Pierre Bourdieu--social space and symbolic space

The difference of people in society is a set of distinct and coexisting positions which can be defined in relation to one another. Social space is constructed in such a way that agents or groups are distributed in it according o their position in statistical distributions based on two principles of differentiation: economic and cultural capitals. The closer they are to one another in those two dimensions, he more they have in common; he more remote they are from one another, the less they have in common.

In his work, Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu tried to represent social space, agents are distributed in the first dimension according to the overall volume of the different capital they possess, and in the second dimension according to the structure of their capital, that is, according to the relative weight of the different kinds of capital, economic and cultural, in the total volume of their capital.

The space of social positions is translated into a space of position takings through the mediation of the space of dispositions (or habitus). The system of differential deviations which defines the different positions in two major dimensions of social corresponds to the system of differential deviations in agents' properties, that is in their practices and in the goods they possess. To each class of positions there corresponds a class of habitus or taste, produced by he social conditioning associated with corresponding condition and through the mediation of the habitus and its generative capability, which leads an affinity of style.

Habitus are generative principles of distinct and distinctive practices. Also habitus are classificatory schemes, principles of classification, principles of vision and division, different taste. They make distinctions between what is good and what is bad; right and wrong; but the distinctions are not identical.

Logic of classes: to construct class is to create as homogeneous as possible from the point of view of the two major determinants of practices and of all their attendant properties.

Theoretical class defined by researchers sometimes does not corresponding with the reality. The mode of Distinction defines distances that are predictive of encounters, affinities, sympathies, or even desires. That means that people located at the top of the space have little chance of marrying people located at the bottom, first because, they have little physical chance to meet each other, secondly, they will not really understand each other. On the other hands, proximity in social space predisposes to closer relations.

Here, Bourdieu did not constructed class as Marx did. In his opinion, social class does not exist, what exist is social space, a space of difference, in which classes exist in some sense in a state of virtuality, not as something given but as something to be done.

Therefore, in social reality, the social agents have to construct individually and collectively, in cooperation and conflict. These actions do not happen in void, but in the structure of the distribution of different kinds of capital, which also commands the representations of this space and the position taking in the struggles to conserve or transform it.

The intricate relation between objective structures and subjective construction is shown in social space, which is the first and last reality, which represents and commands that a social agent can have of it.