File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_1996/96-07-02.141, message 121


Date:         Sun, 05 May 96 07:27:34 EDT
From: "Charles J. Stivale" <CSTIVAL-AT-CMS.CC.WAYNE.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Fields and circles


On Sat, 4 May 1996 17:30:16 -0600 (CST) Katya Mandoki said:
>I also found the idea of concentric circles too simplistic, but being
>reminded by Cindy of  a field revolving around capitals (economic,
>symbolic etc.) perhaps we could, after all, picture Bourdieu's concept of
>field as centripetal. I couldn't understand her idea of the
>periphery, rather than the center, what would define the field. If fields
>are defined by capitals, they can't be but centripetal, and the habitus
>can be interpreted as the magnetic force keeping the field together in
>its process of reproduction.
I too am taken by Cindy's formulations regarding fields, and was able to
conceptualize it in terms of an annual academic conference organization, the
Midwest Modern Language Association (USA), that I am studying in terms of
fields (and sub-fields). In this analysis, I want to understand how, within
the field of literary and language studies, groups within different sub-fields
(e.g. French, Spanish, English, American, etc.) acquire symbolic capital
over several decades and how certain groups become more peripheral (in this
case, the foreign languages) than others (e.g. American Studies and its array
of interest groups such as Pop Culture, Women's Studies, etc). However, it
seems to me that the centripetal force is not the sole one acting upon these
relations, that there is necessarily a centrifugal force as well, with the
point of adhesion/tension perhaps being the aforementioned "magnetic force"
of habitus.
>
>Stanley Fisher's "interpretative communities" seems to me as an echoing this
>idea: communities revolving around a "symbolic capital" of what in reception
>aesthetics (Jauss, to be exact) conforms an "horizon of expectations.
I believe the reference is to Stanley Fish. The sentence 'communities revolve
around a "symbolic capital" of .. an "horizon of expectations"' seems to assume
some uniformity in such communities and horizon, when it would seem that the
struggle/tension for capital and position within a field precludes precisely
such uniformity.
Just some thoughts. I continue to be surprised how certain aspects of Bakhtin
(e.g. the dialogics of struggle) intersect with Bourdieu.

Charles J. Stivale, Detroit USA
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