|
p.5 I propose to sketch in broad brushstrokes the central postulates and purposes that give Bourdieu's undertaking its overarching unity and thrust... Bourdieu seeks to overcome the debilitating reduction of sociology to either an objectivist physics of material structures or a constructivist phenomenology of cognitive forms by means of a generic structuralism capable of subsuming both.
p.11 Bourdieu... weaves together a "structuralist" and a "constructivist" approach. First, we push aside mundane representations to construct the objective structures (spaces of positions), the distribution of socially efficient resources that define the external constraints bearing on interactions and representations. Second, we reintroduce the immediate, lived experience of agents in order to explicate the categories of perception and appreciation (dispositions) that structure their action from inside. It should be stressed that, although the two moments of analysis are equally necessary, they are not equal: epistemological priority is granted to objectivist rupture over subjectivist understanding.
p.12 the second foundational hypothesis that anchors Bourdieu's (1989a: 7) sociology:
There exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world - particularly into dominant and dominated in the various fields - and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to it.
This, of course, is a reformulation and generalization of the seminal idea propounded in 1903 by Durkheim and Mauss (1963) in their classic study, "Some Primitive Forms of Classification." In that essay, [they] argued that the cognitive systems operative in primitive societies are derivations of their social system: categories of understanding are collective representations, and the underlying mental schemata are patterned after the social structure of the group.
p.13 Cumulative exposure to certain social dispositions instills in individuals an ensemble of durable and transposable dispositions that internalize the necessities of the extant social environment, inscribing inside the organism the patterned inertia and constraints of external reality. If the structures of the objectivity of the second order (habitus) are the embodied version of the structures of the objectivity of the first order, then "the analysis of objective structures logically carries over into the analysis of subjective dispositions, thereby destroying the false antimony ordinarily established between sociology and social physiology"
p.13 Symbolic systems are not simply instruments of knowledge, they are also instruments of domination
p.14 Social structures and cognitive structures are recursively and structurally linked
p.14-15 the whole of Bourdieu's work may be interpreted as a materialist anthropology of the specific contribution that various forms of symbolic violence make to the reproduction and transformation of structures of domination.
p.16 The relational perspective that forms the core of his sociological vision is not new... Its most succinct and clearest expression was perhaps given by Karl Marx when he wrote in Die Grundrisse (1971: 77): "Society does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves." What is special about Bourdieu is the zeal and relentlessness with which he deploys such a conception, as evidenced by the fact that both of his key concepts of habitus and field designate bundles of relations. A field consists of a set of objective, historical relations between positions anchored in certain forms of power (or capital), while habitus consists of a set of historical relations "deposited" within individual bodies in the form of mental and corporeal schemata of perception, appreciation, and action.
p.17 A field is a patterned system of objective forces... a relational configuration endowed with a specific gravity which it imposes on all the objects and agents which enter in it... It is the structure of the game... A field is simultaneously a space of conflict and competition
p.18-19 Habitus is, in Bourdieu's words (1977a: 72, 95), "the strategy-generating principle enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations... a system of lasting and transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks." As the result of the internalization of external structures, habitus reacts to the solicitations of the field in a roughly coherent and systematic manner. As the collective individuated through embodiment or the biological individual "collectivized" by socialization, habitus is akin to the "intention in action" of Searle (1983: especially chapter 3) or to the "deep structure" of Chomsky, except that, instead of being an anthropological invariant, this deep structure is a historically constituted, institutionally grounded, and thus socially variable, generative matrix (see Bourdieu 1987d). It is an operator... of a practical rationality [JLJ - note to self, put in current paper]
p.18 [footnote] Habitus "expresses first the result of an organizing action... it also designates a way of being, a habitual state... and, in particular, a disposition, tendency, propensity, or inclination" (Bourdieu 1977a: 214).
p.18-19 habitus reacts to the solicitations of the field in a roughly coherent and systematic manner... habitus is akin to the "intention in action" of Searle... or the "deep structure" of Chomsky, except that... this deep structure is a historically constituted, institutionally grounded, and thus socially variable, generative matrix (see Bourdieu 1987d). It is an operator of rationality, but of a practical rationality immanent in a historical system of social relations and therefore transcendent to the individual. The strategies it "manages" are systemic, yet ad hoc because they are "triggered" by the encounter with a particular field. Habitus is creative, inventive, but within the limits of its structures, which are the embodied sedimentation of the social structures which produced it.
Thus both concepts of habitus and field are relational in the additional sense that they function fully only in relation to one another. A field is... a space of play which exists as such only to the extent that players enter into it who believe in and actively pursue the prizes it offers. An adequate theory of field, therefore, requires a theory of social agents:
There is action, and history, and conservation or transformation of structures only because there are agents, but agents who are acting and efficacious only because they are not reduced to what is ordinarily put under the notion of individual and who, as socialized organisms, are endowed with an ensemble of dispositions which imply both the propensity and the ability to get into and to play the game. (Bourdieu 1989a: 59)
Conversely, the theory of habitus is incomplete without a notion of structure that makes room for the organized improvisation of agents.
p.20-21 "Practical sense"... constitutes the world as meaningful by spontaneously anticipating its immanent tendencies in the manner of the ball player endowed with great "field vision" who, caught in the heat of action, instantaneously intuits the moves of his opponents and teammates, acts and reacts in an "inspired" manner without the benefit of hindsight and calculative reason.
p.21 [Merleau-Ponty] For the player in action the soccer field... is pervaded with lines of force... and is articulated into sectors (for example, the "openings" between the adversaries) which call for a certain mode of action and which initiate and guide the action as if the player were unaware of it. The field... the player becomes one with it... consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu [JLJ - a person's social environment] and action. Each maneuver undertaken by the player establishes new lines of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field.
p.22-23 "habitus is in cahoots with the fuzzy and the vague. As a generative spontaneity which asserts itself in the improvised confrontation with endlessly renewed situations, it follows a practical logic, that of the fuzzy, of more-or-less, which defines the ordinary relation to the world." Consequently, we should refrain from searching the productions of habitus for more logic than they actually contain: "the logic of practice is logical up to the point where to be logical would cease being practical" (Bourdieu 1987a: 96). The peculiar difficulty of sociology, then, is to produce a precise science of an imprecise, fuzzy, wooly reality. For this it is better that its concepts be polymorphic, supple, and adaptable, rather than defined, calibrated, and used rigidly.
p.23 As Don Levine (1985: 17) has argued, "the toleration of ambiguity can be productive if it is taken not as a warrant for sloppy thinking but as an invitation to deal responsibly with issues of great complexity."
p.26 he [Bourdieu] wants to convey the idea that people are motivated, driven by, torn from a state of in-difference and moved by the stimuli sent by certain fields - and not others... People are "pre-occupied" by certain future outcomes inscribed in the present they encounter only to the extent that their habitus sensitizes and mobilizes them to perceive and pursue them.
p.52 Bourdieu does not hold that the social world obeys laws that are immutable... For him, social laws are temporally and spatially bound regularities that hold as long as the institutional conditions that underpin them are allowed to endure.
p.76 On the notion of a field of power... A liminary definition is the following: "The field of power is a field of forces defined by the structure of the existing balance of forces between forms of power, or between different species of capital. It is also simultaneously a field of struggles for power among the holders of different forms of power. It is a space of play and competition in which the social agents and institutions which possess the determinate quantity of specific capital (economic and cultural capital in particular) sufficient to occupy the dominant positions within their respective fields... confront one another in strategies aimed at preserving or transforming this balance of forces... This struggle for the imposition of the dominant principle of domination leads, at every moment to a balance in the sharing of power, that is, to what I call a division of the work of domination. It is also a struggle... for the legitimate mode of reproduction of the foundations of domination. This can take the form of real, physical struggles.. or of symbolic confrontations... The field of power is organized as a chiasmatic structure: the distribution according to the dominant principle of hierarchization (economic capital) is inversely symmetrical to the distribution according to the dominated principle hierarchization (cultural capital)" (unpublished lecture, "The Field of Power," University of Wisconsin at Madison, April 1989).
p.96 Such notions as habitus, field, and capital can be defined, but only within the theoretical system they constitute, not in isolation.
p.96 To think in terms of a field is to think relationally.
p.97 the real is the relational: what exist in the social world are relations - not interactions between agents or intersubjective ties between individuals, but objective relations which exist "independently of individual consciousness and will," as Marx said.
In analytic terms, a field may be defined as a network, or configuration, of objective relations between positions.
p.99 At each moment, it is the state of the relations of force between players that defines the structure of the field... the strategies of a "player" and everything that defines his "game" are a function not only of the volume and structure of his capital at the moment under consideration and of the game chances... they guarantee him, but also of the evolution over time of the volume and structure of this capital, that is, of his social trajectory and of the dispositions (habitus) constituted in the prolonged relation to a definite distribution of objective chances.
But this is not all: players can play to increase or to conserve their capital, their number of tokens, in conformity with the tacit rules of the game and the prerequisites of the reproduction of the game and its stakes
p.101 The principle of the dynamics of a field lies in the form of its structure and, in particular, in the distance, the gaps, the asymmetries between the various specific forces that confront one another. The forces that are active in the field - and thus are selected by the analyst as pertinent because they produce the most relevant differences - are those which define the specific capital. A capital does not exist and function except in relation to a field. It confers a power over the field, over the materialized or embodied instruments or production or reproduction whose distribution constitutes the very structure of the field, and over the regularities and the rules which define the ordinary functioning of the field, and thereby over the profits engendered in it.
p.101 As a space of potential and active forces, the field is also a field of struggles aimed at preserving or transforming the configuration of these forces. Furthermore, the field as a structure of objective relations between positions of force undergrids and guides the strategies whereby the occupants of these positions seek... to safeguard or improve their position and to impose the principle of hierarchization most favorable to their own products. The strategies of agents depend on their position in the field, that is, in the distribution of the specific capital, and on the perception that they have of the field depending on the point of view they take on the field as a view taken from a point in the field.
p.103-104 The field is the locus of relations of force - and not only of meaning - and of struggles aimed at transforming it, and therefore of endless change. The coherence that may be observed in a given state of the field, its apparent orientation toward a common function... are born of conflict and competition, not of some kind of immanent self-development of the structure.
p.104 Every field constitutes a potentially open space of play whose boundaries are dynamic boarders which are the stake of struggles within the field itself. A field is a game devoid of inventor
p.104-105 An analysis in terms of a field involves three necessary and internally connected moments (Bourdieu 1971d). First, one must analyze the position of the field vis-a-vis the field of power... Second, one must map out the objective structure of the relations between the positions occupied by the agents or institutions who compete for the legitimate form of specific authority of which this field [is] the site. And, third, one must analyze the habitus of agents, the different systems of dispositions they have acquired by internalizing a determinate type of social and economic condition, and which find in a definite trajectory within the field under consideration a more or less favorable opportunity to become actualized.
p.120-121 habitus... I wanted initially to account for practice in its humblest forms - rituals, matrimonial choices, the mundane economic conduct of everyday life, etc. - by escaping both the objectivism of action understood as a mechanism of reaction "without an agent" and the subjectivism which portrays action as the deliberate pursuit of conscious intention, the free project of a conscience positing its own ends and maximizing its utility through rational computation.
A second major function of the notion of habitus, of which I must also say that it designates first and foremost a posture... a definite manner of constructing and understanding practice in its specific "logic"... is to break with... positivistic materialism, the theory of practice as practice posits that objects of knowledge are constructed, and not passively recorded... the principle of this construction is found in the socially constituted system of structured and structuring dispositions acquired in practice and constantly aimed at practical functions... this work... consists of an activity of practical construction, even practical reflection, that ordinary notions of thought, consciousness, knowledge prevent us from adequately thinking.
p.122 I said habitus so as not to say habit - that is, the generative (if not creative) capacity inscribed in the system of dispositions as an art, in the strongest sense of practical mastery, and in particular as an ars inveniendi.
[JLJ - ars inveniendi - art of invention. The agent is therefore modeled as a set of practical dispositions, which are cognitively poised, actively constructing objects of knowledge which occasionally "fire" (when triggered by certain practical circumstances which suggest action) and indirectly end up guiding behavior or at least suggesting action.
In quieter moments, higher level cognitive processes might now ask, "If I do that, what happens next?" and effectively conclude either "That is not likely. Perhaps I need not consider consequences along those lines" or "That might happen. Now what?". We let our dispositions then operate on these imagined circumstances, and so proceeds thought.
In urgent circumstances, we might just act as our dispositions direct us. In speed chess, we just move our attacked king to a safer square, possibly without anything more than a quick check that one particular square is less threatened than another. In a game with longer time control, we ask, "and what now?". Amazingly, our dispositions, which we acquire from practice, can guide action without thought, and probably do so more often than we realize.]
p.122 [American pragmatist John] Dewey (1958: 104) writes in Art as Experience: "Through habits formed in intercourse with the world, we also in-habit the world. It becomes a home, and the home is part of our experience." His definition of "mind" as the "active and eager background which lies in wait and engages whatever comes its way" has obvious kinship with Bourdieu's habitus.
p.126 Rationality is bounded not only because the available information is curtailed, and because the human mind is generically limited and does not have the means of fully figuring out all situations, especially in the urgency of action, but also because the human mind is socially bounded, socially structured. The individual is always, whether he likes it or not, trapped - save to the extent that he becomes aware of it - "within the limits of his brain," as Marx said, that is, within the limits of the system of categories he owes to his upbringing and training.
p.127 The relation between habitus and field operates in two ways. On one side, it is a relation of conditioning: the field structures the habitus, which is the product of the embodiment of the immanent necessity of a field... On the other side, it is a relation of knowledge or cognitive construction. Habitus contributes to constituting the field as a meaningful world, a world endowed with sense and value, in which it is worth investing one's energy... the relation of knowledge depends on the relation of conditioning that precedes it and fashions the structures of habitus... Social reality exists, so to speak, twice, in things and in minds, in fields and in habitus, outside and inside of agents. And when habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a "fish in water": it does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted.
p.128 It is because this world has produced me, because it has produced the categories of thought that I apply to it, that it appears to me as self-evident... Habitus being the social embodied, it is "at home" in the field it inhabits, it perceives it immediately as endowed with meaning and interest. The practical knowledge it produces may be described by analogy with Aristotle's phronesis or, better, with the orthe doxa of which Plato talks in Meno... the agent does what he or she "has to do" without posing it explicitly as a goal, below the level of calculation and even consciousness, beneath discourse and representation.
p.129 In reality, every time it is confronted with objective conditions identical with or similar to those of which it is the product, habitus is perfectly "adapted" to the field without any conscious search for purposive adaptation, and one could say that the effect of habitus is then redundant with the effect of field... Habitus is what you have to posit to account for the fact that, without being rational, social agents are reasonable
p.131 The immediate fit between the habitus and field is only one mode of action, if the most prevalent one... The lines of action suggested by habitus may very well be accompanied by a strategic calculation of costs and benefits... Times of crisis... constitute a class of circumstances when indeed "rational choice" may take over
p.133 all the external stimuli and conditioning experiences are, at every moment, perceived through categories already constructed by prior experiences.
p.135 Habitus reveals itself - remember that it consists of a system of dispositions, that is, of virtualities, potentialities, eventualities - only in reference to a definite situation. It is only in the relation to certain structures that habitus produces given discourses or practices... We must think of it as a sort of spring that needs a trigger and, depending upon the stimuli and structure of the field, the very same habitus will generate different, even opposite, outcomes.
p.136 determinisms operate to their full only by the help of unconsciousness, with the complicity of the unconscious.
p.137 The model of the structure of social space put forth in Distinction is a three-dimensional one: in addition to the volume and structure of capital possessed by social agents, it takes into account the evolution over time of these two properties.
p.138 Because practice is the product of a habitus that is itself the product of the em-bodiment of the immanent regularities and tendencies of the world, it contains within itself an anticipation of these tendencies and regularities, that is, a nonthetic [JLJ - non-arbitrary] reference to a future inscribed in the immediacy of the present... Practical activity... is an act of temporalization through which the agent transcends the immediate present via practical mobilization of the past and practical anticipation of the future inscribed in the present in a state of objective potentiality.
p.229-230 By field of power, I mean the relations of force that obtain between the social positions which guarantee their occupants a quantum of social force, or of capital, such that they are able to enter into the struggles over the monopoly of power, of which struggles over the definition of the legitimate form of power are a crucial dimension
p.230-231 one of the main difficulties of relational analysis is that, most of the time, social spaces can be grasped only in the form of distributions of properties among individuals or concrete institutions, since the data available are attached to individuals or institutions... to grasp the subfield of... power... I will create a new column each time I discover a property necessary to characterize... I will pick out redundancies and eliminate columns devoted to structurally or functionally equivalent traits so as to retain all those traits - and only those traits - that are capable of discriminating... and are thereby analytically relevant. This very simple instrument has the virtue of forcing you to think relationally... It is at the cost of such a work of construction, which is not done in one stroke but by trial and error, that one progressively constructs social spaces which... are what makes the whole reality of the social world. [JLJ - note that my editing of this text block has generalized but hopefully preserved the intent]
|
