Unmeditated (and possibly completely wrong) first impressions of Bourdieu

A colleague from school encouraged me to read Bourdieu, so I've been spending the past two hours trying to gather what cursory knowledge I can of him from--how else? hehe!--clicking on links from Google and Wikipedia.

My first impression of Bourdieu is that his concept of habitus sounds very Heideggerian (not surprising for any 20th century thinker, really), so that part I liked. I also like that he disagrees with a purely rationalist understanding of action (which is the same problem I have with Habermas).

One thing I'd like to find out more about, however, is how central is the concept of "class" in Bourdieu's analysis of what shapes one's Weltanschauung (to use the Heideggerian term). My initial scan of the commentaries about Bourdieu seem to imply that class is very central to his thought. I do wonder how I'm going to react to that; my guess is that I'm going to be ambivalent.

On the one hand, I like that Bourdieu seems to broaden the concept of class beyond materialist notions. Very important.

However, despite that, if I do find that the class rhetoric is the central hinge of his critical theory, I think I'm going to be slightly bothered. You see, one thing I've been wondering about these past few years (since beginning work on Arendt) is whether class ought to be our central way of understanding societies; the reason for this is that such frameworks seem to make the notions of power and violence overly, um, essentialist notions. (E.g., At the risk of oversimpliyfing it, I have problems with the notion for example, that, "Regardless of the kind of a person I am, by virtue of living in a third world country, or by virtue of being a woman, I am immediately a 'victim' more than anything else; and regardless of the kind of a person a white American man is, by virtue of his living in a first world country and being a white man, he is automatically an 'oppressor' above all else.") Any essentialist notion of power or violence in my (or should I say, Arendt's) book is dangerous and potentially totalizing (case in point: NPA purges). Following from Arendt, then, I would tend to have a more flexible view of it, making the class-based critique just one among many critiques.

In a similar vein, I do get uncomfortable (and I'm no longer talking about Bourdieu here; I'm not even sure if this applies to him), when anyone carelessly appropriates Marx's theory of class as an absolutely universal, universalizable idea, when I do think that it should also be nuanced by a more particularized understanding of what Marx was saying. To put it simply: the realities that Marx was writing about are no longer the same realities present today, and I do think that any good scholar should adopt theories carefully, testing their validity against contemporary realities. I get a little uncomfortable, for example, the way that some Filipino pundits talk about Marx as if Marx had been referring to the Philippine situation, when any reader of Marx will know that he was reacting primarily to the industrial society of 19th century Europe; the "Marxian" critique within primarily agricultural societies wasn't Marx, that was Mao's appropriation of Marx. Again, not that Marx isn't useful; I do think he is one of the most important philosophers of the 19th century, but at the same time he is one philosopher among many, and I think we need to be more faithful to the text and to the context of the text.

I haven't read Weber, but I imagine Weber's notion of social class might also sometimes be misappropriated in a similar way.

At the end of the day, it's the postmodern philosopher in me speaking. I suppose I really have taken Arendt to heart, and I do believe it's the essentialism of the political theories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that led to the most horrible atrocities of the last century and I'm very wary of essentialism in any social or political theory.

Anyway, these are all just primary impressions and seeing that I've only read two hours' worth of Internet commentary on the guy, I've likely completely missed Bourdieu's point, and I may later have to retract everything I've just written. So don't quote me on anything!