Speculation and representational crisis in the neoliberal society

Abstract

The central argument of Bourdieu’s theory of capital against the idealising assumptions of post-industrial discourses is that the main consequence of the commodity abundance and multiple-choice consumer environment of a welfare capitalist society is not the individualisation of society; rather, the process of exchange and consumption becomes the main mediator of capital accumulation and power-inequality reproduction. There is no doubt that Bourdieu recognised, almost clairvoyantly, as early as the 1970s, that an increasing proportion of the material and symbolic assets of advanced capitalism are seen by social actors as capital assets, used as investments from which they hope to make a profit, to stabilise their socio-economic position. In this paper, I argue that the Bourdieu synthesis, for all its theoretical erudition, does not bring us any closer to understanding the social processes determined by the ‘capital market’ logic of neoliberal capitalism, i.e. financialisation, rent-seeking, and the structural logic of the capital-asset economy, because in its interpretation of these processes, however far it departs from them, it remains a ‘fellow traveller’ of post-industrial and neoliberal discourses. Bourdieu integrates the processes of symbolic and social capital exchange into the neoclassical commodity market model – ignores the specificity of capital market exchange and its difference from commodity exchange, thereby rendering his own theoretical discovery of the dual nature of symbolic goods, their simultaneous commodity character and capital asset character, weightless. The commodification and ‘assetization’ of cultural goods and representative goods give rise to two radically different market valuation logics, the consumer valuation logic of the commodity market and the speculative valuation logic of the capital market, and these two mutually exclusive logics simultaneously shape and thereby overdetermine social systems in which chaotic processes are unleashed – challenging Bourdieu’s capital theoretical efforts to explain the legitimacy and stability of the social order.