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Bourdieu på 1-2-3?
Her kommer lyn-kurs m film om Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieu explored cultural and economic capital as the prime causes in determining the social status of a person, being acquired through upbringing (for example your accent) and education (for example your university degree). It connects social hierarchies with cultural ones, with people’s taste being the foremost indicator of class (Thornton, 1997). Cultural capital carries a wide meaning in Bourdieus work including material things as well as more abstract notions such as status and authority, and cultural capital (cultural taste and what people buy for instance). Cultural capital are the social relations within an exchange system, including goods, material and symbolic, that are presented as rare and desired items within the given social formation (Harker et al 1990). Cultural capital differs from economic capital, and usually a high level of cultural capital correlates with a high level of economic capital. Mocking comments on the ‘new rich’ - be it American oil billionaires or Russian mobsters - illustrate the conflict inherent when this is not the case. Such a conflict is revealed by Bourdieu’s multi-dimensional matrix of social structure which Thornton find more relevant than the traditional vertical models of social structure. Bourdieu also includes a third category, social capital, which is not related to what you own or know, but who you know and vice versa. Particular social relations bestow status, which sometimes takes precedence over cultural or economic capital, for example the social networks of boarding school or private semi-secret clubs.
Antonio Gramsci defined hegemony as a situation where domination by one class over another is achieved by political and ideological means. The dominance is achieved not through force, but through the consent of the other groups, who associates themselves with the moral and intellectual leadership (Abercrombie et al, 1994). Today the term has no single definition of hegemony, but prevalent among all the differing variants the notion of domination is present. One may instead consider hegemony as a discourse on the dominant and the dominated, and how dominating and dominated groups operates and affect the entire social field: “Instead it [hegemony] sees the relations of domination and subordination, in their forms as practical consciousness, as in effect a saturation of the whole process of living – not only of political and economic activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and relationships, to such a depth that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political, and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense” (Williams, 1977:110). I assume that in order to understand hacker culture as a subcultural group which is embedded within a hegemony means considering subtle and overt power relations at play both within and outside the social group. As I have tried to show in the preceding empirical material the struggle between an overarching, dominant culture and a subversive, counter- /subculture is manifested as an attempt to redefine knowledge distribution that power hierarchies of both cultures adhere to. In Bourdiean terms, power is described as how individuals and institutions of dominant fields (governmental or economic for instance) relate to one another and the entire social field. Fields of power are the configuration of capital that ‘makes things happen’, resources such as social networks, and personal or institutional status for instance. Bourdieu says that the power comes from the relationship to other dominant fields and its position within this field of power (Webb et al, 1990). These power relations are also central in the hacker identity formation process, defining the social groups outside the hacker community as well as the hierarchies within it. The hacker dichotomies and categories arise from conflict-laden relations with other underground computer users as well as governmental and corporate entities.
As mentioned earlier in my text, Sarah Thornton do not want to overemphasize the role of the dominant ideology in relation to the subculture itself, but seek to investigate the “subtle relations of power at play within it” (Thornton, 1995:15). She wishes to explore how subcultural ideologies let youth imagine their own and other social groups as well as how the members of the subculture define themselves in relation to the mainstream (ibid, 1997). The subcultural ideologies make meaning in the service of power, “however modest these powers be” (201). She base her analysis of British club cultures on cultural capital, and sees club cultures as ‘taste cultures’, subcultures where members gather on their shared taste in music, media and “preference for people with similar taste to themselves” (Thornton 1997: 200). She coins the term subcultural capital as being central in the creation and maintenance of the social boundaries and internal hierarchies of sub cultures. “Just as books and painting display cultural capital in the family, so subcultural capital is objectified in the forms of fashionable haircuts and carefully assembled records collections” (ibid: 202), or embodied as ‘being in the know’, using the correct slang and performing on the dance-floor as if you haven’t done anything but clubbing in your life. Subcultural capital confers status on its owner in the eyes of the relevant beholder. Thornton use an example in the form of a subcultural gaze upon stereotypes of mainstream the poor girls Sharon and Tracy, who happen to be “weekend-clubbers”, and who are described rather derogatively as ‘dancing around their handbags’. They represent the unhip and unsophisticated in the eyes of the clubbers, the mainstream, that attends clubs for dating and not listening to music. Their handbags are symbols “of the social and financial shackles of the housewife” (Thornton, 1995:101), associated with mature womanhood or someone pretending to be.
The question then arises if the term subcultural capital is viable in an analytical perspective on the hacker subculture with particular regards to internal hierarchies and group boundaries. In Thornton’s work the clubbers expressed their subcultural capital mainly embodied and objectified. The objectified subcultural capital was expressed in cool haircuts and clever record collections. In its embodied state it was talking, walking and dancing the proper club semantics, but at the same time not overdoing it, being “in the know”. In regards to my empirical material some parallels to Thornton’s work appears, but in relation to objectified subcultural capital it seems at first to negate the denotation of Thornton theory. Hackers don’t dress to be cool, they dresses are supposed to be useful. Indeed if one is looking for an aesthetical dress code for hackers, what would be striking is its absence. In regards to clothes at least, hackers prefer functionality to aesthetics. Clothes are meant to be functional, comfortable and demand little or no maintenance. Among the young hackers I meet, a few dressed streetwise, but this was nothing particular different from the general trend among their age group. Most hackers dressed in jeans and sweaters, nothing flashy or trendy. Haircuts, as clothes, were quite functional, with little or no emphasis on signalling symbolic capital. It was a distinct lack of style. Yet adhering to a functionalistic dress code is a sort of style, and even if most hackers vehemently claim dress functionality is a non-style, it’s still an important part of hacker identity . And more importantly, it is recognized as an aspect of hacker identity by the outside culture. After the Columbine shootings in 1999, www.Slashdot.org (a website catering to ‘nerd’ news) asked its readers of accounts at their high school following the tragedy. The media exasperated a negative image of hackers with personal websites, role-playing games and “anti-social” behaviour becoming part of a nationwide profile of potential mass murderers. Anti-style beaconed danger, as the Slashdot readers experienced, with parents suggesting their offspring to become more mainstream, attend sports and “get a girlfriend” (Katz, 1999).
Beyond the lack of any stylistic common denominator in terms of dress sense, there was an interesting tendency to carry technical tools on person, from Swiss army knifes to advanced telephone engineering devices. These tools appeared to attribute to the display of technical knowledge and hacker status. In addition to being used when technical problem situations arose, they functioned as a cultural signal device since the usage demanded a skilled and attentive user especially in regards to more advanced tools, The media image of hackers includes particulars that I did not observe during my fieldwork; such as mirrored sunglasses, roller blades or skateboards. One hacker exclaimed horrified on the notion of roller blading hackers in the film “Hackers” (1995); “have you ever seen a hacker sweat?”
The tendency to favour functionality may even extend to hacker semantics, as the frequent use of words such as “mumble”, “groan” and “sigh” in a hacker conversation may represent a tendency to migrate the grammatical meaning of text-based communication in electronic media to the real world (Raymond, 1998).
I consider the embodied state of hacker subcultural capital as being information. A central tenet of hacker culture is the free access and distribution of information. Hacker culture both through the cultural dynamics of identity formation and its historical tradition puts a premium on secret knowledge, the kind of information that is locked away and not easily available and beyond a mainstream curriculum. This information was previously published in underground leaflets such as the YIPL or TAP, and was transformed into informational currency by the diffusion of BBS’s in the eighties and nineties. This knowledge, which now is available at hacker web sites as well as being traded on Internet chat channels, could be considered the objectified form of subcultural capital. With this kind of knowledge your status as hacker is defined within the hacker community. The authenticity of being a hacker must be confirmed beyond his technical ability. Technical semantics acts as subcultural gate keeping, entrance is granted through the display of technical terms and exploits. By hacking the cellular phone of a hacker group member, the newbie hacker is granted status and acceptance into a hacker group; “wow, you’re our phone guy!” Beyond the display of technical prowess, embodied subcultural capital emphasises the knowledge of confidential social networks, the ones that define a hacker merely beyond a technically able person. With this knowledge, this form of ‘being in the know’, hackers may form groups and operate together ensuring mutual anonymity as well as acknowledging each other’s abilities. Yet the hacker emphasis on the free access information
All this does in effect paradoxically illustrate the contradiction by emphasising free and unlimited access to information, while simultaneously embracing and enforcing its stratified layers of secrecy and hierarchies of secret subcultural knowledge.
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