the high culture of the middle classes (Stallybrass and White 1986:

107). The carnivalesque , with its hybridization, mixing of codes, grotesque bodies, and transgressions, remained a fascinating spectacle for eighteenth-century writers, including Pope, Rousseau, and Words-worth. While one part of this tradition emerged in the artistic bohemias of the mid-nineteenth century, with their deliberate transgressions of bourgeois culture and invocation of liminoid grotesque body symbolism associated with the carnivalesque , another developed into romanticism. When Frederick the Great published his De la littérature allemande in 1780, he protested against the social mixing and transgression and manifest lack of taste in "the abominable works of Shakespeare" over which "the whole audience goes into raptures when it listens to these ridiculous farces worthy of the savages in canada" (quoted in Elias 1978:14). For the bourgeois intellectuals and their public against whom Frederick directed his remarks, the actual savages of North America (Voltaire's L'Ingénu ) and of Tahiti (Bougainville's Voyage ) held a growing fascination as "exotic otherness."

At the same time, then, that traditional popular culture was beginning to disappear, European intellectuals were discovering, recording, and formulating the culture of the people (see Burke 1978). In part this was a reaction against the enlightened gentility of the "civilized" classical culture of the court and the aristocracy (Lunn 1986) and the uniform rationalism and universalism of the Enlightenment. Herder, for example, was sensitive to cultural diversity, the particularity of each cultural community, and wanted the different cultures to be considered on an equal basis. This strand developed into a critique of the French sociocentric identification of their own culture, designated as "civilization" and "high culture," as the universal metaculture for mankind (Dumont 1986).

Concluding Remarks:
The Development of the Cultural Sphere

The development of the cultural sphere must be seen as part of a long-term process that involved the growth in the power potential of the specialists in symbolic production and that produced two contradictory consequences. There was a greater autonomy in the nature of the knowledge produced and the monopolization of production and consumption in specialist enclaves with the development of

strong ritual classifications to exclude outsiders. There was also a greater expansion of knowledge and cultural goods produced for new audiences and markets in which existing hierarchical classifications were dismantled and specialist cultural goods were sold in similar ways to other "symbolic" commodities. It is these processes that point to the autonomy and heteronomy of the cultural sphere.

It would be useful to take Norbert Elias's observations (1971: 15) and examine the process of formation of the "autonomization" of particular spheres, which should be understood in terms of the changing power balances and the functional interdependencies between different social groups. To understand, therefore, the development of the economic sphere, we need to link the term economic to the rise of particular social strata and the theorization of the growing autonomous nexus of the relations generated by this group and other groups. Elias (1984) focuses on Quesney and the Physiocrats (who were soon followed by Adam Smith and others) as the first groups to synthesize empirical data in the belief that they could detect the effects of the laws of nature in society that would serve the welfare and prosperity of humankind. The ideas of the Physiocrats, according to Elias (1984:22), were positioned halfway between a social religion and a scientific hypothesis. They were able to fuse two, until then largely independent, streams of tradition: the large-scale philosophical concepts of book writers and the practical knowledge accumulated by administrators and merchants.

As the power of middle-class groups of economic specialists in commerce, trade, and industry increased, the object of inquiry changed in structure and formed the basis for a more autonomous scientific approach. Therefore the growing autonomy of social phenomena such as markets found expression in the gradual and growing autonomy of theory about these phenomena and in the formation of the science of economics that carved out a separate sphere with immanent, autonomous laws of its own. The claim of middle-class entrepreneurs that the economy ought to be autonomous and free from state intervention became actualized. (For an interesting account of the attempts to create a "market culture" and to persuade people that the theory was in line with actuality, see Reddy 1984). The idea developed that the economy was a separate sphere and was, in fact, autonomous within society. Elias (1984:29) suggests this claim for autonomy had at least three strands:

It was a claim asserting the autonomy of the nexus of functions which formed the subject-matter of the science of economics—of the autonomy in relation to

other functions, the subject-matter of other disciplines. It was a claim to autonomy of the science whose subject-matter this nexus was—of its theories and methods in relation to those of other disciplines. And it was also a claim to autonomy of the class of people who were specialists in the performance of these functions in relation to other social groups and particularly in relation to governments.

We can therefore attempt to understand the processes whereby the economy became posited as an independent social sphere and the relative autonomous science of economics was developed. We have already noted some ways in which the cultural sphere may also have moved in the direction of autonomy, and this trend of course merits a much fuller treatment. There are, however, important differences between the spheres, not only in the level of autonomy achieved but also in the deficit in the power potential of the specialists in symbolic production (artists, intellectuals, academics) compared with economic specialists and other groups and in the nature of the form, content, and social effectivity of the symbols and cultural goods produced. As Bendix (1970) points out, following Weber's reasoning, the religious specialists who monopolized magical-mythical knowledge supplied beliefs that had a mundane meaning and a practical usefulness as a means of orientation for ordinary people. The knowledge of artists and intellectuals did not offer similar practical benefits, despite the convictions of their advocates. Although artists, by virtue of their skills, possessed mysteries that made them formidable, these skills did not provide power in the religious sense, and arcane knowledge without apparent purpose may even have made the cultural elites suspect to the populace (Bendix 1970:145). Nevertheless, the demand for such goods may increase with the shift toward a consumer and credential based society, with its wider market for cultural goods and associated expansion of higher education.

The endeavor to establish an autonomous sphere of high culture may conceal a series of tensions and interdependencies within the production of culture in general. Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1985), for example, has suggested that the major organizing principle in cultural production is whether symbolic considerations (which generate what he calls the "field of restricted cultural production") or economic considerations (the "field of large-scale cultural production") come first. As mentioned, artists and intellectuals tend to emphasize their autonomy from the market and economic life. For Bourdieu, however, a relational dynamic operates here, because the denial of the market and the relevance of economic capital is based on "interests in disinterestedness," an inter-

est in the enhancement of the prestige and relevance of their cultural goods—of cultural capital over economic capital. The picture is further complicated by the fact that the subfield of artistic and intellectual production itself can be seen as part of a continuum. This continuum consists of four parts: (1) the tiny mutual admiration societies of avant-gardes and bohemians who follow myths of charismatic creation and distinction and who are highly autonomous from the market; (2) cultural institutions such as academics and museums that are relatively autonomous from the market and that establish and maintain their own symbolic hierarchies and canons; (3) the cultural producers who achieve "high-society" and upper-class endorsement and success and whose cultural success is closely tied to economic profit and market success; and (4) the cultural producers who achieve mass audience or "popular" success and whose production is closely tied to the dictates of the market (see Bourdieu 1983:329).

A number of points can be made about the interrelationships of the subfields and the notion of cultural production as a whole. First, such a model, which emphasizes the relative heteronomy and autonomy of the various subfields from the market, points to the relational determinism of the various parts of the cultural sphere as a whole. It suggests that the valuation of high culture, and the devaluation of popular culture, will vary with the extent to which cultural avant-gardes and cultural institutions develop and maintain autonomy and legitimacy. We therefore need to examine the interdependencies and shifting power balances between symbolic specialists and economic specialists in a manner that accounts for the differentiation of the various subfields of the cultural sphere.

Second, we should not focus exclusively on these groups. The processes that gave rise to the cultural sphere and mass market culture took place within different state formation processes and national traditions. Maravall (1986), for example, disputes that the development of a mass culture in seventeenth-century Spain should be understood solely in terms of economic factors. Rather, he conceives of the development of baroque culture as a conservative cultural reaction to the crisis faced by the Spanish state (in particular the monarchical and seignorial sectors), which manipulated culture production to generate a new culture of spectacles for the growing urban masses. Another example is directly relevant to the potential autonomy of culture. The peculiarities of the French state formation process, which attained a high degree of centralization and integration, also promoted the view that French culture

represented universal civilization and the metaculture of humankind. This view not only facilitated a serious attitude toward culture through the development of cultural institutions but also favored the development of culture as a prestigious specialism and life-style. This was particularly true for those fractions within the middle class that were attracted to the cultural ideals of the Enlightenment and the life-style of the independent writer in the eighteenth century (Darnton 1983). It also provided the basis for the development of autonomous artistic and literary bohemians and avant-gardes in Paris from the 1830s onward (Seigel 1986). Hence, to understand different societal evaluations of "high culture" or the transcultural applicability of Bourdieu's notion of "cultural capital," we need to be aware that the acceptance and the social efficacy of recognizable forms of cultural capital vary in relation to the society's degree of social and cultural integration. Outside specific metropolitan centers in the United States, cultural capital, that is, knowledge of high culture and acquired dispositions and tastes that manifest such knowledge, is accorded less legitimacy and investment potential than in France (Lamont and Lareau 1988).

Third, although certain subfields of the cultural sphere attain relative autonomy, their cultural practices may still affect everyday culture and the formation of habitus and dispositions within broader groups outside the cultural sphere, as our French example indicates. It would be useful to investigate the place of cultural ideals such as "the artist as hero" and the veneration of the artist's and intellectual's life-style within different groups, education processes, and mass cultural media. For some commentators the cultural sphere is credited with a considerable influence on everyday culture. Bell (1976) asserts that artistic modernism, with its transgressive strategies, has strongly influenced consumer culture and threatens the basis of the social bond. Martin (1981) has also considered the effects of cultural modernism and the counterculture on mainstream British culture. We also need more systematic studies on the role of the cultural sphere in the formation of dispositions, habitus, and means of orientation for different groups. Such studies would help to explore the connections between sociogenetic and psychogenetic perspectives in that the formation of the cultured or cultivated person entails tendencies that parallel the way civilizing processes ensure the control of affects and the internalization of external controls. In addition we need to focus on the long-term processes that form larger audiences and publics for the particular types of cultural goods produced within the various subfields of the cultural sphere.

Our discussion of the cultural sphere therefore suggests the need for a more differentiated notion of the cultural sphere in which the relative autonomy of the various subfields is investigated. This would better enable us to understand the relationship between those sectors that seek to achieve greater autonomy (high culture) and those sectors that are more directly tied to production for the popular markets in cultural goods (mass consumer culture). As we have emphasized, the relationship between these sectors is not fixed or static but is best conceived of as a process. It is therefore important to consider various phases that entail spurts toward autonomy (which, as mentioned, was particularly marked in nineteenth-century France) and toward heteronomy (phases of cultural declassification in which cultural enclaves are pulled into wider economic markets for cultural goods such as postmodernism). We therefore need to focus upon certain phases in the history of particular societies to understand the processes that lead to the formation and deformation of the cultural sphere. This entails examining the particular intergroup and class fractional power struggles and interdependencies that increase or diminish the power potential of cultural specialists and the societal valuation of their cultural goods and theories.

Here it would be useful to investigate the relationship between particular theoretical conceptions of the nature, scope, and purpose of culture produced by cultural specialists and the differential pulls toward autonomy and heteronomy. The intention in this chapter has therefore been to argue for a long-term process perspective on culture in which the focus is on neither cultural production nor cultural consumption per se. Rather, we need to examine both their necessary interrelationship and the swings toward theorizations that emphasize the exclusivity of the explanatory value of either approach given the rise and fall of particular figurations of people involved in interdependencies and power struggles. In effect we need to focus on the long-term process of cultural production within Western societies that has enabled the development of a massive capacity for producing, circulating, and consuming symbolic goods.

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