Notes on: Bourdieu, P. (1989). Social Space and Symbolic Power. Sociological Theory 7 (1): 14 – 25 Dave Harris His work is 'constructivist structuralism… Structuralist constructivism', but not in the sense of Sausssure or Lévi-Strauss. He thinks there are objective structures independent of consciousness and will. And he also thinks there is a 'twofold social genesis… of schemes of perception, thought and action which are constituencies of what I call habitus and… social structures… and particularly… fields and… groups, notably those we ordinarily call social classes' (14). There are different emphases in different books that he's written over time. These two are apparently incompatible points of view, represented by the advice to treat social facts as things, leaving out anything that appears to be an object of knowledge or misrecognition, and, on the other hand seeing the social world as representations the agents have of it, with social science just producing accounts of the accounts. However, the contrast is rarely expressed radically. Even Durkheim was aware that there was a need to use logical categories and classifications, sometimes as mere operational ones. Schutz represents the subjectivist vision best where the field of social scientist is entirely seen as a meaning and relevance structure of the human beings in it, using common sense constructs and thought objects to act, requiring sociologists to work only with '"constructs of the second degree"' (15). Science has to break with primary representations in the first case, but is only a continuity of it in the second. Bourdieu intends to try to overcome this split. He sees the objective structures constructed by sociologists in an 'objectivist moment' by setting aside subjective representations of agents as the basis for 'structural constraints that bear on interactions'. However, subjective representations are crucial for accounting for daily struggles which maintain or transform those structures. Hence a 'dialectical relationship'between objectivist and subjectivist moments. However, even if subjectivist moments are isolated as in interactionism or ethnomethodological analysis, they are still grasped sociologically by relating them to positions they occupy in a structure of agents. This is to depart from substantialism (Cassirer) — where there is no other reality than that available to direct intuition and ordinary experience. Instead, structuralism offers a relational mode of thinking as in modern maths and physics, where the real is not a matter of substance but of relations, social reality is 'an ensemble of invisible relations' which create a space of positions external to each other, in relation of proximity and distance, above, below and in the middle. Sociology as objectivist analysis is a typology. It is this he tried to develop in Distinction. This space is almost certainly unnoticed by the reader of that book despite his using diagrams and correspondence analysis. Substantialism is easier to adopt, and there is a problem in constructing social space. For example the chapter in Distinction about the fractions of the dominant class tends to be read as description of the various lifestyles of those fractions, but they are really 'our analysis of locations in the space of positions of power… The field of power', which is also a break with the ordinary idea of a ruling class.  Social space is like geographic space except that proximity means neighbours have common properties and distance means social distance. Almost everywhere there is a tendency towards spatial segregation, and some overlap between social and geographic space. The two are not the same, and people distanced in social space can find themselves neighbours in physical space, with a particular risk of masking social structures behind empirical interaction. This is seen in 'strategies of condescension' for example where agents in a higher position deny social distance between them and others, although that distance still persists: this gives them a certain profit by being called unaffected or whatever and  combines the advantages of distance and propinquity. So social relations like this are not reducible to interactions. Objective relations should be seen as the relations between positions, a matter of distribution of resources, which can become effective or active ’like aces in a game of cards’ in the competition for scarce goods (17). After empirical investigation (NB) he identified the fundamental powers of economic capital in its different forms, cultural capital, social capital and symbolic capital — ‘the form that the various species of capital assume when they are perceived and recognised as legitimate’. Agents occupy places in the overall social space on the first dimension according to the volume of capital they possess, and on the second dimension according to the structure of this capital, the relative weights of the different species of capital, economic and cultural. It would be a misunderstanding to think that the classes on paper are real groups. Agents in the social spaces do occupy similar positions in similar conditions and have ‘similar conditionings, and therefore have every chance of having similar dispositions and interests and… Practices that are themselves similar’. They might have developed what ‘Goffman callsThe “sense of one’s place”’, and people like to keep to their place, keep their distance, not get too familiar, even if this is ‘perfectly unconscious’ and appears as ‘timidity or arrogance’ indeed ‘inscribed in bodies… Into the relation to the body, to language and to time’, so often ignored by ‘subjectivist vision’. A sense of place and affinities of habitus at the basis of all forms of cooperation, friendship, marriage, associations and so on, and this leads you to think that classes on paper are real groups. Indeed, any political movement will have a better chance of bringing people together as agents who are in the same sector of social space. But we can’t just deduce actions and interactions from the structure. That would be to produce a theoreticist error like the one you find in Marx, A realist error -- what is needed instead is political work to produce social classes as permanent groups, making social classes, exerting a theory effect, as in EP Thompson, where the working class is an historical artefact . Of course, there are limits to what one can construct, both in theory and in practice. However, the social reality that objectivists talk about is also an object of perception and this must be analysed by social scientists in terms of its reality and how it is composed of perspectives or points of view by different agents, how it might appear as folk theories or what he calls ‘”spontaneous sociology”(18) as well as scientific theories, Especially as these can acquire ‘a truly real power of construction’. Objectivist breaks with these spontaneous sociology constructions and ideologies is necessary if we are to do more than just work with the phenomenal vision of the social world. This objectivist break has to be broken with itself by reintroducing what had to be excluded, ‘a sociology of the perception of the social world… The construction of visions of the world which themselves contribute to the construction of this world… Points of view [which]… are views taken from a certain point… from a determinate position within social space’. These will be different depending on the position of the agent in social space. There can be no universal subject, no transcendental ego, because constructing a vision of the world is ‘carried out under structural constraints’. Of course the familiar world tends to be taken for granted and perceived as natural, but that is because the habitus of the agents, the dispositions, are  ‘essentially the product of the internalisation of the structures of that world’. Perceptive dispositions ‘tend to be adjusted to position’ and this leads all agents, even disadvantaged ones, to perceive the world as natural and to accept it. There are no invariant forms of perception or of construction, because construction is not carried out in a social vacuum, and cognitive structures are themselves socially structured. The construction of social reality is also a collective enterprise. Unless you take into account the effects of social space, you cannot see the limits of the particular points of view. Representations of agents are required through ‘the lasting experience of a social position’ (19). Habitus produces practices and perceptions and appreciation of those practices and in doing so ‘expresses the social position in which it was elaborated’. This means that the practices and representations it produces are ‘available for [objective]classification’, Once we know the classificatory schemes we can understand the social meaning. Habitus gives us not only the sense of one’s own place but the sense of the place of others [even for social agents themselves]. When agents classify themselves, they presuppose a classification system, assuming that things go well together like clothes, drinks, sports and friends and that their choice of consumer goods, say, are ‘homologous to the position they themselves occupy in social space’ — ‘Nothing classifies somebody more than the way he or she classifies’. When we classify we can perceive the relations between these practices and positions in social space and this seems commonsense, self-evident. Objectively, the world does not present itself ‘as pure chaos… totally devoid of necessity’ open to being constructed in any way you choose. Nor is it totally structured. There are different principles of vision and division ‘for example economic divisions and ethnic divisions’ and ‘economic and cultural factors of the greatest power of differentiation’. However, these differences are ‘never so great’ [in potency] that other principles of division cannot be used — ‘ethnic, religious, or national ones, for instance’ [So maybe he really is saying that racial divisions can predominate and produce a kind of vertical slicing?] However, despite this ‘potential plurality of possible structurings’’ there is a simple mechanism which simplifies it. The agents that have different properties are ‘systematically linked among themselves’, so that those with certain tastes tend to have other tastes — so that having a particular tasting drink or leisure ‘makes you “look” like a traditional member of the old bourgeoisie’ (20). ‘Differences function as distinctive signs and as signs of distinction’, in a way beyond just deliberate conspicuous consumption. In other words the social world is an objective symbolic system, ‘organised according to the logic of difference, of differential distance… A symbolic space, a space of lifestyles and status groups characterised by different lifestyles’. So we have a ‘double structuring’. On the objective side properties attributed to agents appear in combinations that have unequal probabilities, so that those who can master languages are more likely to be found in particular occupations [not his actual example]. On the subjective dimension schemes of perception and appreciation especially those in language express relations of symbolic power for example in pairs of adjectives which organise taste [his examples are ‘heavy/light, bright/dull’] In various domains. There are always indeterminacy and vagueness and ‘semantic elasticity’ always statistical connections and ‘variations in time… objective elements of uncertainty’ and thus a plurality of visions of the world. This also provides ‘a base for symbolic struggles over the power to produce and to impose the legitimate vision of the world’ [he thinks symbolic struggle is at a maximum in the United States, and it is this that has been exposed particularly well by Goffman]. Symbolic struggles can take an objective form, for example where a group acts to make itself more visible and powerful, Or, more individually,with the strategies of presentation of self in Goffman, designed to improve self-image and also ‘the image of one’s position in social space’ which Bourdieu thinks that Goffman ‘overlooked’. On the subjective side there are efforts to transform categories of perception and appreciation, different forms of classification words and names, different principles of vision and division, different examples of the theory effect [slightly obscure examples at first relating to insults among the Kabylia].(21)  Political efforts to revalorise the past would be an example. The symbolic efforts are connected to economic and cultural capital, since ‘symbolic capital is nothing other than economic or cultural capital’, and legitimation of the social world is not just deliberate propaganda or imposition, but rather ‘structures of perception and appreciation… which tend to picture the world as evident’. ‘Objective relations of power tend to reproduce themselves in the relations of symbolic power’, over the production of common sense, the monopoly of legitimate naming, titles of nobility. Again subjectivism does not grasp this well, since it is not a case of just adding individual orders together, because there is a hierarchy, and some people have more power to impose values, some even hold a monopoly, some symbols are officially sanctioned. Credentials fit here as ‘a piece of universally recognised and guaranteed symbolic capital, good on all markets’ The state and the legal system can consecrate particular kinds of symbolic capital and confer ‘an absolute universal value’ (22). Official discourse diagnoses first, asserting what a personal thing is, for every person, ‘thus objectively’ it follows that there are directives about what people have to do, and finally interpretations of what people actually have done as in official records. Official discourse therefore ‘imposes a point of view, that of institution’, and claims it as legitimate which everyone has to recognise. The state engages centrally in these processes of codification, producing transcendent points of view overcoming particular points of view, as Weber noticed, although we can extend his formulation to include monopolising‘ legitimate symbolic violence’. Even so, they never achieve absolute monopoly and conflicts between symbolic powers remain [rather confusing bit here referring to archaic societies which feature persisting dualist oppositions between masculine and feminine, high and low and so on. Also a hint that the world is never finally made, so contradictions are continually emerging?] Symbolic power has a ‘form par excellence… the power to make groups’ (23) either consecrating those that are already established, or bringing some into being, as with Marxism. It has to be based on the possession of symbolic capital which conveys social authority as a form of credit. Authority can often come only after ‘a long process of institutionalisation’ which ends in a representative structure for the group. Symbolic efficacy also depends on the links between the vision and reality — that is ‘the objective affinities between the agents who have to be brought together’ as in the theory effect. Symbolic power only works with words, but it also has to be ‘adequate to things, a matter of ‘consecration or revelation’, selecting or designating a group or a region or a nation, for example. Classification is a fundamental dimension of class struggle, political power is precisely about making ‘visible and explicit social divisions that are implicit’, Making groups to manipulate the structure of society as a performative power, a collective agent. How does a spokesperson come to be invested with the power to act in the name of the group ‘which he or she produces by the magic of the slogan, the watchword or the command… As an incarnation of the collective?’. They must somehow personify ‘a social fiction to which they give life’ (24), even if only by the fact of speaking publicly or officially and being recognised is entitled to do so. [Finally, a plea for complexity]. ‘Complexity lies within social reality and not in a somewhat decadent desire to say complicated things’ (24) questioning of simple ideas is needed in the social sciences because we can’t ‘satisfy ourselves with the commonplaces supplied to us by a commonsense experience or by a familiarity with a scholarly tradition’