Sociology 514 20th Century European Thought w/ UNM Professor Richard Wood

I've been doing a bit more academic writing as of late because of the class, and I'm loving the class overall.  The standing assignment is to write no more than 1 page summarizing what we've read and adding a bit of our reaction.

I'll include it here and link to various wikipedia entries, which is not something I do in the original.

Here's a precis of the most recent readings about and by Pierre Bourdieu

There's nothing more relieving than when reading  an author,  he admits that what he is writing is difficult.   Bourdieu knows the concepts he's writing about are difficult and admits that, basically, he doesn't think he should be easy to understand.  In the reading, "PartVI:  The Sociological Theory of Pierre Bourdieu," the author has tried to summarize Bourdieu's thoughts in bulleted sections:   "Structure and Action:  False Dichotomies, Habitus and Misrecognition, Fields and Capital," and "Structure and Practice in Social Life." 

These bulleted sections frame Bourdieu's writing quite nicely.  So when one reads "Social Space and Symbolic Space," one is armed with at least some framework in which to understand Bourdieu.   One particularly telling quote, "The habitus is this generative and unifying principle which retranslates the intrinsic and relational characteristics of a position into a unitary lifestyle, that is, a unitary set of choices of persons, goods, practices" (272) I underlined but upon typing this I'm still muddled about what exactly he's trying to say.  In reading Bourdieu, I don't think I should be able to explain it in a short pithy phrase.   He goes on to explain further what his notion of habitus is, "...what the worker eats, and especially the way he eats it..." (272). Thus habitus, to grossly oversimplify, is both a noun and a verb.  There is a precision in Bourdieu's writing that is refreshing because he is not so much redefining terms, but being very clear in his definitions.   He notes that when someone is different he/she is not indifferent. It's this literal meaning; this very particular choice of words that, to me, make his writing so radical [my emphasis].  

Bourdieu goes on to explain that social space is an "invisible reality," which further clarifies his thinking.   It may not be able to be pinpointed, but that doesn't mean it isn't any less real.   While I think he is writing with Marx's conception of class clearly in his head, he's not so keen on trying to identify that term as actually existing in anything more than a theoretical sense.   He writes, "...which are fictitious regroupings existing only on paper, through an intellectual decision by the researcher..."(273).   Bourdieu's writing is slippery, freely admitting that how we discuss society is modulated by the words we choose to discuss it.   Thus, when he admits, "What exists is a social space, a space of differences..." the reader begins to grasp how difficult really understanding his work his.   Bourdieu is interested in the spaces between.  He's quite often defining something as if it existed on some sort of vacillation between two poles:  objective structures and subjective constructions, objectivism and subjectivism, structuralism and constructivism, materialism and idealism. 

In reality there was so much I found entirely fascinating in Bourdieu's work, I could ramble on about how often I've heard slam poets say, "But that's not really poetry," or academic poets chastise slam poets as not really "caring" about writing, and my sudden revelation of this fitting some sort of Bourdieu scheme for how social capital is maintained.  But alas, the end of the page calls.