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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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