, "Social Space and Symbolic Power"

Abstract

"Nothing classifies somebody more than the way he or she classifies." In "Social Space and Symbolic Power" Bourdieu marks out a position which he terms "structuralist constructivism," and which he locates in the midst of discussions of social space generally characterized, he suggests, by a stark division between subjectivism and objectivism as means of establishing notions of social categories and relations. Bourdieu's structuralist constructivism inhabits a middle space wherein objective social structures ("social reality") and the "schemata of perception, thought, and action" which construct and characterize these structures are alike taken into account. The bulk of the essay focuses on the complicated interaction between the two, that is, between objective social relations and the perceptual structures according to which we imagine and inhabit relational social space. Bourdieu's emphasis on the processes of categorization, on symbolic power as the power of "world-making," seems well-placed, but I do wonder about his appeals to "objective reality" and to systems of relation which exist prior to their social construction; where would Bourdieu locate "reality"? What sorts of structures does he want to posit as "primary" or "real" in this sense? Keeping this anxiety in mind, I will briefly outline Bourdieu's argument and then suggest some points for consideration. After setting up the classic division between objectivism and subjectivism, Bourdieu posits instead a dialectical relationship between the two, between social structures and their representations, and suggests that the key to understanding this dialectic lies in a relational model (which is also a spatial model) of social existence. Social structures express themselves as relations of power within a field, and within that imagined field spatial distance indicates social distance. Bourdieu is careful to point this out, and to make a distinction between literal spatial proximity (in the sense of social contact) and social proximity. Contact, or interaction, between individuals who are socially distant is common, and indeed part of the process whereby social distance gets masked (for example, through "strategies of condescension"); Bourdieu perceives social relation as separate from, and irreducible to, social interaction (like the strict objectivists and subjectivists, the interactionists have it all wrong). How then to map social relations, if not on the basis of interaction? "These objective relations are the relations between positions occupied within the distributions of the resources which are or may become active," (p. 127) writes Bourdieu, with "resources" here understood as capital: economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital. Relative power, expressed as position within this social grid, is determined by the quantity and structure of available capital. At this point the argument becomes a little more complicated, since the question not only of how these relations are established but how they are understood, and organized as social group and social class, comes into focus. Bourdieu suggests that, first, construction of the social world is under a certain amount of structural constraint (witness the "objective reality"