Citation

 

Contents

• General Introduction
• Part I. The Economy of Linguistic Exchanges
  • Introduction
  • 1. The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language
  • 2. Price Formation and the Anticipation of Profits
  • Appendix: Did You Say ‘Popular’?
• Part II. The Social Institution of Symbolic Power
  • Introduction
  • 3. Authorized Language: The Social Conditions for the Effectiveness of Ritual Discourse
  • 4. Rites of Institution
  • 5. Description and Prescription: The Conditions of Possibility and the Limits of Political Effectiveness
  • 6. Censorship and the Imposition of Form
• Part III. Symbolic Power and the Political Field
   
  • 7. On Symbolic Power
  • 8. Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Political Field
  • 9. Delegation and Political Fetishism
  • 10. Identity and Representation: Elements for a Critical Reflection on the Idea of Region
  • 11. Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes’
  •  

 

Author

Bourdieu's work was primarily concerned with the dynamics of power in society, and especially the diverse and subtle ways in which power is transferred and social order maintained within and across generations. In conscious opposition to the idealist tradition of much of Western philosophy, his work often emphasized the corporeal nature of social life and stressed the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics.

Context

Thesis

linguistic utterances or expressions can be understood as the product of the relation between a “linguistic market” and a “linguistic habitus.” When individuals use language in particular ways, they deploy their accumulated linguistic resources and implicitly adapt their words to the demands of the social field or market that is their audience. Hence every linguistic interaction, however personal or insignificant it may seem, bears the traces of the social structure that it both expresses and helps to reproduce.

Methodology

Key Terms

field - A field is a setting in which agents and their social positions are located. The position of each particular agent in the field is a result of interaction between the specific rules of the field, agent's habitus and agent's capital (social, economic and cultural).^[40] Fields interact with each other, and are hierarchical: Most are subordinate to the larger field of power and class relations.

Habitus-  can be defined as a system of dispositions(lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought and action).  a central aspect of the habitus is its embodiment: Habitus does not only, or even primarily, function at the level of explicit, discursive consciousness. The internal structures become embodied and work in a deeper, practical and often pre-reflexive way. An illustrative example might be the 'muscle memory' cultivated in many areas of physical education.

Doxa - Doxa refers to the learned, fundamental, deep-founded, unconscious beliefs, and values, taken as self-evident universals, that inform an agent's actions and thoughts within a particular field. Doxa tends to favor the particular social arrangement of the field, thus privileging the dominant and taking their position of dominance as self-evident and universally favorable. 

Language - Bourdieu takes language to be not merely a method of communication, but also a mechanism of power. The language one uses is designated by one's relational position in a field or social space. Different uses of language tend to reiterate the respective positions of each participant. Linguistic interactions are manifestations of the participants' respective positions in social space and categories of understanding, and thus tend to reproduce the objective structures of the social field. This determines who has a "right" to be listened to, to interrupt, to ask questions, and to lecture, and to what degree.

 

Criticisms and Questions

Notes 

from Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton (Doxa and Common life)
-language is as much and instrument of power and action than of communication 
-Problems with Marxists conception of ideology
       -"enlightened false consciousness" too simple, people more shrewd and cynical than suggested
      - what keeps system going is less rhetoric and discourse than the system's own logic (does not need to pass through consciousness to be validated)
-ideology as false consciousness remains Cartesian the social world works in terms of practices, mechanisms, etc.
-By using the term 'Doxa' we accept many things without knowing them, and that is what is called ideology
-It operates through language, through the body, through attitudes below level of consciousness
-emancipation is therefore a work of mental gymnastics as much as consciousness-raising
-Althusser, whatever the limits of his thought, was trying to shift the concept of ideology to a much less conscious, more practical, institutional place
-"very often the persons who are able to speak about the social world know nothing about the social world and those who do know cannot speak"
-you mystify people when you say "look, rap is great" the question is: does this music really change the structure of the culture?
-you are reacting to economism by lifting economic imagery into the cultural sphere rather than by registering the weight of the material and economic within culture. 
-Doxic submission does not mean happiness, it means bodily submission, which includes a lot of internalized tension. 

A. i. conceptual problems with structuralism - focus on internal mechanisms, attempt to distill structure from social world
ii- ignores pragmatics
iii - the application of structural linguistics to other kinds of behavior (anthropology)
B. i - encourage sociolinguists to supplement structural, pragmatic studies with consideration of socio-historical context
language- instrument of action and power we use language to do things (speech act theory) create reality, constrain, intimidate, set boundaries. 
a - constrained by institutions which defines the relatively stable social relations between agents in a conversation. 
b- field/market - structured spaces of positions, site of struggle for power and prestige.
-ascribes a particular value to a language, ascribed by dominant group to our goods always and determines access that others can have to language of institution comparison to value of legit. language.
-assigns capital and (resources and honor and prestige ascribed to resources)
    a) economic - material wealth
    b) cultural  knowledge and skills
     c) symbolic- accumulated prestige 
C. Habitus i. set of dispositions ingrained in the body, habits, behaviors, comportment.
               ii. linguistic habitus: hypercorrection, censorship, silencing we/they are committing symbolic violence against ourselves