What comes after fields,capitals,habitus? Suggestions for future cultural consumption research in Australia

The Australian Cultural Fields (ACF) project exhibits the enduring vitality of Bourdieusian concepts and methodology for understanding what people like and why, and how these cultural and symbolic potencies mediate opportunities and life chances. Fields, Capitals, Habitus (FCH, Bennett, Carter et al., 2021) updates its ‘Australian Distinction’ predecessor, Accounting for Tastes (Bennett et al., 1999), a key influence on the study of class and inequalities in Australian sociology, and in the development of my own sociological imagination as an undergraduate student. Importantly, these works also trouble some aspects of Bourdieu, showing how other contours of inequality along with class – gender, age, location, race and ethnicity, and importantly in this latest study, Indigeneity – influence distinctions in cultural consumption.

The task of responding to this book – to consider where a Bourdieusian sociology can go next – is daunting as there are many things that this project brings to the fore. As a youth sociologist, I will focus on some specific areas of interest to me and my colleagues. To be clear, these are suggestions, not criticisms of ACF per se, as the project makes deep contributions towards these issues. Any ambitious project of this size will by necessity have omissions or understate aspects of social life and cultural practice. I offer the following as suggestions relating to youth: increased material inequality and its implications for cultural production; the development of consumers participating in cultural production; and the importance of considering emotions and affect in Bourdieusian sociology.

Youth?

ACF has a lower participation rate of youth than the general population, but this is not surprising as it is often the case in large projects that seek to survey the general population of 18 years old and over. Recruiting young people for research can be difficult, especially if researchers want to include low cultural and economic capital youth that are usually occluded from legitimised spaces. More so if sending out recruitment paraphernalia to the general public, rather than through specific institutions and services. For instance, our research centre has had difficulty finding young, disadvantaged men to talk to us about debt, speaking to issues of class, but also masculine shame and guilt. Essentially, as Bourdieusian analysis would show, there is an array of elements of self-exclusion here, a ‘refuse what one is refused’ because ‘that's not for the likes of us’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 471). Relying on landline phone surveys (Bennett, Carter et al., 2021, p. 339) is increasingly obsolete for even the not-so-young, and certainly contributes to the struggle to recruit under 25-year-olds.

There are questions in the survey about usage of technology or how one accesses music or TV, but culture here seems to be imagined as rather analogue and mostly passive. Gaming, for instance – hardly just a youth cultural practice and arguably the biggest culture industry in the world (Monahan, 2021) – is not part of the project, but one of the most common everyday leisure practices. Millions of people are spending millions of hours playing Candy Crush, Angry Birds, and Minecraft, and there is now a 50-year history of consoles from Atari, Nintendo, Xbox and PlayStation.

Designing a large-scale mainstream oriented survey that includes specific cultural texts and public figures as prompts is a fraught exercise, especially when constructed by largely white, middle-aged, middle-class academics. I understand that the research team debated widely how to represent culture in its choice of fields and ‘scales’, which is what the cultural texts and personalities are called in the book that are used to provoke responses in the survey. Choices need to be made, every decision has positive and negative consequences for what the data will represent. It is difficult, no matter how researchers try, to ‘capture’ a field. Musical tastes, a particular interest of mine and to which I will limit my comments here, are so wide that the scales need to be very well known to have purchase for general recognition, but also in terms of statistical legitimacy. These considerations are important to capture the relationships within the broad fields and the relations between them. Anything chosen will by necessity be unknown or irrelevant to some survey respondents, which essentially is part of the conceptual underpinning of the project. ACF certainly accommodated wider migrant and Indigenous perspectives than previous work, which is a key strength of the project.

I was struck by just how mainstream the scales are and how many young people would not really have anything to do with any of these examples (I’m aware of the problematic nature of simplistic mainstream/alternative dichotomies, see Baker et al., 2013). I would go so far as to describe most of the music scales as legacy acts. At the time that the survey was being developed in 2014, international superstars Sia and Iggy Azalea were among the most streamed artists on Spotify, which even then was a key platform for how the general population listen to music. All of this is to say, when it comes to the music scales, Peter Sculthorpe, Jimmy Barnes, Kate Ceberano, AC/DC, Vince Jones, Kylie Minogue, Kasey Chambers and Gotye are touchstones of a previous generation, if not the one before. I’m now 47 and, while I had heard of all those artists, I do not ‘like’ any of them. But I’m not sure that this has anything much to do with my class, gender or age, it is just that these scales omit almost everything that would not be heard on the ABC. Reflexively, I am not sure how I could have answered questions about these artists and if I did, I’m not sure exactly what those answers would mean, echoing here Bourdieu's concerns about how ‘public opinion does not exist’, but that its effects are real (Bourdieu, 1993).

While it can be argued that having very contemporary or less established artists in the survey may risk them not being popular by the time that the research is published, without them the research is instantly outmoded and there is no way of telling if or how respondents are engaging with contemporary culture. It would also contribute to the temporality aspect at the heart of the chapter on music, and how age is generally a key marker of difference throughout the research, which is also apparent in the constant intergenerational moral panics over young people's tastes and practices.

I say all this in good faith: as an ageing youth culture researcher, I have tended to think I’m on top of broad cultural trends, but recently was the recipient of friendly reprimands by students in a first-year tutorial about my cynicism at the existence of so-called Eshays. But the lack of contemporary scales that at least have some relation to young people has implications for how cultural distinction is being measured in FCH. The recent moral panics around drill in western Sydney is a good example: it is hugely popular in Australia and abroad, expressing the alienation experienced by working-class and racialised youth. At the time of writing drill act OneFour has over 700,000 monthly listens on Spotify (Jimmy Barnes has 933,284, Kate Ceberano 70,558, AC/DC 24,7847,66). Police are not only shutting down OneFour's gigs, but trying to remove their music from digital platforms, an appalling attempt at overtly governmentalised censorship (Lee et al., 2022). It is these kinds of cultural concern to which many young (and not-so-young) people have their attention tuned, attention being the key product of platform capitalism (Citton, 2017). I am not saying that the likes of OneFour should be included in large-scale surveys like this one, they are too niche, but including actual contemporary culture – that is, what is popular in the here and now when the research is being conducted – is needed to be able to capture taste distinctions in a cultural field.

The lack of young people in the project and the absence of contemporary references replicates the place of youth in wider society: they are talked about and not with, and their interests are constructed by adults who usually do not understand their lives. Future research this well-funded and of this scale and import needs to actively include young people not just as a cohort, but in the design.

Rising material inequality and cultural production

With material inequality returning to the levels of the 1800s across the Global North (Piketty, 2014), more attention needs to be paid to economic aspects in future cultural research. The economic dimensions of class are not necessarily overlooked in Bourdieusian sociology since Bourdieu sees economic capital as the root of the others (Bourdieu, 1986). Nonetheless, wealth is not the key object of study of most Bourdieu-inflected work, which is understandable considering that his attention (and that of those influenced by him) was directed towards cultural and symbolic aspects. In FCH, wealth is measured and discussed in terms of the class categories of Professional/Managerial, Intermediate and Working-Class and their different levels of income, business value, house valuation, and invested capital (Gayo & Bennett, 2021). These categories then valuably show class trajectories and aspects of their fragmentation. Today, assets have become even more central to the creation and maintenance of wealth. Asset appreciation can outperform wage income in terms of the growth of wealth (Adkins et al., 2020). Non-privileged young people are increasingly locked out of the housing markets in the metropolitan cities and popular regional centres (Arundel & Ronald, 2021). These developments, along with the ever-increasing precarity of labour markets, skews the complexion of class relations and intergenerational wealth transfer even more towards the top of the class system.

These are not only economic matters, they have censorious effects on cultural production that add further problems to what is already a difficult sector to navigate and work in (Taylor & Luckman, 2020). It is increasingly evident that cultural production and the so-called creative industries are dominated by the privileged (Eikhof & Warhurst, 2013), especially those who are white and male (Idriss, 2018; Luckman et al., 2020). The sectors themselves are mired in the rhetorical promotion of ‘fakequity’ (Hadley et al., 2022) rather than addressing issues of social justice and inequality. Welfare systems that were once a key life support for struggling artists, including for some of those listed as scales in the book, such as Jimmy Barnes and AC/DC, are harder to access and punitively administered. The level of volunteering, free work and internships, the need to apply for grants, and the rapid gentrification of inner-city suburbs where much of this action takes place, means that anyone without financial and material support is squeezed out. This is the case even in underground and DIY circles. While being relatively poor has always been a part of a traditional bohemian lifestyle, young people who move to cities to be part of creative scenes, even those who get degrees and start professional-managerial careers, make decisions to reflexively ‘choose poverty’ if they want to pursue artistic endeavours (Threadgold, 2018a). Only those with the privilege of material support can get by in the ‘wageless life’ (Alkovska, 2022) of the ‘projectariat’ (Szreder, 2021) culture and creative industry labour markets.

For the mainstream culture that is the object of research like ACF, these social changes mean that cultural production will represent the interests, values and morals of the relatively privileged even more than Bourdieusian-influenced studies already confirm. These aspects are especially important for considering the media industries that play a central role in how class and inequality are represented, and how the increasingly oligarchical political realm operates. The ACF project is predominantly about cultural consumption and participation, rather than cultural production (Pertierra & Turner, 2021, pp. 282–3). Future research about consumption will need to engage more with the inequalities regarding how culture is produced – that is, the ‘who’ of culture – along with some of the concerns that I outline below in terms of the ‘how’ and the ‘what’.

The ‘how’ of consumption, rather than the ‘what’

The rise of material inequality and the ubiquity of digital algorithmic technologies have implications for how cultural distinction is practised and how it relates to class. As FCH discusses (Gayo & Bennett, 2021), class comes and goes as a public concept. Colleagues and I have argued that class needs to be brought into public discussions of inequality, especially because these discussions are dominated by the use of deliberately distorted scapegoating figures that obfuscate the systemic nature of inequality and the endemic nature of poverty (Gerrard & Threadgold, 2022). Inequality is figured, represented and distorted (Threadgold, 2020a) in ways that speak for a small, privileged cohort of society, especially the legacy media that are so dominated by middle-class voices (Attfield, 2020). For instance, I have analysed the figures of hipsters and bogans (Threadgold, 2018b) in terms of how they represent class, where the figure of the hipster resonates more with the tastes and morals of middle-class media workers, and so is reported on much more playfully than the more straightforward, symbolically violent invocations of the bogan.

Where people get their news is a good example of how digital technologies have fundamentally changed consumption, especially of information. News and current affairs are consistently among the top rating TV shows (Bennett, Gayo, Rowe, and Turner, 2021: 84) but are decreasing as a way in which people receive information, with it being disseminated across internet sites, social media feeds, and fora such as Discord, Reddit and 4Chan. And by disseminated, I mean distorted. Lines are increasingly blurred between news and entertainment, work and leisure, fact and factoid, information and conspiracy, art and memes, pop culture and politics, data and cultural text, at a level of intensity that would make Baudrillard blush. I would guess that as many young people are aware of Jimmy Barnes via the memes created from his scream in the Kirin J. Callinan video as from ‘Working Class Man’.

Social media platforms are spaces where people engage with all the fields investigated in ACF. In this sense, the ‘how’ of consumption practices needs to be considered just as important as the ‘what’, where distinctions are as much in terms of ‘ways of preferring’ as to what is preferred (Daenekindt & Roose, 2017). Consumer performativity (Skeggs et al., 2008) and the rise of so-called ironic consumption (Warren & Mohr, 2019) are precursors of this development. In relation to scales discussed above, I could say I ‘like’ AC/DC ironically these days. But, in terms of even more complex aspects of cultural consumption, culture industry products and texts are consumed via the ever-increasing array of content platforms, but then reimagined, bricolaged, memed, distorted, repurposed and shared across social media platforms as forms of self-expression, conviviality, political engagement and methods of deception (Phillips, 2015). This is a fundamental development from the ‘one-way’ model of consumption in FCH. Questions about platforms and devices were included for each field and also addressed in discussion of the overall space of lifestyles (Bennett, Gayo, & Pertierra 2021, Figure 7.4), but I would especially like to see research that develops more deeply the links between where and how people get their news, their orientations towards media and knowledge, and how they relate to wider cultural tastes.

I doubt that what I’m describing here could be defined as a singular field – they are more an array of different practices showing how different fields meet – but it is in these spaces that a contemporary version of distinction is enacted. Cultural ‘consumption’ is no longer a passive practice where one reads, watches or listens, but where one actively talks back, remixes and transforms. Every click and comment are data that influence what the algorithm feeds next, again, a fundamental change in how one consumes and ‘updates to remain the same’ (Chun, 2016). As media scholars and digital sociologists are showing, consumers participate in production, and it is with this relatively new aspect that future consumption research also needs to engage to be able to understand how distinction is not just performed but mediated.

Class affects and Bourdieusian concepts

Class relations are moral and affective economies as much as they are economic and symbolic. I have made a detailed argument that Bourdieu's work is useful for thinking with affect (Threadgold, 2020b), that much of what is deemed the symbolic in Bourdieu is affect. Taste is a feeling (Highmore, 2016), if not an emotion itself (although taste is certainly emotional). For instance, in FCH when Aisha is talking about her love of old Arabic singers (Noble, 2021, pp. 261–3), she not only relates this to a happy phase in her life, but to her cultural and family history, giving this ‘like’ an importance beyond fandom or instant gratification. Taste is also about morals: when Gabrielle is ‘hating on’ music producers (Bennett, Dibley, & Gayo, 2021, pp. 61–2), it is not just about the ‘terrible’ sound but also a matter of character: ‘he's fairly – even as music producers go – morally sketchy’.

In relation to the above point about how news/information relate to taste cultures, it is these subjective aspects of taste that are clearly brought out in the qualitative side of the project that shows how cultural consumption is a deeply affective practice (Wetherell, 2012). Taste – the way that one relates to and feels about sociocultural aesthetics, genres, artists, texts, etc. – is concerned ‘with material experiences, with the way the sensual world greets the sensate body, and with the affective forces that are generated in such meetings’ (Highmore, 2010, p. 121). Aesthetics, for instance, concerns the entanglements between our passions, emotions, perceptions, senses and the body. It is in and through these entanglements that class is made in everyday moments.

I have been promoting the use of other concepts beyond the holy trinity of field-habitus-capital for some time (Threadgold, 2019), as I think that the reliance on these alone tends to render Bourdieu a more structural functionalist sociologist than he really is. In relation to research on cultural consumption, I suggest that the concepts of conatus and illusio will be especially useful to address the blurry digitally mediated lines between production and consumption discussed above, and then relate them to new developments in how some individuals and groups are premeditatedly disqualified as legitimated practitioners in cultural fields.

Bourdieu defines conatus as an arrangement of interests and dispositions that incline individuals to reproduce their own social position (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 176). Conatus relates to the intensity with which one pursues their passions, and how this activity reproduces social norms and unequal relations in conjunction with the capitals that one possesses. As described in Distinction, cultural intermediaries are important to how fields work because, through their consecrated expertise, they act as tastemakers and gatekeepers, essentially shaping a field in their own image. In terms of the blurry lines between digital production and consumption, the making and disseminating of memes, reviewing of books on Amazon or videos on YouTube, or the ‘pile ons’ and trolling on Twitter, are all examples of conatus in action, active forms of cultural consumption that convey distinctive dispositions.

Illusio is an orientation towards the stakes and rewards of a particular field and whether they are constituted as valuable (Bourdieu, 1990: 195). Individuals emotionally invest in day-to-day struggles within fields as the means of making their lives meaningful and worthwhile. The more that they invest their time, efforts and emotion, the more that illusio becomes central to their very being. Illusio, then, is a Bourdieusian concept that can help understand why some people direct their energy or attention towards some cultural spaces over others, speaking to the how and why of the intensity of those investments and, importantly for what I have been outlining above, can be used to think about the quality and substance of that investment: is it long lasting or fleeting, deep or shallow, earnest or ironic?

Conclusion

The year 2014 seems like a lifetime ago. The generality at the heart of what needs to be addressed in search of broad-scale social relations inevitably means that some things will be omitted or obfuscated. Despite my suggestions for the future, FCH is a highly significant moment in Australian sociology, deeply illustrating the complex homologies within and between Australian cultural fields that are so essential for understanding the relations of social magic and social distance that subtly underpin how inequality operates.