#12619 - Bourdieu Pascalian Meditations - Sociological Theory

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 ignored

  • the habitus allows endless contexts to be adapted to, and allows the whole situation to be understood as meaningful

• Rational choice tends to slide between accounting for action mechanistically and teleologically

  • so either agents’ actions are constrained by external causes, or agents act with full knowledge of the situation

    • the position of the rational choice theorist is given by the nature of the knowledge he is willing to give agents

      • some think rational choice is descriptive, others normative

      • when it is presented as the sole motivation of action, it must be normative

      • can see parallels to the enlightened self-interest of the proletariat in Lukacs

• Because the body is exposed and endangered in the world, it is able to acquire dispositions that are themselves an openness to the structures of the social world (functionalism??????)

  • we learn bodily - the social order is inscribed in bodies through the conditionings of the material conditions of existence, and of the inert violence of the economic and social structures

  • the most serious social injunctions are addressed to the body, rather than the intellect

    • e.g. masculine and feminine are inscribed in clothing, ways of walking, talking, standing, looking, sitting

      • inscriptions done by institutions are simply the limiting case of explicit actions through which social classifications are naturalized

    • social injunctions are addressed through psychological or physical emotion and suffering

      • these are attempts to confer nature or necessity upon arbitrary arrangements

A logic in action

• The principle of practical comprehension is not a knowing consciousness, but the practical sense of a habitus inhabited by the world it inhabits, which constructs the world and gives it meaning

  • the agent engaged in practice knows the world too well - he has no objectifying distance, but takes it for granted because he is caught up in it

• Someone who has incorporated the structures of (i.e. knows intimately) a field, can find his place there without deliberation or calculation

  • ultimately when one knows perfectly how to use a tool and need not think about it, one is used by the tool (????)

• Insofar as the...