Bourdieu Works for the Bank: Cultural Sociology in an Age of Digitalisation and Financialisation

Abstract

This article argues that algorithmic, platformed culture has been absorbed into predictive infrastructures that shape access to finance, insurance and housing. This has major implications for the object of cultural sociology. Cultural practices like streaming music are now captured as data for algorithmic assemblages that classify without understanding genre or meaning, treating tastes as proxies for risk. This recasts cultural sociology’s object beyond conventional readings of, for instance, cultural capital: tastes and genres appear less as expressive forms than as inputs to automated inequality assemblages, with inclusion and exclusion often imperceptible as they occur. In this article we outline some of these changes and challenges where distinction is encoded, automated and streamed through digital infrastructures, extending symbolic violence in virtual as well as affective registers. Bourdieu may now work for the bank as his conceptual toolbox has been captured and operationalised by finance and its data infrastructures to rank and manage risk. Importantly, cultural sociology’s concerns have not been eclipsed by these developments, but there needs to be more careful attention paid to the financialisation of culture.