The Cultural Intermediary in Plutocratic Times

The article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the cultural intermediary as a way to think through the combined effect of an intensification of economic inequality with the lack of a viable language of contemporary social class. Through an examination of organizers in art and activist spaces in London in the late 2000s, the article looks at the mixed motivations and contradictory tendencies of these intermediaries. Although fraught with internal conflicts and with the risk of immobilization, a possible basis of an emergent class agency is considered owing to an orientation towards collective practices and an openness to heterogeneous formations stemming from the very lack of conventional class coherence. By directly posing questions of class and inequality, the article makes an intervention into recent research on the cultural intermediary which has been all too silent on these pressing matters.