Grasping Bourdieu

I'm trying to process some ideas for my Bourdieu paper and am not finding it easy in the least. I'm interested in writing about agency in his work in order to think through a connection that I find with Bauman's notion of production in a digital age. At the same time, I think I need to spend my five pages on Bourdieu alone in order to know his ideas better. I can bring Bauman back later.

So, I'm feeling a little behind on this paper process (as far as the actual writing goes -- the thinking has been ongoing). Some notes here may help.

Production -- There's cultural production and reproduction, but also an individual agency within those constructs. Structure and agency. And redistribution. Obviously I don't know what to say about this yet.

Legitimation, Recognition, Misrecognition -- I'm really interested in this idea. Habitus is formed, partly, by what others legitimate. As is Symbolic Capital. This process of socialization works only through the process of recognition. Of being recognized as a certain kind of person and not of another. Bourdieu also makes clear that Fields are defined by the struggles between them -- that inclusion in a particular field means exclusion from another.

Whiteness -- Bourdieu also has me thinking back to Thandeka's book Learning to Be White (which I cannot locate in my collection right now). She argues that white people experience a loss as their white communities teach them racial separation. This loss, she believes, is abusive and painful. Is it possible, then, that as white people develop habitus around a racially separated selves that they experience a loss as well when faced with their privilege? In other words, learning privilege is painful because it means separation from a white community embodied in habitus. This maybe doesn't make any sense, but again, I'm processing.

Determinism -- Bourdieu tries really hard not to be deterministic (or that's Swartz's take). This relates again to agency, but I want to locate the places for the agency. Bourdieu seems to only hint at it at times.

Taste -- A student in the classroom I observed once said that people don't separate based on race any longer, but on style. She is a white student, but several students of all races seemed to agree with her. How does this relate to what Bourdieu says about taste and what Bauman says about style?

Mobility -- Having social, cultural, and symbolic capital offers the individual mobility -- moving between Fields, perhaps, and social worlds. This, as we talked about last week, is what we want to teach our students. Yet, I'm a bit uneasy about mobility. In all of the movement, who gets left behind? I rejected a while ago any notion of the authentic self, but that doesn't mean that our society has rejected that notion. So in the process of moving from here to there, where do individuals experience loss of a perceived idea of self, community, being?