Reading Scott Lash's summary of Bourdieu, in _sociology of postmodernism_, esp. 262-264. Lash suggests a contrast in B. between stable strategies (means of acquiring capital and status in an existing framework) and struggle, which is the context between the orthodox "priests" who defend the existing system ("bureaucratically," Lash says Bourdieu thinks, making explicit reference to Weber's typology), and the "prophets" or avant-garde, who have "charisma of creativity."

Modernization was the movement from a generalized "field of power" in which individuals traded capital with each other unmediated, in personal relationships, and the modern, where transactions are specialized into distinct fields (professionalization?) and where all such transactions are mediated. Within each field, the struggle between orthodoxy and heterodoxy means that all truth claims have to be legitimated, usually through some process of reason and discourse, and thus fields have means of assessing "validity" (authority?) and creating normativity (within the field), though this is always emergent.
The older system of a unified "field of power" focused on "friend versus foe," [and here Lash makes reference to Carl Schmidt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt. ]

Bourdieu calls for us to "classify the classifiers," with special focus on the producers of knowledge.

On (p. 263) Lash suggests a Bourdieu-based theory of modernization defined by the increasing "autonomization" of different fields (professionalization, again?), and that post-modernization is the dissolution of these fields, as specialist knowledge and vocabulary ("control of classification") become seized again by the middle classes and masses.
posted by Lloyd at 4:04 PM