Cultural Intermediaries

The notion of cultural intermediary has been of use to recent research and thinking on consumer culture because it has enabled explorations of how the emergence and reproduction of the latter is hard-wired to broader sets of sociocultural transformations, including transformations to the class structure and to large-scale shifts in the relationship between consumption and production. Mobilized initially by French [Page 389]contemporary social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, the concept of cultural intermediary refers to those sets of occupations and workers involved in the production and circulation of symbolic goods and services in the context of an expanding cultural economy in postwar Western societies. Bourdieu included in this category the “producers of cultural programmes on TV and radio or the critics of ‘quality’ newspapers and magazines and all the writer-journalists and journalist-writers” (Bourdieu 1984, 325) as well as those working in design, marketing, public relations, advertising, packaging, and sales promotion (Nixon and du Gay 2002). Crucially, however, the notion of cultural intermediary was mobilized not simply to capture a quantitative growth in the number of symbolic occupations and workers; it was also operationalized to capture the sociological significance of this expansion in terms of transformations to the class structure.

Specifically, cultural intermediary was a term mobilized by Bourdieu to capture how the growth in symbolic occupations and working activities related to the emergence of a service class or new middle class, a class fraction whose tastes, classificatory schemes, dispositions, lifestyles, and working practices often clashed with those of the established middle class. The positions of power and control in the mass media occupied by members of this group moreover allowed the assembly and circulation of cultural products (advertising, television, film) that embodied such tastes and values. Bourdieu characterized the latter as involving the creation of a whole range of “half-way genres” (1984, 326) that sat somewhere in between “legitimate” and mass culture, genres that divulged aspects of “legitimate” culture to those who had been historically excluded from its consumption. The emergence of cultural intermediaries therefore marked not just an expansion of the culture industries and a major and enduring transformation of the class structure but also the emergence of what has been termed postmodern culture, a culture in which established taste and value hierarchies were challenged by halfway hybrid genres produced in the main by a new culturally “mediating” class fraction. Moreover, according to Scott Lash, through the production of this culture, this new class fraction not only shaped tastes and challenged the authority of established taste makers but also pursued its own legitimacy and power.

While Bourdieu's comments on cultural intermediaries were brief and not particularly well elaborated either empirically or theoretically, nonetheless they are of substantial significance, not least because they captured simultaneously economic and cultural change, or changes in both the spheres of production and consumption. This is of importance because social scientific accounts of social life tended toward and often still tend toward a radical separation of economy and culture. Hence, accounts of production tend to bracket questions and issues of culture and vice versa. Bourdieu's account of cultural intermediaries (and his corpus more generally) challenges this separation and is widely acknowledged to have provided a pivotal account of the interlinkages and interrelationships between cultural and economic practices. Hence, as well as providing key theoretical resources for the elaboration of the characteristics of postmodern consumer culture (especially the class dynamics of the latter), Bourdieu's understanding of cultural intermediaries has helped to pave the way for the recent resurgence of interest in cultural economy.

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