In other words, the increasing differentiation of cultural levels and its social implications were an important part of the history of cultural development in the nineteenth century in Europe as across the Atlantic, but this was never the whole story. Other impulses were at work even in the United States, where Thomas Bender and Joseph Horowitz have provided accounts of late nineteenth-century cultural life that show the boundaries between levels as much more permeable, and interactions between them more dynamic and fertile, than Levine’s account allows. Looking at New York, rather than the narrower and more staid world of Boston that supplies much of Levine’s material, they present the world of operas and orchestras as providing “a battleground over aesthetics” rather than a site for the triumph of any single cultural attitude. A mixed audience of natives and immigrants including artisans as well as middle-class families flocked to concerts where music by a wide range of European composers was performed. Anton Seidl, the conductor whose passion for Wagner put him near the center of New York musical life at the end of the century, acted on his conviction that he could interest widely diverse audiences in classical music, asking potential contributors to support the “grand and glorious mission” of providing free concerts of “good music” for ordinary people in parks and other sites of leisure (including the new popular amusement center Coney Island). Given a chance, such audiences would come not only to understand and appreciate quality fare, but even to see that it met an important need they might not otherwise have recognized in themselves. His attitude was widely shared among European working-class advocates, and partly inspired the program of the German Social Democratic Party to spread culture among its members.6
The forms of cultural capital
To see how these various possibilities worked themselves out over the course of the nineteenth century, we need first to consider some of the ways culture figures in the lives of people with differing social characteristics and experiences. A useful point of entry is provided by the notion Pierre Bourdieu introduced on behalf of his argument that modern culture works chiefly to make evident and justify class distinctions, “cultural capital.” For him the term refers to the stock of attitudes, expectations, and ways of relating to things and people (Bourdieu names such a complex a “habitus”) that bourgeois and other elite members of society acquire in the natural course of growing up in families where leisure and culture are part of everyday life. Those whose experience furnishes them with such capital possess a sense of ease and entitlement toward cultural goods that is bound to contrast with the feelings of distance, discomfort, even intimidation produced in less-favored people when they are confronted with socially valued objects and ideas for which their lives, and circumstances provide little or no preparation. Bourgeois may not consciously regard culture as a realm where their superiority to workers and country people finds confirmation, some of them may even see it as a potential vehicle for lessening social differences; but in settings such as art museums and symphony concerts most of them are all the same bound to act in ways that dramatize their distinction from others.7
That such differentials in inherited cultural resources exist and produce effects of the kind Bourdieu described is surely correct; evidence for them jumps into view in any modern society. But Bourdieu was not the first person to call attention to such effects of culture, and others have done so in ways that help to see cultural capital in a more rounded and less one-dimensional light. One of his predecessors was Simmel, who in some moods could sound much like Bourdieu. In one place he called the “apparent equality” of access to cultural products a “sheer mockery,” since like other goods in a society based on money relations the freedom to aspire to them was undercut by “the fact that only those already privileged in some way or another have the possibility of acquiring them.” Just because education and its benefits seemed more accessible than wealth and power, nothing made “those in inferior positions … feel so deprived and helpless, as the advantage of education.” Worse, the benefits available to those who already possess cultural advantages grow greater the more they draw on them, since by doing so they accumulate more resources on which to nurture themselves, much in the way that the benefits individuals receive from passive investments grow as these returns are ploughed back in, enlarging the pool from which future gains will flow.8
We saw earlier, however, that Simmel simultaneously recognized a different and contrasting dimension to the relations between individuals and culture. Over time, intellectual and artistic contents come to be increasingly embodied in “objective” or “supra-individual” forms, giving birth to a kind of shared treasury of ideas, information, and knowledge, one that differs from the accumulation of material objects in that if one person consumes such goods he or she does not remove them from the stock available to others: “The more values are transposed into such objective forms, the more room there is in them, as in the house of God, for every soul.”9 Here Simmel points to the existence of cultural capital in a sense different from Bourdieu’s, as the accumulation of an expanding treasure of intellectual and artistic resources much like the ones that the sponsors of the Revolutionary Louvre or of late nineteenth-century concert life sought to make as widely available as possible. Economists today have restated Simmel’s point, naming the kinds of products from which people can benefit without excluding others from them “nonrival goods,” meaning ones “whose consumption by one person” does not make them “less available for consumption by another.” Once a novel, a piece of music, or a painting has been added to the stock from which a given human group (or the whole of humanity) can draw, it remains there whether you or I appropriate it for our purposes or not. To be sure, restrictions can be and often have been put on access to such goods through copyright laws and admission charges, but the situation this creates is not equivalent to the one whereby my inhabiting a desirable house or consuming a particularly fine dish or an excellent glass of wine prevents you from doing the same.10
For this reason, the analogy between “cultural capital” and money capital can never be more than partial. Simmel’s other description of the general accessibility of cultural materials as a “sheer mockery” is not without its point, but it is far too harsh, greatly underestimating the way that expanding education has in fact made intellectual and artistic resources available to people whose inheritance provides them with few of them. Among the best evidence for this point is Jonathan Rose’s remarkable history of British working-class intellectual life, rooted in a tradition of self-education that extends back into the sixteenth century, and that was given powerful new impetus first by the late eighteenth-century reduction in the price of books and by the “explosion of reading” noted in the previous chapter, and then by the spread of mass education after 1870. Taking issue with earlier writers, Rose finds much evidence that despite the limitations of the new “Board Schools” set up under the Education Act, working-class and lower-middle class students found both pleasure and nurture in the instruction they received there. Nor did literacy serve as an instrument for imposing middle-class ideas and values on the poor, who proved capable of using the literary and cultural resources made available to them to contest upper-class views about their inability to cultivate their minds, and to develop their own sense of singularity and self-worth.11
No less important, if “cultural capital” means the residue of experience and upbringing that gives people specific intellectual and aesthetic capacities, then it does not exist only in the singular, but takes different forms in different groups and settings. Just this point was made by an early twentieth-century British author who was also a coal miner, B. L. Coombes, in response to Virginia Woolf’s contention that capital in the usual financial sense was a necessity for a writer, since to lack it was to be in want of the independence that made sustained creative work possible. Coombes replied that “a writer’s capital” was not to be found in a bank account but in “all his experiences; his environment; his knowledge of human life and how people l
ive and aspire, love and desire, hate and die.” A working-class writer possessed a particular species of such capital, which derived from “living amongst the people of our kind” and knowing about the world from their point of view. Only by drawing on that capital could such a person function as a writer; to abandon it was to lose the chance to be one.12
All these perspectives, Bourdieu’s, Simmel’s, Jonathan Rose’s and Coombes’s, will provide illumination when we come, in the later part of this chapter, to the new forms of popular culture that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century. Before turning to these developments, however, we need to open up one more point of view on the mix of similarity and difference in the responses of bourgeois and non-bourgeois to culture in general, and especially to the new forms it was taking as the Old Regime ended. This standpoint comes from the subtle but revealing topic of the relations between social experience and language.
Class, language, and the uses of education
A number of writers have called attention to the differing communicative styles and attitudes toward language exhibited by particular social groups, and specifically to certain distinct features of bourgeois usage. Adeline Daumard notes that bourgeois speech, both in the nineteenth century and earlier, differed from that of other social groups in its greater concern for “clarity, precision, [and] grammatical correctness,” adding that “one spoke or wrote not to distinguish oneself or follow fashions, but to express oneself as clearly as possible, in order to be understood by all ones interlocutors.” Daumard’s judgment may be insufficiently critical, but the type of linguistic practice to which she points contrasted with the more casual style of both popular speech and of various slang idioms – among them those evolved by individuals in a particular craft or employment, those employed by groups of young people, and by denizens of salons, artists’ studios, or underworlds – all of which generally assumed a narrower and more predictable audience than did commerce, administration, or writing for the public.13 Bourgeois usage also contrasted with aristocratic forms of expression, as Angelika Linke has pointed out. Aristocratic social relations often took place by way of gestures and other non-verbal actions, suited to acknowledging and articulating hierarchies: bodily postures, bows, and other modes of reverence (in French a common meaning of reverence is a bow). One reason dance was an art form particularly favored at princely courts was its ability to dramatize such relations, and the prominence of dancing-masters as instructors in proper behavior owed much to the model such modes of expression provided. Middle-class people participated in these usages too, but less so as the spread of communicative networks during the eighteenth century led them to value verbal discourse more. Linke finds that bourgeois speech in Germany (where part of the program of those who promoted Enlightenment was creating a literary language able to be understood throughout the still-fragmented country) exhibited features much like those Daumard describes for France, and that in these conditions verbal equivalents for some socially significant actions replaced performing them: people began to say “I kiss your hand” instead of actually doing it.
Linke offers several explanations for these changes, some cultural and some social. The Enlightenment goal that Kant called “maturity” was tied up with gaining some degree of rational control over oneself and one’s surroundings, a capacity developed through discursive interchange and exercised through being able to speak in ways that could persuade others. Having power over words became a means to develop social and political standing that people did not otherwise possess. Linguistic change was also encouraged (as Simmel already recognized) by the increase in “the variety of communicative situations in which complex forms of speech had to be employed,” as specialization advanced in both government agencies and business enterprises. In addition, geographical and social mobility put people into shifting and unfamiliar environments. The need for a kind of linguistic competence able to support such moves gave priority to forms of speech based on general rules of correctness, rather than on practices that signified membership in particular groups.14
Aristocratic resistance to such changes, based on an inherited preference for casual and truncated forms, was particularly salient in England, where the lesser importance of court culture reduced the role of gestural expression, while elite involvement in a mode of rural life infused with market relations fostered a kind of cursory directness. The offhand style extended to writing as well as speech, as George Eliot testified in a passage of Middlemarch set around 1832: “At that time the opinion existed that it was beneath a gentleman to write legibly, or with a hand in the least suitable to a clerk. Fred [Vincy] wrote the lines demanded in a hand as gentlemanly as that of any viscount or bishop of the day: the vowels were all alike and the consonants only distinguishable as turning up or down.” At the moment to which this passage referred a campaign for correct grammar was in full swing, supported by books and periodicals. Among its chief targets were “vulgar” contractions such as “ain’t,” saying “me and him” where “he and I” is called for, unnecessary repetitions, omitted pronouns, and sentences that stopped short of the conclusions they seemed to imply. Some supporters of the drive took it very far, for instance opposing “don’t” even when the subject “I” makes it grammatically correct, in order to forestall its use with he or she; such rigidity provided some justification for those who resisted “correctness” as stiff and intrusive (we saw earlier that some contemporaries protested against Evangelical purity in speech for similar reasons). But other supporters of older practices held to them more from a certain aristocratic revulsion toward any behavior that might mark one as a “clerk,” preferring what some of Anthony Trollope’s upper-crust characters regarded as “free and easy habits of speech.” As late as 1907 one such author defended “ain’t” as part of what one historian of language calls “a rearguard action for upper-class colloquial speech, and against the by now considerable forces of grammatical correctness.”15
Some years ago Basil Bernstein provoked much controversy by his attempt to theorize what differentiates middle-class speech from that of other social groups, particularly the working class, in terms of the contrast between “restricted” and “elaborated” linguistic codes. Based on recorded interviews and conversations, Bernstein distinguished speakers whose vocabulary and syntactical patterns are largely predictable because they repeatedly follow models commonly used inside some defined group or community, from others whose practices are less easy to foretell or anticipate because they are individualized appropriations of a wider range of lexical possibilities. Speech that tends to the first set of alternatives conforms to some “restricted” code (ritualized speech would be the extreme example, never varying), while usage closer to the second is regulated by an “elaborated” norm or practice. Which style particular individuals or groups adopt will depend on the kinds of social situations they inhabit. “A restricted code is generated by a form of social relationship based upon a range of closely shared identifications self-consciously held by the members. An elaborated code is generated by a form of social relations which does not necessarily presuppose such shared, self-consciously held identifications, with the consequence that much less is taken for granted.” Users of an elaborated code recognize each other as socially and culturally similar no less easily than do those who employ some restricted one, but the practices associated with the first reflect a more varied and shifting field of interaction, leading to a discourse that aspires more to general communicability than to identification with a self-consciously differentiated community. Bernstein’s understanding of how elaborated codes arise is close to the account both Daumard and Linke give of what characterizes bourgeois speech, shaped by implicit or explicit orientation to a broad and sometimes anonymous public, in contrast both to aristocratic practices and to the slang of age or occupational groups, studios, or salons. The novelist George Meredith noted qualities similar to the latter in locally based rural speech in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, giving a more negat
ive twist to what Bernstein observed: “Their ideas sem to have a special relationship in the peculiarity of stopping where they have begun.”16
What made Bernstein’s argument so controversial was his attempt to describe working-class speech in general as following restricted codes, and to explain the relatively poor performance of working-class children in school as a consequence of their living in conditions that predisposed them to the narrow intellectual horizons to which such speech corresponded. Although his aim was to deny that this limited success was due to lesser intelligence, and thus to encourage educational practices that might make up for the difference, his characterization of workers and their culture still provoked pained and angry objections. Some of these were surely justified, since there is much evidence that working-class people were (and are) fully able to shift between contexts and the usages expected in them, and thus to participate in the conditions that foster elaborated codes. Testimony to this was provided by a careful observer of the London poor in the years around 1900: “A woman entirely alters her phraseology according to whether she is speaking to a child, to her husband, to a neighbor or an employer, and the difference is still more marked among men. In certain districts when men are speaking to one another even upon such general topics as the weather their language is almost unintelligible to a stranger, but they can if they choose make themselves readily understood by him.”17 The ability of non-bourgeois to use language whose vocabulary and syntax reach beyond the conditions Bernstein associates with restricted codes, and to draw intellectual sustenance from mental worlds distant from their own, is shown also by the rich tradition of working-class self-cultivation already noted.18
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