Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Bourdieu and the concept of Social Capital

Many of my Dalton friends have the admirable benefit of an "intact" social circle. In other words -they are in conformity with the Upper Middle class social norm..their daily social role is consistent with their family, friends , work life, etc..their "habitus and habits" are more or less stable.
Mine is not. My family background is RADICALLY different than my habitus..they have NO idea of the NYC Contemporary artworld..don't listen to Joni Mitchell etc.. Likewise my DALTON friends don't know about the urban or rural black experience either.
However a person has gotta make a stand..that's my dilemma. I will be 47 years old 01/26/2009..I am not married, live with a roommate like two overgrown college grad students in an alcoholic, pop music permeated haze, frankly it's embarrassing...it's time to grow up and cash in some social capital.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why do you have to cash in? What are all of those things but artificial constructs. What we are, what is important, we carry within ourselves. We are. I am. I struggle with this issue all of the time because what is important to me is seen as nothing to the world and the "things of the world" are sometimes difficult for me to find important. But the conflict comes because, as much as I would like to pretend otherwise, I care what other people think of me and I want a platform for communication, a bridge between my inside and the outside world. I get lonely.

christopherlee said...

Well, it's a question of your world view, do you see the self as this little dot inside of your body looking out at the world as if thru a plate glass window, or is even subjectivity itself something thrown in to the world, already involved in the world of things as a thing amongst other things. Art is not just a random collection of "pictures" in the developed West, it's a social relation "mediated" by images.