Bourdieu and the Bloggernacle: Autonomy and Apostasy

April 6, 2016    By: Jeff G @ 1:58 pm   Category: Apologetics,Bloggernacle,Ethics,Money and getting gain,Mormon Culture/Practices,orthodox

“He that is not with me is against me: and he that gathereth not with me scattereth.”

“For, behold, priestcrafts are that men preach and set themselves up for a light unto the world, that they may get … praise of the world; but they seek not the welfare of Zion.”

This should be the final post in the series – at least for a while. Whereas the previous post was a Bourdieuian indictment of us who read, lurk and comment within the Bloggernacle, this post is more aimed at those of us who engage in the writing and publishing of posts within our little online community. To do this, I will provide a Bourdieuian account of the relationship and struggles between two fields of cultural production: the LDS church and the Bloggernacle. (All pages refer to Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production, chapters of which can be found here and here.)

Bourdieu’s understanding of cultural production – this includes art, science, religion, music, literature, etc. – can be understood in terms of his diagram below:

cultural production

The diagram is a logical representation of the social space in which we live, with north and south representing the amount of economic and cultural capital that a person has. West and east, by contrast, represent the relative concentrations of cultural capital (what we might put on a resume) in the west or economic capital (what we should declare to the IRS) in the east. Roughly speaking – and with significant overlap and historical variation – we could locate the following fields of cultural production from west to east: Art and Literature, Religion, Science, Politics, Economics. Those who wield power within our society, obviously find themselves at the top of the chart.

(A side note for the sake of exposition: A Marxist would want to turn this table clockwise 90 degrees, thus making economics the base upon which the more cultural fields are built. Bourdieu’s table, however, is situated to highlight the struggle for stratification within different fields of cultural production.)

Within the field of cultural production, then, there are several other distinctions that are relevant to understanding the struggles and mutual (mis)understandings among cultural producers. On the right hand side exists the field of large-scale cultural production – those types of cultural production which are aimed at either mass-consumption (social or pop art) or, more toward the top of the chart, distinctive/conspicuous consumption within “high” society (patroned, commissioned or otherwise bourgeois art). More to the west, however, exists the final sub-field: that of small-scale or limited cultural production – those types of culture which are consumed (at the top) by other producers within the same field (pure art or “art for art’s sake”) or consumed by very few, if any people at all (avant-garde or bohemian art) – the difference between these two being the quantity and quality of their actual audience.

Again, it must be kept in mind that while Bourdieu focuses on artistic production, he also insists that the same forces structure and stratify all forms of cultural production, including academia, literature, music, religion and blogging. Every field is stratified along the lines of autonomy from vs. tutelage to the ruling authorities (east/west) and orthodox conservatism vs heretical innovation (north/south).  It is in this spirit that I wish to interpret the relationship between the church and the Bloggernacle along these Bourdieuian lines.

To do this, I wish to limit the social space under consideration to the general church membership and Mormon culture. Within this social space, the church leadership is the “ruling class” at the northeastern corner from which the low-level, mainstream (to the south) and the largely self-contained sub-field of Mormon intellectuals who write for other Mormon intellectuals (to the west) can be distinguished. It should also be noted that under this transformation, the capital to the right would not be economic capital, but religious capital – which is basically priesthood authority within the LDS tradition.  While Bourdieu insists that material or economic capital is the most fundamental type, he does allow for religious authority to be a dominating force to which other fields of cultural production are sometimes subservient. Since the Enlightenment of the 18th century, he claims,

“[i]ntellectual and artistic life has progressively freed itself from aristocratic and ecclesiastical tutelage as well as from its aesthetic and ethical demands. This process is correlated with the constant growth of a public of potential consumers… an ever-growing, ever more diversified corps of producers… [and a] multiplication and diversification of agencies of consecration.” (Pg. 112)

The Bloggernacle, then, is a field of LDS cultural production – an LDS Republic of Letters, if you will – that, to varying degrees, seeks and achieves autonomy from the ruling elite of the priesthood leadership. It is useful to provide further examples of where other LDS cultural producers are situated within this larger field. Starting at the northeastern corner, we would find SS manuals and the church public relations department. Moving southward, we would probably find Meridian magazine and Millennial Star until we came to Jack Weyland and Gerald Lund in the southeastern corner. The culturally consecrated (as opposed to priesthood consecrated), northwestern corner would probably include Dialogue and various Mormon Studies programs throughout academia. Again, moving southward, we would find Times and Seasons, BCC, W&T and FMH until we came to the bohemian, southwest corner made up of myself and other low-level individual blogs that largely go ignored. Farms, Fair and apologetics in general would lie toward the central-northward direction while most of the locally produced works that one can find at Seagull books, for example, would probably lie toward the central-south.

With this taxonomy in mind we can elaborate upon the variations in and struggles for symbolic capital and autonomy within LDS culture. This relationship is crucial since, Bourdieu argues, the struggle for autonomy from the dominant culture is the primary means to the symbolic capital necessary to contest that dominant culture. The quest for autonomy and freedom (academic or otherwise) from priesthood authority is, then, a potential source for great conflict with and against the church. Within the eastern field of large-scale and heteronomous LDS production, producers thus find it necessary to adapt their cultural products to tastes and preferences of their LDS market, be it the aggregate demand of mass consumption (toward the south) and/or a specific request from their priesthood authorities (toward the north). The movement westward is thus defined by an increased autonomy from both the LDS mainstream as well as priesthood supervision:

“The autonomy of a field of restricted production can be measured by its power to define its own criteria for the production and evaluation of its products.” (Pg. 115)

Consequently, as fields of LDS cultural production move westward, their cultural interest in a neutrality, if not active disinterest towards LDS orthodoxy grows. Producers within the field of limited LDS production seek the approval and good opinion of the fellow cultural producers and critics of whom they (the original producers) have a good opinion of.

“[I]n the most perfectly autonomous sector of the field of cultural production, where the only audience aimed at is other producers … the economy of practices is based, as in a generalized game of ‘loser wins’, on a systematic inversion of the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies: that of business (it excludes the pursuit of profit…), that of power (it condemns honours and temporal greatness), and even that of institutionalized cultural authority (the absence of any academic training or consecration may be considered a virtue).” (Pg. 39)

For relatively those neglected bloggers, such as myself, who find themselves situated in the southwest corner, there are two paths out of obscurity: I can gain a larger audience within the LDS public by “selling-out” and traveling eastward toward a low-level popularity or I can “culturally refine” my blogging content so as to strive for the accolades, hat tips and linked posts from the other, “more culturally consecrated” blogs above me in our social space. These two audiences, however, consist of very different people whose good opinions are valued very differently.

The reason why moving northward within the field of autonomous, limited-scale production is so difficult is because such a field is the product of a long-term arms race in the struggle for the symbolic capital that comes with upward mobility. Symbolic capital, to be clear, is not the same as economic, cultural, social or even religious capital. It is, instead, the ability to define for others the relative legitimacy of these various types of capital and those who produce and trade in them. A person with high symbolic capital is thus able to legislate – with relatively low resistance – the definition and value of their own field with respect to other, competing fields. Let’s take Kate Kelly as an example. To the extent that people accepted her definition and valuation of (il)legitimate LDS culture without objection or resistance, she was thus wielding symbolic power within the LDS community. (J. Max Wilson provided a fantastic, ableit sadly neglected critique of how those within the Bloggernacle struggle for distinction and symbolic capital within it.)

“The struggle in the field of cultural production over the imposition of the legitimate mode of cultural production is inseparable from the struggle within the dominant class … to impose the dominant principle of domination (that is to say – ultimately – the definition of human accomplishment)…  who is legitimately entitled to designate legitimate writers or artists.” (Pg. 41)

The defining relationship both within and between different fields of cultural production, according to Bourdieu, is one of competitive struggle. The priesthood leadership struggles against the wayward and “leveling” tendencies of the mainstream membership from which they have been “set apart” and the world in general. The largely autonomous Bloggernacle similarly struggles to distance itself from and delegitimize the “unthinking” mass membership of the church. Higher blogs struggle to distinguish themselves from the less rigorous, less qualified or otherwise unworthy-of-serious-attention bloggers such as myself. I struggle to subvert the principles and values according to which such bloggers set themselves apart from the rightful domination of priesthood authority. And so on. To exist as a producer of culture just is to struggle against and distinguish oneself from other forms and producers of culture.

Fields of cultural production such as the church or the Bloggernacle thus exist in a (sometimes uneasy) tension wherein one’s peers are both 1) united against the power (symbolic or otherwise) wielded by outsiders and 2) competitive obstacles to one’s own struggle for religious or cultural capital within your respective sub-field.

“The writer, the artist… even the scientist writes not only for a public, but for a public of equals who are also competitors. Few people depend as much as artists and intellectuals do for their self-image upon the image others … have of them.” (Pg. 116)

Doctrines and policies within the church, or slogans and metaphors within the Bloggernacle, then, are no different from the scientific realm in which,

“Theories, methods and concepts are to be considered as strategies aimed at installing, restoring, strengthening, safeguarding or overthrowing a determinate structure of relationships of symbolic domination; that is, they constitute the means for obtaining or safeguarding the monopoly of the legitimate mode of practicing a literary, artistic or scientific activity.” (Pg. 139)

While he does not come out and say it, I suspect that Bourdieu would agree with a paraphrase of David Sloan Wilson’s group selectionist theory: Cooperation within fields is easiest to maintain where competition between fields is most fierce and (this he does say) competition is most fierce between fields that are closest to each other. Quite obviously, the Bloggernacle and the LDS church are very close to one another in the space of cultural production.

Given the historical nature of the struggle for capital that defines each both the Bloggernacle and the church, Bourdieu totally rejects the idea that these communities (or any academic discipline while we’re at it) can ever be defined in terms their quest for coherence or consensus (sorry Pierce):

“[W]hat can be constituted as a system for the sake of analysis is not the product of a coherence-seeking intention or an objective consensus (even if it presupposes unconscious agreement on common principles) but the product and prize of a permanent conflict; or, to put it another way, that the generative, unifying principle of this ‘system’ is the struggle.” (Pg. 34)

As is to be expected, the struggle that constitutes every (sub)field is historical in nature, admitting of no timeless essences which might distinguish one field from another. Any attempt at imposing a timeless essence upon a religious, scientific or artistic field is

“only re-using, without knowing it, the historical production of the slow and very gradual work of purification … which, in each of the genres … accompanied the automatization of the field of production.” (Pg. 190)

While this clearly amounts to a strong argument for continuing revelation within the church, he is also careful to distance himself from a charismatic conception of prophets or online personalities.  Cultural authorities within any field, he insists, do not act as “the unconscious spokesman of a group” (Pg. 56) and he would totally reject the possibility of any community being organized solely or even primarily for the sake of “mourning with those who mourn” or “giving voice” to the oppressed. Rather, a cultural authority is he or she who is most praised and followed within their cultural field since it is he or she that is able to best accrue symbolic capital for that field at the expense of other competing fields. In other words, the French placed Napoleon above themselves only insofar as he led them to victory over their neighbors.

It is in this sense that some innovations and revelations are well received within a community, they being seen as “consecrated betrayal[s] of expectations” according to which the consecrated elite come to alter the ways in which they continually sift the upwardly mobile from the bohemian heretics. (Pg. 119)

“Scholastic codifications of the rules of scientific practice are inseparable from the project of building a kind of intellectual papacy, replete with its international corps of vicars, regularly visited or gathered together in concilium and charged with the exercise of rigorous and constant control over common practice.” (Pg. 139)

To be repeat, the relationship between the cultural producers that make up the Bloggernacle and Church leadership is one of conflict and struggle. Both parties – especially the former – define themselves in opposition to and distinction from the other. If the relationship between the Bloggernacle and the church were one of full compatibility, then the former’s quest for autonomy from the latter would be meaningless. Cultural producers on the far left, however, do seek a meaningful autonomy from priesthood regulation precisely because there is a struggle between the two parties for symbolic capital. Both sides claim the right to define and evaluate the persons, products and capitals that circulate within LDS culture.

“All critics declare not only their judgement of the work but also their claim to the right to talk about it and judge it. In short, they take part in a struggle for the monopoly of legitimate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the production of the value of the work of art.” (pg. 35-36)

This, I submit, pretty well sums up the relationship which the Bloggernacle has to the church. By continually discussing the church, we continually assert our claims to judge the church. It is for this reason that the church, like any other dominant class, attempts to strike a balance with these producers of Mormon culture. It offers to

“recognize the intellectual’s and the artist’s monopoly on the production of the work of art as an instrument of pleasure… in return, the artist is expected to avoid serious matters, namely social and political questions.” (Pg. 128)

Within the current context, then, a Blogger is allowed by their church leaders to post whatever they like so long as they do not interfere with, subvert or otherwise call into question the social, political or otherwise moral functions of the church. It is when this “compromise” is ignored or actively rejected that both the church and those parts of the Bloggernacle that are most autonomous of the church threaten to withhold the cultural capital of which they are the guardians from each other.

“Any act of cultural production implies an affirmation of its claim to cultural legitimacy: when different producers confront each other, it is still in the name of their claims to orthodoxy or, in Max Weber’s terms, to the legitimate and monopolized use of a certain class of symbolic goods; whey they are recognized, it is their claim to orthodoxy that is being recognized.” (Pg. 116)

It is little wonder, then, that these oppositions often “express themselves in terms of reciprocal excommunications” (pg. 117) in which each party claims that the other is actually the one who left them and their (no longer recognized) orthodoxy.

To recap, the path leading from autonomy from priesthood authority to apostasy against priesthood authority is as follows:

  1. An online community (the Bloggernacle) distinguishes itself from the LDS mainstream.
  2. The Bloggernacle strives for autonomy from the priesthood authorities who define the social world and prioritize the different forms of capital that circulate within it for the LDS mainstream.
  3.  The Bloggernacle becomes a largely self-contained community of peers who mutually evaluate each other according to their own logic and history which is distinct from that of the mainstream church.
  4. A hierarchy emerges around the differential production and accumulation of the cultural capital which defines the Bloggernacle.
  5. The elite within the Bloggernacle’s cultural hierarchy gain symbolic capital by which they gain the ability (authority) to define the social world and prioritize the different forms of capital that circulate within it for those within the Bloggernacle.
  6. The symbolic capital that comes from being a cultural elite within Bloggernacle is thus brought to bear in a struggle against the, by very definition, distinct symbolic capital of the ruling elite of the LDS priesthood authorities.
  7. These two, distinct hierarchies find themselves compelled to excommunicate each other by the authority of the differing symbolic capital that they each wield in opposition to the other.

Also, just for fun, here is a very rough, first draft of the taxonomy that I have in mind.  I would love for any additions or corrections to this:

Bloggernacle 1.0

21 Comments

  1. Good job. I think it is telling that you recognize that you are not allowed to use “economic” in your analysis of what the church is. One of the most interesting parts of this is the role of the lawyers and PR people in enforcing the boundaries and doing the analysis.
    I think it makes sense except for the decision to make the church a “religion” and not just another entity without an essence in the struggle. I think it still holds pretty well but I still think the assumption of power of the church leaders is debatable. How do you know they aren’t doing the bidding of another ruling class?

    Comment by Martin James — April 6, 2016 @ 2:42 pm

  2. My guess is that Bourdieu would totally reject any straightforward analysis of any church or religion in terms of economics (like the “vulgar” Marxists do). He sees religious forms of cultural production as very much residing on the autonomous-of-economic-forces side…. even though no field is totally free of such forces.

    Indeed, the clergy/aristocracy STRONGLY objected to the rise of the bourgeoisie and capitalism in general due to its making economic concerns (profit, interest, etc.) a virtue rather than the vice that they thought it was.

    Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s main point (and the reason why he rejected communist parties) was that there are other forms of capital by which domination can be maintained and legitimized. This opens the door to my own analysis.

    “I think it still holds pretty well but I still think the assumption of power of the church leaders is debatable.”

    You may be right that the average Mormon is at least in tutelage to the ruing Bourgeoisie, but if we limit ourselves to LDS culture, I think we can sideline economic considerations for the time being. If not, I would definitely be interested in an analysis that does include the Bourgeois interests, but that would be a mighty tall order.

    Comment by Jeff G — April 6, 2016 @ 2:55 pm

  3. What would Bourdieu say about how one gets to be an Apostle?

    Comment by Martin James — April 6, 2016 @ 4:03 pm

  4. Here are the steps from autonomy to apostasy:

    1. A group of like-minded producers of culture distinguish themselves from the mainstream.
    2. This group seeks autonomy from the dominant authorities.
    3. This group becomes a community of peers who mutually evaluate each other according to their own logic and history.
    4. A hierarchy emerges within this group in terms of the cultural capital around which the group defines itself.
    5. The elite within this group gain the authority to define reality and prioritize different forms of capital for others.
    6. This distinct definition and evaluation of the social world comes in conflict with that of the original, dominant authorities.
    7. The two hierarchies excommunicate each other.

    Comment by Jeff G — April 6, 2016 @ 4:07 pm

  5. He would say that it’s not all that different from other forms of upward mobility. One must demonstrate a lack of material interests. Social capital certainly helps. A strong competence in the “unwritten rules” by which religious capital and higher or spiritual taste is discerned. An ability to articulate the rules that structure the religion is useful, but not necessary. Above all, the ability to be a “good Mormon” is non-negotiable.

    Comment by Jeff G — April 6, 2016 @ 4:13 pm

  6. The part of this that strikes me as old fashioned or not applicable to the USA is that it seems to be that elites compete for status and the lower classes follow. But in the USA it seems to me that elite status religiously comes from the ability to have mass followers. The apostates have a hard time having followers.

    Comment by Martin James — April 6, 2016 @ 5:12 pm

  7. I don’t think there is much of a difference between the new and old worlds here. Weber describes this authority in terms of “charisma” while Bourdieu wants to talk about the symbolic capital which tracks the various forms of capital: refinement in taste and worldly success in general. Having symbolic capital just is to have followers.

    Comment by Jeff G — April 6, 2016 @ 5:29 pm

  8. It should also be kept in mind that the tastes and habits that makes for a good member within the church are very different from the tastes and habits that makes for a good leader within the church. That was the whole point of Distinction in that the lower classes tend to reproduce values and lifestyles that work well within their position, but are terrible for upward mobility.

    Comment by Jeff G — April 6, 2016 @ 7:35 pm

  9. I wonder how these findings would relate to Bourdieu’s chart?

    It’s tough to tell whether it would serve as a (very rough) measure of each online communities autonomy from priesthood authority or the LDS mainstream in general. In other words, should the chart be place east to west, or northeast to southwest? Or some other?

    Comment by Jeff G — April 7, 2016 @ 10:57 am

  10. Not that it undermines this analysis (which I really liked) to what degree does the reasons for production matter? That is there seems a fundamental difference between productions to persuade, productions to understand, and productions to get noticed.

    Comment by Clark — April 7, 2016 @ 11:51 am

  11. I’m not sure that Bourdieu would really recognize a difference between such motives. If we are engaged in production, then we are necessarily 1) aiming for the good opinion of SOME audience and 2) aiming to set ourselves apart from other producers for the sake of (1).

    In other words, understanding is only an ideological veneer by which we dress up our efforts at distinguishing ourselves from those who would address other questions or the same questions differently.

    The conclusion which we are trying to sell others is also somewhat incidental to the cultural profits (yes, he uses that term) which we seek for ourselves. If some other thesis would provide us with a higher profits, we would have defended it instead.

    It is important to remember, however, that while Bourdieu does construe cultural and social capital in explicitly economic terms, he absolutely rejects the idea that such pursuits are grounded in conscious calculation of any kind. I probably should have, but sadly didn’t address his idea of “habitus” when I discussed our tastes. Basically, habitus is the set of dispositions which we have internalized such that we feel more “at home” with certain fields of competition than in others.

    He even provides a cute equation which is supposed to express how our choices in cultural consumption and production are made: [ (habitus) ( capital )] + field = practice

    I think this is about right, but putting it in the form of an equation doesn’t make it any more rigorous, iterative, etc.

    Comment by Jeff G — April 7, 2016 @ 12:07 pm

  12. In other words, our telling others that we are interested in understanding, persuasion, attention, etc. are themselves merely different strategies by which we distinguish ourselves from those who are not so concerned with “understanding”, “attention”, etc.

    Comment by Jeff G — April 7, 2016 @ 12:12 pm

  13. For those who have already read the post, I added a postscript that includes a rough taxonomy of the Mormon culture production. I might be fun to play with this chart a bit.

    Comment by Jeff G — April 7, 2016 @ 1:31 pm

  14. So I am a bohemian? Cool, I think. I think that the analysis is on the mark. Very interesting.

    Comment by Eric Nielson — April 8, 2016 @ 7:29 am

  15. I can make sense of the tutelage to priesthood but the basis of the Prestige scale makes my head spin for the following reason. The rankings are somehow within the LDS community but I don’t think there are agreed upon prestige measures within that community. So are you taking the prestige from “outside” the community and using it to score prestige within it or are you using subsets of tutelage to priesthood scores and then ranking prestige based on the values of that subset?
    How about Ordain Women or Mormon Stories or Peggy Fletcher Stack’s SL Trib articles? Are they not on the scale because the they are not in the community? Are they not included because they they have a negative tutelage score?
    Also is your tutelage score so low because you are arguing from a point of view outside priesthood books? I would score you higher because you seem to prioritize priesthood authority above other things.
    Your won arguments seem to agree that prestige is relative to the group and there is no outside objective basis for it, so whose view of prestige is used for the scoring?

    Comment by Martin James — April 8, 2016 @ 8:24 am

  16. You bring up good points.

    The way that I personally understand the y-axis is in Kuhnian terms where an established paradigm would basically defined the field, its authority figures (towards the north) as well as its heterodox naysayers (to the south). In other words, the y-axis measures how likely the sub-field is likely to accept and defend a person’s assertions against critics to the east and south. (The southeast doesn’t really criticize anybody, they either pay attention or not.)

    Thus, I am talking about prestige within a sub-set of the LDS community. For example, some people get bigger audiences at Sunstone symposia and FAIR conferences; some authors are more quoted or more cited (Givens, Nibley) within somewhat self-contained LDS circles. In contrast, you don’t find many sub-communities in which Jack Weyland, Sherrie Dew or Chicken Soup for the Soul is discussed and invited to give presentations. In other words, all of the audiences in question are LDS, but some are sub-groups that have organized themselves in distinction to the mainstream “masses”. It is this organization that gives such groups both their hierarchy and their power which can eventually come in conflict with the authorities that rule over the larger LDS culture.

    Again, these are just rough guesses on my part, but I think OW would be (0,8) since they are quite explicitly organized in distinction tot he mainstream and their authorities clearly wield cultural and symbolic capital. Fletcher is a bit more tough, since see is clearly aimed to selling newspapers, but she also stands apart from the LDS mainstream. (What would have been ideal is providing a 3 dimensional chart where x-measures economic autonomy (as in Bourdieu’s original), y measures cultural capital and z would be the spectrum of different types of cultural capital (religious, literary, scientific, etc.). My chart is basically a depiction of the z and y axes, whereas the x axis that I left out would be essential to locating reporters like Fletcher.

    “Also is your tutelage score so low because you are arguing from a point of view outside priesthood books?”

    I’m glad you asked. Mine is so low because I’m not directly concerned with defending or supporting any particular priesthood claims or policies. Indeed, as I’ve noted before, I think many of my writings would do more harm than good to the LDS mainstream, for which reason I actively try to separate myself from them. Thus, I am much more of a heterodox critic of the autonomous left than I am an orthodox contributor to the right. Also, let’s face it, my version of Mormon doctrine is anything but mainstream.

    It is for this reason that I do not see Eric as a Bloggernacle Bohemian (sorry Eric!). I think he would definitely be further to the right than I am, maybe (7,2)?

    “there is no outside objective basis for it”

    Bourdieu strongly objects to this. Some people are “objectively” listened to, accepted and defended more than others. Kevin Barney, Steve Peck, Nate Oman, John Dehlin or Kate Kelly are, by any credible standard, taken much more seriously than I am. If priesthood authorities censor any of these people, there will, quite obviously, be a much greater uproar about it than if am so censored.

    Comment by Jeff G — April 8, 2016 @ 11:03 am

  17. I was thinking that I decent way of mapping the Bloggernacle seems to be taking the listings at MA as an axis running from (0,10) to (10,0) and these findings as a separate axis running from (10,10) to (0,0).

    It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a fair start.

    Comment by Jeff G — April 8, 2016 @ 11:07 am

  18. C’mon Jeff you’ve got to play the long game here. Your prestige is higher than you think because of the quality of the philosophical texts you cite and the high educational and economic standing of those that comment.
    I’m pretty sure if we weight the blogs on the average tithing per reader, you are at or near the top!
    Those other blogs are just pandering to the masses, where’s the distinction in that?

    Comment by Martin James — April 8, 2016 @ 12:41 pm

  19. That all might be true but,

    1) the authorities I cite almost all lie outside the LDS canon, thus pushing me westward, and
    2) nobody cites me, placing me pretty far southward.

    Comment by Jeff G — April 8, 2016 @ 1:27 pm

  20. How worthy a person is of “serious” attention is Bourdieu’s definition of culture capital, and by those lights I have very little.

    Comment by Jeff G — April 8, 2016 @ 1:29 pm

  21. Sorry. Consecration, not cultural capital.

    Comment by Jeff G — April 8, 2016 @ 1:30 pm