Part 1: Introducing Pierre Bourdieu
With empirical research and opposing intellectual viewpoints, French social scientist Pierre Bourdieu theorizes regarding culture, power, stratification or class, and social knowledge. The book we are using highlights Bourdieu's principal conceptual interweavings, (p.6).
Culture Power and Reproduction
He offers a genetic theory of groups that explains how systems of domination/heirarchy persist and perpetuate over time.
The Agency/Structure Problem
He unites the individual and society (micro and macro) into a structural theory connecting action (the individual or agency) to culture, structure, and power. From this stems his key concept of habitus.
Fields of Power
Practices occur in structured areas of conflict called fields.
Sociology as Socioanalysis
The sociologist's role is to tap into the social unconscious of society, exposing underlying interests that bind individuals and groups into unequal power relations.
For a Reflexive Practice of Social Science
Socioanalysis requires a systematic and rigorous self-critical practice of social science.
Sociology as Politics
Bourdieu posits his work as political intervention against the intelligentsia as carriers of universal cultural values freed from economic and political determinants.
Career
Bourdieu is a cultural and social outsider to the French intellectual elite.
Writing Style
Bourdieu's very style flies in the face of the French elite and the taken-for-granted world. How refreshing!
Part 2: Chapter 3 Bourdieu's Meta-theory of Sociological Knowledge
The Subjective/Objective Antinomy
Bourdieu opposes the subjective/objective modes of knowledge, preferring integration into a general science of practices.
The Relational Method
Preferring to break with objectivism and subjectivism, Bourdieu describes a relational or structuralist foundation to all scientific thought. Like geometry with lines and points defined relationally, so should social science do the same rather than consider individuals in isolation.
Part 3: Chapter 4 Bourdieu's Political Economy of Symbolic Power
Beyond Structuralist Marxism
Bourdieu develops a political economy of symbolic power that includes a theory of symbolic interest, a theory of power as capital, and a theory of symbolic violence and capital.
A Sociology of Symbolic Interests
All cultural production, in a political economy of culture, (including science), is reward-oriented for investment and profit.
There can be as many interests as there are institutionalized arenas of conflict over valued resources. Interest is whatever motivates action toward consequences that matter. Thus intellectual objectivity or disinterest is nil.
Power as Capital
Capital extends to all forms of power. Individuals and groups draw upon cultural, social, and symbolic resources to ameliorate their position in the social order.
Cultural capital has three forms:
acquired through socialization by the individual
objects that require special abilities to use (art, music, etc.)
institutionalized through the educational system.
In spite of autonomy, culture is subordinate to economy (the starving artist).
A Theory of Symbolic Violence and Capital
Symbolic systems
perform three functions: cognition, communication, and social differentiation.
order the social world
codes channeling deep meanings shared by members of a culture
serve as instruments of domination.
Bourdieu thus combines structuralist and constructionist perspectives. Binary symbolic distinctions correlate with social distinctions turning symbolic classifications into social hierarchy. The power of domination through legitimation cements class hierarchy.
Symbolic violence intellectualizes the power struggle and legitimizes it through sociological explanation. Mis-recognition, false conscious, or denial is the mental state that perpetuates symbolic violence.
Symbolic capital is power that is perceived as legitimate need for recognition, deference, obedience, or the services of others. Many such practices would not be performed if they were recognized for what they are: self-serving.
Symbolic capital is the legitimation of power relations through symbolic forms. It is accumulated like material capital and can be exchanged for material capital.
Symbolic labor is specialized producers in the arenas of culture such as religion where there are symbolic producers.
Cultural producers (artists, writers, teachers, journalists, etc.) legitimate social order by producing symbolic capital through symbolic labor.
Bourdieu's work is the study of the political economy of forms of symbolic capital.
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