Въплътената история на настоящето: трансформация на мрежовите капитали
The embodied history of the present: transformation of network capitals

Summary/Abstract: The text has been provoked by some phenomena, visible with a non-specialist eye and typical for the everyday life of the transition. To understand how their existence is possible, we view them as indicators that the postsocialist present sends us back to its socialist past. Focusing on one fragment of the ‘socialist way of life’ – consumption – we are interested not only in the structural changes in the history of socialism as a society of networks (which we view as compensating for both the systematically reproducing economic shortage and for the shortages of symbolic legitimation) but also in the way in which the socialist everyday life reproduces itself. Thus the central theme of analysis is the uniform, repeating, normalized, in other words, the socialist das Man. The article traces the transformation of network capitals through an illustration of the rules of the ‘network rationality’ (as an ethos of network games) and the conditions of possibility of the typical network strategies in the sense of Bourdieu, i.e. not as following any explicit rule or project but as having an implicit correctness provided by the habitus. Our main thesis is that the situation of transition in Bulgaria after 1989 the change of objective structures is so fast that the inertia of the habituses formed during the socialist period makes them produce structural resemblances of these social structures that they have embodied.

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