PPE Notes Sociological Theory Notes
Notes on ideology, class, and methodology. Including summaries of Bourdieu, Durkheim, Weber, Zizek, Marx and Giddens....
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Pierre Bourdieu - Pascalian Meditations
Chapter Four: Bodily Knowledge
Objective definition seems particularly scandalous when applied to the scholastic world - to people who seem themselves as qualified to explain rather than be explained
to move out of this problem we need to take on Pascal’s words: ‘By space the universe comprehends and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.’
i.e. because I have a place in the material world and social structures I am able to comprehend the world
BUT we cannot comprehend this practical comprehension without exploring what distinguishes it from theoretical comprehension and what are the conditions of both
here the ‘I’ that comprehends the physical/social world isn’t the subject as in philosophy, but a habitus, a system of dispositions
it occupies a position in the physical/social world
Analysis situs
Biological individuals are situated in a physical and social space - not placeless or in numerous different spaces
the ideal of the separate individual is given to us by the familiar idea of man as a living being among others, yada yada
but this is naive spontaneous materialism
the mentalist picture is inseparable from Cartesian dualism
but the model of the isolated, distinguished body, which is reinforced by the legal definition of the individual, is also a principle of collectivization
being open to the world implies conditioning and socialization - individuation is the product of fashioning by social relations
The social space
Social agents are situated in social space in the same way as physical objects are situated in physical space
social space is made up of a distinct set of positions
the relations of social space reflect the relations of physical space - high/low, left/right etc
e.g. he who has no place - a vagrant - lacks social existence
Comprehension
The world is comprehensible because the body has the capacity to be present to what goes on outside it; is exposed to its regularities
given this, the body can anticipate the regularities in behaviours which engage a corporeal knowledge of practical comprehension
this is distinct from intentional decoding
this knowledge comes from the experience of frequently encountered situations
We need to move beyond mentalism and intellectualism, which see the practical relation to the world as a perception
we need to reclaim from idealism the active side of practical knowledge
the habitus can do this - it restores to the agent a generating, unifying, constructing, classifying power, whilst recognizing that the capacity to construct social reality is that of a socialized body, not the subject
Digression on scholastic blindness
2000 years of diffuse Platonism lead us to see the body not as an instrument of knowledge, but as a hindrance to knowledge, and to ignore the specificity of practical knowledge
The root of the contradictions/paradoxes that scholasticism claims in an analysis of practical knowledge come from a certain philosophy of mind
according to which spontaneity and creativity always presuppose a creative intention
this view is reinforced by grammar
this idea of ‘voluntary deliberation’ implies that every decision is a theoretical choice among theoretical possibilities
totally unrealistic
Habitus and incorporation
Habitus dispels two fallacies of scholasticism:
that action is the mechanical effect of the constraint of external causes
that the agent acts freely, consciously and with full understanding - action as a calculation
instead social agents are endowed with habitus, which is inscribed in their bodies by past experiences
habitus is schemes of perception, appreciation and action, which allows agent to perform act of practical knowledge, based on the recognition of conditional, conventional stimuli to which they are predisposed to react
The most effective strategies are those which spontaneously adjust themselves to the ‘necessity of the field’, without intention or calculation
the agent is never completely the subject of his practices
the presuppositions of the field make their way into the ‘seemingly most lucid intentions’ of the agent
The practical sense allows agents to act without rules of conduct
its disposition remain unnoticed until they appear in action - even they they seem so self-evident that they are...
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Notes on ideology, class, and methodology. Including summaries of Bourdieu, Durkheim, Weber, Zizek, Marx and Giddens....
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