Bourdieu Key Concepts

Bourdieu Key Concepts

Biography

Bourdieu opposed biographical research.

He rejected this constructed “life” because such construction always exists within a coherence and always implies a subjective or objective intention behind the individual’s involved actions. He found that between the lines of biographical researchers, there was always a specific expressive tendency: “already,” “from then on,” “from his youngest days,” “always.” In short, what Bourdieu opposed was this neat, chronological description of people’s lives, which, in his view, were artificially ordered, if not predestined.

Human life is not always accompanied by order; people act with “uncertainty.” Therefore, such a posteriori description is misleading—it is the biographer’s attribution of meaning to the subject’s life. Any attribution cannot fully reflect the true situation at the time; it is a re-creation. Such re-creation, embodying the author’s own biases, may cause the biography to lose its objectivity.

Bourdieu’s Life.

1. Born in 1930 in a French village.
2. Graduated from the École Normale Supérieure, alumni include Sartre, de Beauvoir, Derrida.
3. Taught at a secondary school for one year after graduation.
4. In 1955, served military service in Algeria, managed a library during this period—an important experience.
5. Returned to France in 1960, became an assistant to Raymond Aron.
6. 1964: Editor of the “Common Sense” series, translated many important academic texts in the social sciences.
7. 1984: Entered politics.
8. 2001: Retired, passed away the following year.

People who influenced Bourdieu’s thought:

• Enlightenment thinkers - Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Voltaire, Auguste Comte
• Sociology - Marx, Weber, Durkheim
• Existentialism - Sartre, de Beauvoir - Existentialism
• Objectivism - Claude Lévi-Strauss - Objectivism
• Phenomenology - Merleau-Ponty

Bourdieu’s Thought:

• Using Marx against Marx, Weber against Weber, Durkheim against Durkheim. The “third way of realism” is an attempt to revive Marxist practical philosophy while discarding “19th-century political rhetoric” and communist propaganda.
• The “opposition” between subjectivism and objectivism that has emerged in the social sciences is “the most fundamental and the most destructive.”

Subjectivism - Subjectivism holds that “our mental activity is the only indubitable fact of our experience.” It is not shareable, not public, and there is no external, objective truth.

Existentialism - Existentialism (English: Existentialism, German: Existentialismus), also translatable as philosophy of existence or philosophy of the self, refers to a philosophical thought where life becomes aware of its own existence and explores, pursues, resolves, and optimizes everything about its life centered on the “I.”

Objectivism - Objectivism is a philosophical system proposed by the Russian-American philosopher and writer Ayn Rand. Objectivism holds that: reality exists independently of subjective consciousness; each person is directly connected to reality through sensation; humans can acquire objective knowledge from sensation through concept formation and logical induction and deduction; the moral meaning of life lies in the pursuit of personal happiness or rational self-interest; the only social system compatible with this morality is one that fully respects individual rights, embodied as pure laissez-faire capitalism; the role of art is to transform a person’s metaphysical viewpoint into a physical form they can understand and react to emotionally through a selective recreation of reality, i.e., a work of art.

Structuralism - Structuralism (English: Structuralism) is a scientific school that focuses on understanding structure rather than pursuing an understanding of essence. It advocates for interdisciplinary exchange and a holistic science that seeks underlying relationships through surface phenomena to obtain universally applicable structures. [1] Structuralism was a popular method in the latter half of the 20th century for analyzing language, culture, and society.

Bourdieu:

Field - Capital - Habitus

Habitus

Empirically, we often feel we are free agents, but the various decisions we make daily are often based on predictable, prescribed behaviors and the attitudes of others.

How social structure and individual agency are reconciled, and how we can allow the “external” and “internal” to shape each other.

Bourdieu defines habitus as a characteristic of social agents. It contains what is called a “structured structure” and a “structuring structure.”

Structured structure: Achieved through a person’s past and present situation, such as family background or educational experience.

Structuring structure: How a person’s habitus helps shape their present and future practices.

Structure: The resulting systematic order, not random or unformed.

【(Habitus)(Capital)】+ Field = Practice

Habitus and field mutually construct each other; possible misalignment (lagging behind the times).

Habitus is one of Bourdieu’s most crucial concepts.

Field

Field - Social space - A particularly internal territorial scope, a site of struggle.

Different positions (capital) exist within a field.

c1: Contradictions develop within/between fields.

Football field Rules, game, internal divisions and external boundaries.

Force field in science fiction A self-contained small world with a hierarchy, predictability.

Force field A field can be conceived as the result of various forces and counterforces, a field of power.

Studying a field:

1. Analyze the field’s position in relation to the field of power.
2. Map the objective structure of relationships between positions, which will be occupied by social agents or institutions.
3. Analyze the habitus of the social agents.

Problems brought by field theory:

1. The problem of marginal zones - the issue of drawing boundaries.
2. The problem of too many fields.
3. The problem of change within a field - non-deterministic, developmental.
4. The problem of inter-field connections.

Various Aspects of Field Operation

• Field and social class labels and their implications.
• Capital and circulation.
• Discussion of belief, how social phenomena evolve.
• The lag problem when habitus and field are out of sync.

Social Class

What Bourdieu insisted on is that social class must play a role in the mainstream context and be examined sociologically on a cultural level.

• Social Space Position (sense of place) and Habitus.

  First, determine an individual’s position in social space—measured by the type (cultural capital, economic capital) and amount of their capital.

  Individuals in similar positions (capital) have a higher probability of having similar habitus, thus constituting a class.

  Examples:

  • Artisans face higher survival urgency, therefore dislike “frills.”
  • More affluent white-collar workers are freer to pursue more aesthetic things.

• Distinction: A cluster of objects in social space that develop their own cultural traits, distinguishing them from others. They are devoted to symbolic struggles, attempting to establish the superiority of their cultural traits while also establishing official recognition. Symbolic struggle is somewhat like class struggle.

  Beware of “classification.” Classification itself may represent a bias. Who determines the authority of a classification? No one. Especially for less natural, higher-level classifications, the acceptance of a certain classification method represents the success of a group in the struggle for cultural capital.

Symbolic Capital

What is capital?

Bourdieu believed the economic definition of capital was too narrow, focused on “commodity exchange.” It should actually be applied to a broader range of exchanges.

Various forms of capital:

• Symbolic Capital
  • Cultural Capital
  • Linguistic Capital
  • Scientific Capital
  • Literary Capital
• Economic Capital

Symbolic capital is essentially the occupation of the high ground of human taste, possessing the power to define “what is good.”

Symbolic capital:

• They are objectified or embodied.
• They require time to acquire.
• Their acquisition occurs through a systematic process of inculcation.
• They express the (external) habitus of the delegating institutions of power that perform the inculcation and their fields.
• They bring value to social agents, the standard being how “well-constructed” the individual’s (internal) habitus is relative to the inculcation within the field.
• They vary in their trans-field applicability.

Various forms of symbolic capital.

Belief

Answers several questions:

• What is belief?
• What is unique about belief?
• What can we do?

Belief is:

Belief refers to a pre-reflective, primordial knowledge shaped by experience, a bodily unconscious inheritance, a relational presupposition.

Belief is “a set of fundamental certainties that do not even need to be put into an explanatory form; they are conscious as a kind of dogma” (Bourdieu 2000a:16).

Tradition is silent; it does not need to proclaim itself as “tradition.”

Therefore, it is naturally closely related to field and habitus.

c1: Belief is a mental seal. The reason symbolic capital requires a lot of time to accumulate is that instilling belief in people takes time—it is shaped through repeated emphasis. Once “belief is formed,” people’s habitus is shaped accordingly. Moreover, since belief is not subject to rational inquiry, it becomes the most deeply ingrained part of habitus.

Belief itself also constitutes a field.

Hysteresis

The phenomenon of disjunction that occurs when habitus and field interact and co-evolve.

Hysteresis attempts to describe this disjunction in a more non-tendentious way, unlike “alienation.” Bourdieu did not believe there was a moral standard to judge whether this disjunction was good or bad.

The rupture between habitus and field causes hysteresis. An example is “Don Quixote.”

No matter how hard he tried, Don Quixote’s chivalric disposition did not achieve the goals he expected, which, based on past experience, he could have reached. On the contrary, his audience, those who could fully naturalize the sense of the game within it, saw his behavior as incredible, incomprehensible, and comical.

• What prompts the transformation of field and habitus?
  1. External fields change, directly affecting the current field—e.g., war.
  2. The habitus of some individuals within the field changes with the development of contradictions, thereby driving field change—e.g., national reform. As individuals living in many fields, how can we keenly notice changes in the field, and how can we promote change in the field?

Field Conditions

Interest

Bourdieu believed “interest” is the core driving force behind individual practices in various fields.

We note that for the ways individuals act in social practices to position themselves, Bourdieu considered strategy a better concept. However, this practice is not only based on the connection between personal habitus and their surrounding field conditions but is more an unconscious calculation of interest (fundamentally, how to improve one’s position in the field). In this way, they obtain a personal interest.

Interest needs to be realized through operation within the relationship between field and habitus.

We exist under “regularities” and “dispositions,” not laws.

Interest is therefore a concept whose use is to view social practice as a game and also as an economic game. In other words, individual action aims to maximize interest. However, such action is not merely a simple calculated choice or conscious decision; we must also judge how to maximize interest while considering costs.

Interest exists widely in various social forms. In pre-capitalist societies, interest might be expressed through honor or virtue: meaning people in such societies might not pursue the accumulation of economic capital but instead pursue symbolic capital.

Bourdieu believed there are as many interests as there are fields.

Interest exists widely in:

• Education - The ideology that education seeks to inculcate is based on the culture of a particular class, creating empathy and consensus for that class in the educated person that might not have existed originally. In this process, this culturally dominant class expands its power.
• Art and Literature

For Kant, experience could only be thought of as existing within a realm of aesthetic disinterestedness, unrelated to any desire, requiring and benefiting from the precise existence of the object’s representation. All of this was distorted into a “pure” taste.

This is what Frank Lloyd Wright referred to as taste.

I once had a doubt: what is good taste? Does the appreciation of "beauty" really possess a certain commonality at the level of all humanity? If so, why can taste be trained? It's much easier to explain using Bourdieu's interest/capital.

• Economy - Economic interest is taken for granted in capitalist society.

These two theories claim that individuals’ choices of action are based on clearly discernible options that are visible and the result of calculation. In Bourdieu’s view, both are idealistic in the extreme. They both ignore the fact that any individual habitus is “rational” action, or at least reasoned, because it presupposes possession of economic and cultural capital in a specific and appropriate social time and space. The calculation of opportunity—which is only feasible, possible, and potential—can only be made based on specific social and economic conditions to finally recognize the existence of opportunity: “because it must assume a universality arising from nothing, a pre-construction of interest, and rational action theory completely forgets the social origin of the historical flux of interest.”

“As if bound by my skin: the game I play is not of my choosing, and at the same time, I am not the subject of my actions.”

/Sociology/ /Philosophy/ /Notes/ /Bourdieu/