4.05.2006
Outline of a Theory of Practice (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
Bourdieu begins by taking Levi-Strauss and positivist objectivist thought to task. The aim is to take objectivist constructs and "to make possible a science of the dialectical relations between the objective structures to which the objectivist mode of knowledge gives access and the structured dispositions within which those structures are actualized and which tend to reproduce them."(3) However, "only by constructing the objective structures...is one able to pose the question of the mechanisms through which the relationship is established between the structures and the practices or the representations which accompany them." (21) The problem with objectivism is "failing to construct practice other than negatively, objectivism is condemned to either ignore the whole question of the principle underlying the production of the regularities which it then contents itself with recording; or to reify abstractions, by the fallacy of treating the objects constructed by science, whether 'culture,' 'structures,' or 'modes of production,
as realities endowed with a social efficacy, capable of acting as agents responsible for historical actions or as a power capable of constraining practices; or to save appearances by means of concepts as ambiguous as the notions of the rule of the unconscious, which make it possible to avoid choosing between incompatible theories of practice." (27) Bourdieu then moves on to a discussion of the habitus. "In order to escape the realism of the structure, which hypostatizes systems of objective relations by converting them into totalities already constituted outside of individual history and group history, it is necessary to pass from the opus operatum to the modus operandi, from statistical regularity or algebraic structure to the principle of the production of this observed order, and to construct the theory of practice, or, more precisely, the theory of the mode of generation of practices, which is the precondition for establishing experimental science of the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality, or, more simply, of incorporation and objectification." (72) The habitus is "the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations" (78) which is produced by particular enviromental structures. He links the habitus to embodiment: "Every confrontation between agents in fact brings together, in an interaction defined by the objective structure of the relation between the groups they belong to...systems of dispositions...such as a linguistic competence and a cultural competence and, through these habitus, all the objective structures of which they are the product, structures which are active only when embodied in a competence acquired in the course of a particular history."(81)"The habitus is the product of the work of inculcation and appropriation necessary in order for those products of collective history, the objective structures...to suceed in reproducing themselves more or less completely, in the form of durable dispositions, in the organisms...lastingly subjected to the same conditionings, and hence placed in the same material conditions of existence."(85) "Springing from the encounter in an integrative organism of relatively independent causal series, such as biological or social determinisms, the habitus makes coherence and necessity out of accident and contingency."(87) "through the habitus, the structure which has produced it governs practice, not by the processes of a mechanical determinism, but through the mediation of the orientations and limits it assigns to the habitus's operations of invention. As an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted, the habitus engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions, and all the actions consistent with those conditions, and no others. This paradoxical product is difficult to conceive, even inconceivable, only so long as one remains locked in the dilemma of determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity."(95) In the next chapter, Bourdieu talks about myth, taxonomy and the body. "Understanding ritual practice is not a question of decoding the internal logic of symbolism but of restoring its practical necessity by relating it to the real conditions of its genesis, that is, to the conditions in which its functions, and the means it used to attain them, are defined."(114) "To graps through the constituted reality of myth constituting the mythopoeic act is...to reconstruct the principle generating and unifying all practices, the system of inseperable cognitive and evaluative structures which organizes the vision of the world in accordance with the objective structures of a determinate state of the social world: the principle is nothing other than the socially informed body, with its tastes and distates, its compulsions and repulsions, with, in a word, all its senses, that is to say, not only the traditional five senses...but also the sense of necessity and the sense of duty, the sence of direction and the sense of reality, the sense of balance and the sense of beauty, common sense and the sense of the sacred, tactical sense and the sense of responsibility, business sense and the sense of propriety, the sense of humor and the sense of absurdity, moral sense and the sense of practicality, and so on."(124) Finally, Bourdieu looks at doxa - "a quasi-perfect correspondence between the objective order and the subjective principles of organization...[so that] the natural and social world appears as self-evident." (164) It is in the interest of the dominant to maintain doxa as self-evident, the dominated to show it as constructed.
Keywords
Structure, Objectivist, Doxa, Habitus, Practice, Discourse.
Other Thoughts
By the way, there are a lot of anthropological case studies in here.
"If one ignore the dialectical relationship between the objective structures and the cognitive and motivating structures which they produce and which tend to reproduce them, if on forgets that these objective structures are themselves products of historical practices and are constantly reproduced and transformed by historical practices whose productive principle is itself the product of the structures which it constantly tends to reproduce, then one is condemned to reduce the relationship between the different social agencies...to the logical formula enabling any one of them to be derived from the other."(83)
"In short, the habitus, the product of history, produces individual and collective practices, and hence history, in accordance with the schemes engendered by history."(82)
"It is in the dialectical relationship between the body and a space structured according to the mythico-ritual oppositions that one finds the form par excellence of the structural apprenticeship which leads to the em-bodying of the structures of the world, that is, the appropriating by the world of a body thus enabled to appropriate the world."(89)
"The language of the body...is incomparably more ambiguous and more overdetermined than the most overdetermined uses of ordinary language...Words...limit the range of choices and render difficult or impossible...the relations which the language of the body suggests. It follows that simply by bringing to the level of discourse...a practice which owes a number of its properties to the fact that it falls short of discourse...one subjects nothing less than a change in ontological status the more serious in its theoretical consequences because it has every chance of passing unnoticed."(120)
"Logical criticism inevitably misses the target: because it can only challence the relationships consciously established between words, it cannot bring out the incoherent coherence of a discourse which, springing from underlying mythic or ideological schemes, has the capacity to survive every reductio ad absurdum." (158)
"Each agent, wittingly or unwittingly, willy nilly, is a producer and reproducer of objective meaning." (79)
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
Bourdieu begins by taking Levi-Strauss and positivist objectivist thought to task. The aim is to take objectivist constructs and "to make possible a science of the dialectical relations between the objective structures to which the objectivist mode of knowledge gives access and the structured dispositions within which those structures are actualized and which tend to reproduce them."(3) However, "only by constructing the objective structures...is one able to pose the question of the mechanisms through which the relationship is established between the structures and the practices or the representations which accompany them." (21) The problem with objectivism is "failing to construct practice other than negatively, objectivism is condemned to either ignore the whole question of the principle underlying the production of the regularities which it then contents itself with recording; or to reify abstractions, by the fallacy of treating the objects constructed by science, whether 'culture,' 'structures,' or 'modes of production,
as realities endowed with a social efficacy, capable of acting as agents responsible for historical actions or as a power capable of constraining practices; or to save appearances by means of concepts as ambiguous as the notions of the rule of the unconscious, which make it possible to avoid choosing between incompatible theories of practice." (27) Bourdieu then moves on to a discussion of the habitus. "In order to escape the realism of the structure, which hypostatizes systems of objective relations by converting them into totalities already constituted outside of individual history and group history, it is necessary to pass from the opus operatum to the modus operandi, from statistical regularity or algebraic structure to the principle of the production of this observed order, and to construct the theory of practice, or, more precisely, the theory of the mode of generation of practices, which is the precondition for establishing experimental science of the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality, or, more simply, of incorporation and objectification." (72) The habitus is "the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations" (78) which is produced by particular enviromental structures. He links the habitus to embodiment: "Every confrontation between agents in fact brings together, in an interaction defined by the objective structure of the relation between the groups they belong to...systems of dispositions...such as a linguistic competence and a cultural competence and, through these habitus, all the objective structures of which they are the product, structures which are active only when embodied in a competence acquired in the course of a particular history."(81)"The habitus is the product of the work of inculcation and appropriation necessary in order for those products of collective history, the objective structures...to suceed in reproducing themselves more or less completely, in the form of durable dispositions, in the organisms...lastingly subjected to the same conditionings, and hence placed in the same material conditions of existence."(85) "Springing from the encounter in an integrative organism of relatively independent causal series, such as biological or social determinisms, the habitus makes coherence and necessity out of accident and contingency."(87) "through the habitus, the structure which has produced it governs practice, not by the processes of a mechanical determinism, but through the mediation of the orientations and limits it assigns to the habitus's operations of invention. As an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted, the habitus engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions, and all the actions consistent with those conditions, and no others. This paradoxical product is difficult to conceive, even inconceivable, only so long as one remains locked in the dilemma of determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity."(95) In the next chapter, Bourdieu talks about myth, taxonomy and the body. "Understanding ritual practice is not a question of decoding the internal logic of symbolism but of restoring its practical necessity by relating it to the real conditions of its genesis, that is, to the conditions in which its functions, and the means it used to attain them, are defined."(114) "To graps through the constituted reality of myth constituting the mythopoeic act is...to reconstruct the principle generating and unifying all practices, the system of inseperable cognitive and evaluative structures which organizes the vision of the world in accordance with the objective structures of a determinate state of the social world: the principle is nothing other than the socially informed body, with its tastes and distates, its compulsions and repulsions, with, in a word, all its senses, that is to say, not only the traditional five senses...but also the sense of necessity and the sense of duty, the sence of direction and the sense of reality, the sense of balance and the sense of beauty, common sense and the sense of the sacred, tactical sense and the sense of responsibility, business sense and the sense of propriety, the sense of humor and the sense of absurdity, moral sense and the sense of practicality, and so on."(124) Finally, Bourdieu looks at doxa - "a quasi-perfect correspondence between the objective order and the subjective principles of organization...[so that] the natural and social world appears as self-evident." (164) It is in the interest of the dominant to maintain doxa as self-evident, the dominated to show it as constructed.
Keywords
Structure, Objectivist, Doxa, Habitus, Practice, Discourse.
Other Thoughts
By the way, there are a lot of anthropological case studies in here.
"If one ignore the dialectical relationship between the objective structures and the cognitive and motivating structures which they produce and which tend to reproduce them, if on forgets that these objective structures are themselves products of historical practices and are constantly reproduced and transformed by historical practices whose productive principle is itself the product of the structures which it constantly tends to reproduce, then one is condemned to reduce the relationship between the different social agencies...to the logical formula enabling any one of them to be derived from the other."(83)
"In short, the habitus, the product of history, produces individual and collective practices, and hence history, in accordance with the schemes engendered by history."(82)
"It is in the dialectical relationship between the body and a space structured according to the mythico-ritual oppositions that one finds the form par excellence of the structural apprenticeship which leads to the em-bodying of the structures of the world, that is, the appropriating by the world of a body thus enabled to appropriate the world."(89)
"The language of the body...is incomparably more ambiguous and more overdetermined than the most overdetermined uses of ordinary language...Words...limit the range of choices and render difficult or impossible...the relations which the language of the body suggests. It follows that simply by bringing to the level of discourse...a practice which owes a number of its properties to the fact that it falls short of discourse...one subjects nothing less than a change in ontological status the more serious in its theoretical consequences because it has every chance of passing unnoticed."(120)
"Logical criticism inevitably misses the target: because it can only challence the relationships consciously established between words, it cannot bring out the incoherent coherence of a discourse which, springing from underlying mythic or ideological schemes, has the capacity to survive every reductio ad absurdum." (158)
"Each agent, wittingly or unwittingly, willy nilly, is a producer and reproducer of objective meaning." (79)
# posted by SMRT : 7:33 PM
