人生，颇不容易。

某节课讲资本的形式，班上一英国土著很受伤地说，这书太恐怖了，原文是法文，被一个德国人翻译成英文，看不懂啊。此话一出，引得众土著拼命点头。我只好极其无语地说，哥们你知足吧，能帮忙想象一下我一中国人读被德国人从法语翻译过来的英文，那是什么感觉。（Stop it, can you imagine how it is like when a Chinese reads this English piece translated by a German from French?? )

 

什么叫学院派？

* 有话不好好说。一个10行的段落必须是一句话。

* 一句话里能有一个词看得懂那就烧高香了。而且那个词是be动词。

* 我咬牙切齿地翻字典，彷佛看到大师透过薄薄的一页纸冲我奸笑，嘿嘿小样，不玩晕你我枉叫学院派。

* 当然，结果必然是当你终于查出所有词的意思，发现还是不懂他要说啥。

 

随便贴一段大师的高论，谁有雅致可以闲来和大师厮磨一下，我老人家的脑细胞是快死光光了。

 

    The social world is accumulated history, and if it is not to be reduced to a discontinuous series of instantaneous mechanical equilibria between agents who are treated as interchangeable particles, one must reintroduce into it the notion of capital and with it, accumulation and all its effects. Capital is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its ‘incorporated,’ embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor. It is a vis insita, a force inscribed in objective or subjective structures, but it is also a lex insita, the principle underlying the immanent regularities of the social world. It is what makes the games of society – not least, the economic game – something other than simple games of chance offering at every moment the possibility of a miracle. Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one’s social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winning of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything. Capital, which, in its objectified or embodied forms, takes time to accumulate and which, as a potential capacity to produce profits and to reproduce itself in identical or expanded form, contains a tendency to persist in its being, is a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that everything is not equally possible or impossible.^[1] And the structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world, i.e. , the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practices.

 

First published: Bourdieu, P. (1986) The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York, Greenwood), 241-258.
Originally: in “Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital.” in Soziale Ungleichheiten (Soziale Welt, Sonderheft 2), edited by Reinhard Kreckel. Goettingen: Otto Schartz & Co.. 1983. pp. 183-98. The article appears here for the first time in English. Translated by Richard Nice.