"Capital"

So in between computing final grades for my various classes, I've been reading up a little more on Bourdieu, guided by Leland's comments to my previous post. Today, I read up a little more on the different forms of capital. I wonder why Bourdieu chooses to use that term--"capital"--when discussing the non-economic elements of one's habitus, such as cultural and social capital, and I wonder what the merits of using this analogy are.

Forgive me for jumping in immediately with an Arendtian comparison, but since I know Arendt more than I know any other thinker, it's really the only point of reference I can begin with. One of the central and most original features of Arendt's thought is her distinction between "work" and "action." She used the term "work" to refer to the human's activity on the material, tangible world that fabricates durable objects (such as when a carpenter makes a table or an artist paints a painting). She uses the term "action" to refer to humans' activity among one another (such as discussion or debate). (A third category is "labor" which refers to the human's activity for the purpose of biological survival.) The confusion of the categories of "work" and "action," she says, has sometimes, in the past, been fatal. When human history--that is, the stories of human action--is seen as a "work," as an object to be fabricated, then several presumptions are made: history is then something seen as something that can be "shaped" through an act of violence (in the same way that a carpenter must do violence to a tree in order to turn it into a table), and history is seen as something that can be "finished." The consequences of such a view of history is clear: a Utopian vision that must be "engineered" where humans are mere cogs in a machine to create that vision. Humans are seen as machines whose behavior can be predicted absolutely and controlled. Thus, the grand totalitarian experiments disasters of the first half of the 20th century (parallels of which are still visible today). This is at the heart of Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism.

[Of course there are difficulties with the rigidity of Arendt's categories. Newspapers, for example, are products of work, because they are reified texts, but they are also where discussion and debate--action--take place. What, then, do we do with Arendt's categories in reference to such examples?]

So does all this have anything to do with Bourdieu? I don't know yet. Maybe not, heheh! :) But I wonder what the effects are of using language that sees culture, and social networks as "capital." Does Bourdieu emphasize that unlike economic capital, social networks and linguistic symbols cannot be "possessed,"' cannot be stored and depleted, and cannot be produced in an objective sense (cf. the section entitled "Forms of Capital" in this Wikipedia entry)? And if he doesn't, is there important merit in not making that distinction, and in maintaining the parallel among cultural, social and economic capital? Or does it, insofar as Bourdieu's thought is concerned, not even really matter? Am I merely unnecessarily quibbling with semantics?

Of course, maybe the question is larger than that, in that Bourdieu is a sociologist and Arendt is a philosopher (and a postmodern one at that), so they are speaking from two different sets of presumptions to begin with. Is it correct to assume that as a sociologist, Bourdieu has to speak with the presumption of predictable human behavior and action reified in artifacts? Whereas as a 20th century normative philosopher, Arendt has to begin from the recognition of the free individual human person. If this is the case, then maybe I'm making something out of nothing, and the only reason for his choice of words proceeds from the necessary presumptions of his discipline.