Cultural Capital in the Digital Era: Mapping the Success of Thomas Pynchon

This paper will present some of my first work on a
larger dissertation project: a new model for cultural
capital in the digital era. In a time of rapidly evolving
ecologies of reading and writing, I argue that the Internet
affords us massive amounts of new data on previously
invisible cultural transactions. New architectures for
reviewing, discussing and sharing books blur the lines
between readers, authors and critics, and these cultural
structures capture thousands of conversations, mental
connections and personal recommendations that previously
went unrecorded. Through a close examination
of the networks of cultural interchange surrounding the
work of Thomas Pynchon, I hope to define a new, statistically
informed conception of cultural capital and different
modes of critical and commercial literary success.
Background
This paper takes as its starting point the idea that cultural
capital can be defined or at least mapped online through
exchanges at the intersection of literature as a field of
art and the business of buying and selling books.1 The
advent of new media is transforming this landscape of
literary production and consumption, making possible
all sorts of new ecologies of reading and writing. At
the same time, many transactions at the heart of digital
cultural capital (i.e. customer reviews, shared libraries,
“also-bought” lists, etc) are now captured in digital amber.
Just as importantly, long-running statistical research
into text-mining and content extraction has made effective
tools available to map out semantic links between
concepts and proper nouns in text archives. By combining
data from digital ecologies and professional critical
book reviews, I will compare the networks of cultural
reception and critique that make for authorial fame. This
combination of research methodologies promises new
insights not only into the vast datasets of internet culture
but also into the often-hidden cultural relationships that
exist between various professional and popular archives,
some of which reach back decades or centuries. There
are exciting possibilities here for tracing the networks of
influence and exchange that make up contemporary literary
success and bringing some empirical rigor to often vague conceptions of cultural capital.
Proposal
As I work on the larger project of outlining a new, digital
cultural capital, I propose a paper that explores some
of these themes in the more limited arena of a particular
contemporary author: Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon’s
pointed refusal to offer a public presence to the standard
engines of publicity and authorial fame (he lives in more
or less total secrecy, allegedly in Manhattan, and no clear
photographs have been taken of him for decades) makes
him an ideal candidate. Perhaps more than any other
major contemporary author, he has relied on particular
forms of cultural capital to earn literary fame, even as he
critiques the social transformations wrought by capitalism
through his work.
This paper will attempt to map the network of Pynchon’s
cultural capital and, through this exercise, make
some larger claims about how cultural capital functions
in the digital era. I will combine a broad reading of the
discourses Pynchon engages in his novels with a study
of the critical and popular reception of his work. If the
statistical analyses I perform here cannot “prove” or
“disprove” that reading, they will still inform it, just as
the reading will inform my interpretations of Pynchon’s
cultural network maps. I see Pynchon as a bridge figure
between the emerging discourses of post-War techno-supremacy,
information theory, the new managerial class,
and American consumerism. According to this position
the allusive density and postmodern genre-bending of
Pynchon’s novels serve in effect to train readers in a
form of interdisciplinary network reading. Dealing with
such disparate and detailed threads of information, we all
become paranoid connection-seekers, bridging different
chasms and structures of knowledge across Pynchon’s
varied literary terrain. One question these results will
necessarily address is to what extent Pynchon readers
are more drawn to participation in his cultural networks
online as compared to readers of other relatively similar
contemporary authors (see methodology, below).
One of the most effectively reclusive authors on the contemporary
scene, Pynchon has succeeded admirably in
allowing public attention to focus solely on his work. I
hypothesize that Pynchon’s difficult, boundary-breaking
books succeed in forging their own ideational networks,
and that their author has both exploited and redefined
contemporary cultural capital. In this way Pynchon places
his readers in exactly the position they have assumed
in new digital ecologies of reading and writing: the role
of critic/operator, of consumer/creator, who grapples
with unstable fictional ontologies from the vantage point
of equally unstable critical ontologies.
Methodology
There is no comprehensive dataset or perfected analytical
tool for exploring cultural capital, so this paper will
construct its argument with several imperfect measures.
The argument will draw primarily on results from a new,
wide-ranging dataset of reviews incorporating “highbrow”
cultural review publications like The New York
Times, academic journals, popular media and customer
reviews from blogs and websites such as Amazon.com.
Using a combination of APIs, Perl scripts and commercial
databases, I am assembling a targeted dataset of
professional and popular reviews and recommendations
from the book review archives of major newspapers,
magazines, and the websites Amazon and LibraryThing,
with more academic, popular and commercial archives
to follow should time permit.2 Using named entity recognition
(NER) and part of speech tagging (PoS), I will
construct social and conceptual network maps based on
this corpus to explore a) how Pynchon was introduced or
integrated into the existing cultural firmament, b) who
reviewed and/or was mentioned in connection with Pynchon
and how these networks evolve, c) what insights
I can draw from resonances and differences in the conceptual
maps drawn from different categories of cultural
reaction (e.g. professional reviews vs. reader reviews).
This analysis will adapt an available open-source NER
and PoS text-mining tool (most likely Carnegie Mellon’s
AutoMap or the University of Massachusetts’ Proximity)
to construct the network maps.
These maps, while hopefully revelatory, will not offer
much in the way of quantitative measurement of social
capital or literary success. To address the problem of
quantifying cultural capital, I will be creating control
groups of books for each Pynchon work discussed. These
groups of 5-10 novels will be selected based on their cultural
proximity to the relevant Pynchon work (a messy
term, I concede): published within a year of the Pynchon
work; written by an author with similar style, interests
and/or who might be reasonably said to compete with
Pynchon; greeted with similar levels of highbrow acclaim,
and greeted (to the extent this can be determined)
with similar levels of commercial success. It is my hope
that the potential liabilities of any particular judgment or
selection will be ameliorated in aggregate, and that the
control groups will still provide a reasonable baseline for
studying how Pynchon’s work has fared over time.
Using these baselines, Pynchon’s work will also be considered
along several more quantitative metrics. I will
trace the historical reception of his work through measures
of annual MLA citations and popular press citations
(the latter will most likely use a small index of publications—newspapers and magazines with consistent
national presence over the past 50 years). Since sales figures
are notoriously difficult to come by, I will attempt
to chart the current popularity and lasting success of
Pynchon’s books by looking at library presence (through
meta-catalogs like Worldcat.org), used books available
for purchase online, and presence on library sharing sites
like LibraryThing. Of course these popularity statistics
will be judged comparatively against their normative
control groups. Finally, I should note that while the control
groups will allow some metrics to be tracked over
time (citations, for example), used book availability, library
presence and some other factors will necessarily be
limited to a snapshot of current conditions.
Conclusion
By exploring contemporary networks of cultural capital
related to the work of Thomas Pynchon, I hope to
develop tools and statistical methodologies that will be
adaptable to other authors in my own project and to other
scholars for their own work. I am aware of limited applications
of social and conceptual network mapping in
literary study, but in extensive searches I have yet to find
an easily adaptable tool that non-technical literary scholars
might use to explore a new corpus. I hope to close
this gap at least partially as I make my own arguments
about the evolving nature of digital cultural capital.
Notes
The notion of cultural capital discussed here is based
most directly on the work of John Guillory in Cultural
Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, and
through him Pierre Bourdieu. The term is a fraught one
and a full definition is beyond the scope of this paper.
Instead, I hope to lay the groundwork for a new, digital
understanding of cultural networks and influence as they
relate to literary production in the larger capitalist system,
using cultural capital as a bracketed general term.
To briefly explain my choice of websites: Amazon is
an obvious choice because of its active reviewing community
and relatively long-running archive, with over a
decade of reviews available. Publishers Weekly declared
LibraryThing the most popular of the social reading
network sites, and it also encourages an active group of
user-reviewers. A more extensive study will, with luck,
involve other major book-reviewing sites online.
Selected Bibliography
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of
the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production:
Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. New
York: Columbia University Press.
English, J. (2005). The Economy of Prestige. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Guillory, J. (1993). Cultural Capital: The Problem of
Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstracted
Models for a Literary History. London and New York:
Verso.
Radway, J. (1997). A Feeling for Books: The Book-ofthe-
Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.