Today, "official" governments and economies theorize general, abstract "commons" which must be managed: the air, the sea, mental health, etc.

               The Invisible Committee

excerpt

"These knowledge domains – épistèmes – provided ‘rational’ arguments for sustaining particular power regimes, which became, in Foucault’s terms, capillary power (power that stretches into the smallest and most private aspects of life). Through such shifts, power became largely invisible, a series of commonsense and inevitable ingredients of life...and a thing we accept ‘for our own good’, rather than ‘power’ in its widespread sense, therefore, Foucault...talks about ‘surveillance’: power is exerted by means of a panoptic organisation of society, in which all aspects of our lives are visible and open for inspection...Decentralised, capillary power thus strengthens the power of the centre rather than weakens it".

BAHADUR (On Adichie)

Although she adores the American and British stories she grew up with, she had to face an unintended consequence – for a long time live with a very limited perception of literature. She was convinced that stories by their very nature were about foreign people and themes, experiences she could not identity with. Her reading of African writers saved her from what she calls “a single story of what books are”.

She goes on to recount her time as a student in America, where her roommate found it hard to believe that she could use a stove, speak very good English and listen to Mariah Carey instead of some tribal music. When a novel of hers was published, a professor remarked that it was “not authentically African” – because her characters were educated, middle-class citizens who drove cars and were not exactly starving. Foreigners like her roommate and the professor, says Adichie, unfortunately have narrow views because they have been repeatedly fed with “a single story of Africa”. Africa is presented to them as a place of beautiful landscapes and animals but incomprehensible people “fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner”. Africans are projected as inhabitants of “a continent of catastrophes” towards whom your default position must be “patronising, well-meaning pity”.

Such conceptions of Africa and Africans, explains Adichie, ultimately come from a tradition of depicting the continent in Western literature and have little to do with Africa’s conception of itself. She traces the origins of this tradition of storytelling about Africa to a London merchant called John Lok...who, having sailed to west Africa in 1561, wrote of Africans “as beasts who have no houses.” “They are also people without heads,” he continued, “having their mouth and eyes in their breasts.” Adichie also mentions the derogatory language used by the famous British writer Rudyard Kipling in his 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden, where he openly referred to non-European races as “half-devil and half-child”.


And since then, the single story of Africa has been told over and over again. What does the single story do? Adichie says: “It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.”

When in America, she never made the mistake of taking any one character from any American book as “representative” of the whole culture. She knew that Americans had diverse temperaments and interests. This was because she had read “many” stories of the country – writers like Anne Tyler, John Updike and John Steinbeck and Mary Gaitskill. America could afford to produce multiple stories of itself because of its immense political and economic clout. The production and publication of stories in the world – who tells which stories and how many and when – Adichie maintains, are, sadly, too dependent on the prevalent power structures.

Stories have immense power. Before them we are “impressionable and vulnerable”. Stories can be used either to empower and humanise or to dispossess and malign. And our present power structures allow only specific stories of specific people. Adichie here raises a terribly important point which anyone associated with publishing and social communication must dwell upon. 

TULIKA BAHADUR

Routledge press on Bourdieu

How Bourdieu Matters Today

It is hard to overestimate the influence Bourdieu has had on social theory. Bourdieu’s works have been translated in over two dozen languages and many are already considered classics in disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. Not only sociologists, but also those in anthropology, cultural studies, and education consider Bourdieu required reading for anyone trained in their disciplines. Bourdieu’s understanding of sociology as a “combat sport” that critically takes on and exposes the underlying structures of social life has also had a strong impact on the academic field, particularly in his home nation of France.
Key Concepts:

Cultural Capital

While he didn’t consider himself a Marxist sociologist, the theories of Karl Marx heavily influenced Bourdieu’s thinking. Marx’s influence is perhaps most evident in Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital. Like Marx, Bourdieu argued that capital formed the foundation of social life and dictated one’s position within the social order. For Bourdieu and Marx both, the more capital one has, the more powerful a position one occupies in social life. However, Bourdieu extended Marx’s idea of capital beyond the economic and into the more symbolic realm of culture.

Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital refers to the collection of symbolic elements such as skills, tastes, posture, clothing, mannerisms, material belongings, credentials, etc. that one acquires through being part of a particular social class. Sharing similar forms of cultural capital with others—the same taste in movies, for example, or a degree from an Ivy League School—creates a sense of collective identity and group position (“people like us”). But Bourdieu also points out that cultural capital is a major source of social inequality. Certain forms of cultural capital are valued over others, and can help or hinder one’s social mobility just as much as income or wealth.

According to Bourdieu, cultural capital comes in three forms—embodied, objectified, and institutionalized. One’s accent or dialect is an example of embodied cultural capital, while a luxury car or record collection are examples of cultural capital in its objectified state. In its institutionalized form, cultural capital refers to credentials and qualifications such as degrees or titles that symbolize cultural competence and authority.
Habitus

Habitus is one of Bourdieu’s most influential yet ambiguous concepts. It refers to the physical embodiment of cultural capital, to the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that we possess due to our life experiences. Bourdieu often used sports metaphors when talking about the habitus, often referring to it as a “feel for the game.” Just like a skilled baseball player “just knows” when to swing at a 95-miles-per-hour fastball without consciously thinking about it, each of us has an embodied type of “feel” for the social situations or “games” we regularly find ourselves in. In the right situations, our habitus allows us to successfully navigate social environments. For example, if you grew up in a rough, crime ridden neighborhood in Baltimore, you would likely have the type of street smarts needed to successfully survive or steer clear of violent confrontations, “hustle” for jobs and money in a neighborhood with extremely low employment, and avoid police surveillance or harassment. However, if you were one of the lucky few in your neighborhood to make it to college, you would probably find that this same set of skills and dispositions was not useful—and maybe even detrimental—to your success in your new social scenario.

Habitus also extends to our “taste” for cultural objects such as art, food, and clothing. In one of his major works, Distinction, Bourdieu links French citizens’ tastes in art to their social class positions, forcefully arguing that aesthetic sensibilities are shaped by the culturally ingrained habitus. Upper-class individuals, for example, have a taste for fine art because they have been exposed to and trained to appreciate it since a very early age, while working-class individuals have generally not had access to “high art” and thus haven’t cultivated the habitus appropriate to the fine art “game.” The thing about the habitus, Bourdieu often noted, was that it was so ingrained that people often mistook the feel for the game as natural instead of culturally developed. This often leads to justifying social inequality, because it is (mistakenly) believed that some people are naturally disposed to the finer things in life while others are not.
Field

Along with Bourdieu’s notion of a “feel for the game” came his theory of the game itself. Bourdieu understood the social world as being divided up into a variety of distinct arenas or “fields” of practice like art, education, religion, law, etc., each with their own unique set of rules, knowledges, and forms of capital. While fields can certainly overlap—education and religion, for example, overlap in many religiously-based colleges and universities in the United States—Bourdieu sees each field as being relatively autonomous from the others. Each field has its own set of positions and practices, as well as its struggles for position as people mobilize their capital to stake claims within a particular social domain. In art, for example, Bourdieu noticed that each generation of artists sought to overturn the established positions of those who came before them, only to be critiqued by the next generation of “avant-garde” artists who sought their own powerful positions within the field. Much like a baseball or football field, social fields are places where people struggle for position and play to win.

Routledge

Agamben

“For millennia, man remained, according to Aristotle, living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question”.

       Giorgio Agamben

Sapolsky

Consider the World War I Christmas truce of 1914. The powers that be had negotiated a brief truce so that soldiers could go out, collect bodies from no-man's-land in between the trench lines. And soon British and German soldiers were doing that, and then helping each other carry bodies, and then helping each other dig graves in the frozen ground, and then praying together, and then having Christmas together and exchanging gifts, and by the next day, they were playing soccer together and exchanging addresses so they could meet after the war. That truce kept going until the officers arrived and said, "We will shoot you unless you go back to trying to kill each other." And all it took here was hours for these men to develop a completely new category of "us," all of us in the trenches here on both sides, dying for no damn reason, and who is a "them," those faceless powers behind the lines who were using them as pawns.

And sometimes, change can occur in seconds. Probably the most horrifying event in the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre. A brigade of American soldiers went into an undefended village full of civilians and killed between 350 and 500 of them, mass-raped women and children, mutilated bodies. It was appalling. It was appalling because it occurred, because the government denied it, because the US government eventually did nothing more than a slap on the wrist, and appalling because it almost certainly was not a singular event. This man, Hugh Thompson, this is the man who stopped the My Lai Massacre. He was piloting a helicopter gunship, landed there, got out and saw American soldiers shooting babies, shooting old women, figured out what was going on, and he then took his helicopter and did something that undid his lifetime of conditioning as to who is an "us" and who is a "them." He landed his helicopter in between some surviving villagers and American soldiers and he trained his machine guns on his fellow Americans, and said, "If you don't stop the killing, I will mow you down."

Robert Sapolsky