Even More Bourdieu Questions

Cultural capital, unlike economic capital (and to some extent educational capital), is not easily quantifiable. Despite its arbitrary nature, cultural capital is valued in similar ways as physical assets. At times Bourdieu complicates his statistical results by pointing out the potential problems with “objective” findings. Yet, I wonder if the problem with this runs deeper. By assigning quantifiable value to an otherwise nebulous category how is Bourdieu shaping the way we think of cultural capital from the beginning? Can critiques of monogamy, especially the notion of “starvation economies” put forth in The Ethical Slut, provide other ways of approaching the concept? How might thinking of cultural capital as infinite rather than a scarce commodity impact Bourdieu’s analysis?

Even in this book, the working classes are treated unfairly. While Bourdieu discusses bourgeois taste for 61 pages and that of the petit bourgeois for 54, he only devotes 24 pages to working class tastes. How can we account for this? What tastes and life styles are we not hearing about? Did the survey design encourage this by structuring legitimate taste as presence and vulgar/popular taste as lack? Can we discuss the popular taste without reference to legitimate taste?

Bourdieu writes, “the most fundamental principles of class identity and unity, those which lie in the unconscious, would be affected if, on the decisive point in relation to the body, the dominated class came to see itself only through the eyes of the dominant class” (384) What does he mean by “unconscious” class unity and/or identity? How does this correlate to his other claims that the creation of a habitus is an active yet socially constrained process? Does occupying a marginalized social position exclude one from an active role in identity formation? Other than his attention to magazines earlier in the passage, what is the significance of the body here? How does physicality figure into class identity?