10. 1 bourdieu reader

7/22/2019 10. 1 Bourdieu Reader

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4Pierre Bourdieu abitus andth Logic of Practiceoseph Margolis

There are too many convergences and specific differences betweenPierre Bourdieu's account of societal life and my own to permit me toaddress his theory without providing a sense of how to approach theissues we share. In the interests of candor risking good manners,however, I must mention, briefly, certain initial convictions we seemto share but construe differentl}', and then turn t once to Bourdieu'sviews.I find the following three intuitions particularly apt in the analysisof the human condition : first, th t the observers and the observedsof the human world are one and the same; second, that neither saltogether what it seems to be in spontaneous individual reflection;third, that the relationship between our perceiving the natural worldand the world's being correctly perceived s an analogue of (human)self-knowledge. I see no reason to resist replacing these naive intuitions in good time. Still, in their crudity - perhaps more clearly thusthan otherwise - unacceptable alternatives are instantly exposed asunpromising. Certain very strong styles of analysis go contrary totheir implied instruction.

f we confine ourselves to Anglo-American and French philosophical practices, then, among the first, we should have to discount allversions of positivism and the unity of science program; and, amongthe second, all versions of Sartrean existentialism and Saussureanstructuralism. Bourdieu s clearly attracted to such economies. \01ysense is that the options that remain cleave to two principal themes:one, that human thinking and action are, inherently, manifestations ofhistory; the other, that, as historied processes, however individuatedin the lives of particular selves, they are effective because their powers


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Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus and the Logic o Practice 65are structured by, and incorporate, the enabling collective powers ofthe forms of life of which they are manifestations.The economy of beginning thus is too cr},ptic to be entirely trusted.I think Bourdieu is generally hospitable to these five themes, that is,including the two corollaries just mentioned. I am committed tothem.Bourdieu departs from them, somewhat, in a certain characteristic way. When we espy the telltale signs in what he writes, webegin to grasp the force and limitation of his investigations andexplanatory practices. Bourdieu finally adheres, I think, to a certainfoundational view of how the oppositional role of the sexes generatesuniversally - the historically variable structures of differentsocieties. I take that line of speculation to be doubtful - much thinnerthan any we should rely on and contrary in spirit to a stronghistoricism.Bourdieu says, quite characteristically: A vision of the world is adivision of the world, based on a fundamental principle of divisionwhich distributes all the things of the world into two complementaryclasses. o bring order is to bring division, to divide the universe intoopposing entities, those that the primitive speculation of the Pythagoreans presented in the form of 'columns of contraries' (sustoi-chiai) The cultural act par excellence is the one that traces theline that produces a separated delimited space.,,2 o oversimplify forthe moment, I suggest that Bourdieu escapes both structuralism I...evi-Strauss's, since his own empirical work has been in the ethnology oranthropology of Algeria and southeastern France) and existentialism(Sartre's, given his own personal history) - by way of insisting onthree essential themes: 0) that human agents are not mere subjects(automatically following rules or autonomously exercising existentialfreedom); b) that actions are not to be understood in terms ofobedience to a rule but rather in terms of exploiting real possibilities and realistic strategies;3 and a third theme c) that needs still tobe defined.Already in Outline o a Theor, o Practice, Bourdieu bringstogether his parallel objections to Levi-Strauss and Sartre. AgainstLevi-Strauss, he says:In order to escape the realism o the structure, which hypostatizes systems ofobjective relations by converting them into totalities already constitutedoutside of individual history and group history, it is necessary to pass fromthe opus operatum to the modus operandi, from statistical regularity oralgebraic structure to the principle of the production of this observed order,4and, against Sartre, just two pages on, he adds:


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66 oseph Margolisf the world of action is nothing other than his [Sartre's] universe of interchangeable possibles, entirely dependent on the decrees of the consciousness\ hich creates it and hence totally devoid of objectiuity if it is moving becausethe subject chooses to be moved, revolting because he chooses to be revolted,then emotions, passions, and actions are merely games of bad faith, sadfarces in which one is both bad actor and good audience.s

These remarks fix the last theme wanted, namely, c) that an objectivehuman science must address the real practices of the members of asociety - in which there cannot be a disjunction between the powersof individual agents and the empowering processes of the social worldin which they live and act, and which do not take the form ofinstantiating constitutive rules.I take a) c) to be as clear nd straightforward a set of cluesabout Bourdieu's sociology-cum-philosophy as any that may be given,and I support them. They explicate Bourdieu's sense of the falseobjectivity of the hidden structures the structuralists insisted on,as well as the false reality of a Sartrean consciousness detachedfrom the world it practices on. They place Bourdieu correctly, if I mayspeak thus. Bur wh t their explication shows is that, althoughBourdieu finally rejects the fictions of structuralism, he docs notadopt the same stance against binarism (which, of course, structuralism insists on).The truth is, Bourdieu allows himself (I believe) to be tricked by anequivocation symptomatic of his entire oeuvre. For, although it is truethat predication is oppositional it is (and should be) an empiricalmatter as to whether the ordered predicates that best serve explana-tion in the human sciences are binary. I hardly think they are, ndBourdieu's own studies, for example regarding the marriage practicesamong the Berbers, tend to show that the binary rules of kinshipplainly give way to the diverse strategies of marriage. Still, Bourdieu appears (to me to insist on binarism. It is theexplicit inflexibility of the structuralist's use, not the supposed validity, of a foundational binarism that Bourdieu opposes. He does notreally oppose the latter. Let me offer this as a provisional finding. f itrequires adjustment, I shall certainly allow whatever qualificationswill be needed. But there cannot be any serious doubt aboutBourdieu's inclination to favor binarism in a way that generatesstructuralist societies. This is surely wh t he means in remarkingthat non-literate societies seem to have a particular bent for thestructural games which fascinate the anthropologist - he hasthe Kabyle and related peoples in mind. 7 But he is also tempted -the term may he too weak - to apply hinarism to modern societies,where there is an overlay of variable and labile structures th t


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Pierre Bourdleu: abitus and the Logic o Practice 67obscure the would-be underlying binarism and misleadingly put itsproper foundational function in considerable doubt. Thus he says:Psychoanalysis, a disenchanting product of the disenchantment ofthe world, which tends to constitute as such a mythically overdetermined area of signification, too easily obscures the fact that one's ownbody and other people's bodies are always perceived through categories of perception which it would be naive to treat as sexual, evenif . . . these categories always relate back, sometimes very concretely,to the 0J'position between the biological defined properties of the twosexes. I think this is meant to be a binarism that constrains thecontingencies of cultural history.Let me leave it at that for the moment. tv y reason for pressing thepoint is that the habitus is never really segregated (in Bourdieu's mind)from this universal generative structuralism, and that the linkagehelps to explain Bourdieu's sense of the microprocesses of socialfunctioning. I on the other hand, claim that the binarism cannot beconvincingly sustained in its universal (or modal) form; that it applies,empirically, only piecemeal, to strongly traditionalist and preliteratecultures; and, most important, that it violates the deeper historicity ofthe human condition itself (which Bourdieu seems very often tofavor). The issue is as ancient as Presocratic philosophy - whichBourdieu himself signals.Bourdieu risks his entire sociology on the adequacy of genderoppositions, which he intends at least metonymically. But neithergender nor sex - the one, for social and ideological reasons, theother, for biological reasons9 - can be convincingly so construed.His own studies should have made this plain. The insistence is notso much a return to an old structuralism as it is a weakness regardinghistoricity, determinism, the requirements of objectivity and realism,and, ultimately, the relationship between body and mind. My concernis this: one cannot displace structuralist rules by improvisationalstrategies (within the practice of effective action) without also replacing a binarism of descriptive and explanatory categories by an openended diversity of evolving social strategies. To endorse the one andresist the other is profoundly inconsistent. The Fieldwork in Philosophy' interview seems to be congruent with these notions, but otherstrands of Bourdieu's thought are more difficulr t reconcile withwhat h says (in the interview) and (frankly) with what I wouldfavor for quite different reasons. I'm certain that part of the convergences between our views is due to our having been equally impressedwith Wittgcnstein's notion of the ebensform and Marx's Theses onFeuerbach. The difference between us lies with the treatment ofhistory and the flux.


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8 Joseph a r g ~

IIBourdieu's binarism merely alerts us to deeper difficulties - those inparticular that have to do with the meaning of the habitus and,ultimately, with the treatment of the relationship between mindand body. There is a certain slacknes.'i in Bourdieu's analysis of thehabitus though it is very good as a general schema. Where it goeswrong, or begins to lose its surefootedness, may be guessed from hisown explicative images. (If I am mistaken in this, I should be happy torecant.)Let me cite two carefully phrased passages about the habitus thatfind at once marvelously suggestive and distinctly worrisome. In one,Bourdieu says:Prat:tical belief is not a " .1ate of mind, still less a kind of arbitrary adherent:eto a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines ( heliefs"J, hut rather a state of thebody. Doxa is the relationship of immediate adherence that is established inpractice between a habitus and the field to \vhich it is attuned, the pre-verbaltaking-for-granted of the world that flows from practical sense.The second remark, only a few lines away, goes on to say:Practical sense, social necessity turned into nature, convened into motorschemes and body automatisms, is what causes practices, in and throughwhat makes them obscure to the eyes of their producers, to be sensible that isinformed by a common sense. It is because agents never know completelywhat they are doing that what they do has more sense than they know.Every social order systematically takes advantage of the disposition of thebody and language to function as depositories of deferred thoughts that canhe triggered off at a distance in space and time hy the simple effect ofreplacing the body in an overall posture which recalls the associated thoughtsand feelings, in one of the inductive states of the \XxIy which, as actors know,give rise to states of mind10My diagnosis runs as follows. What Bourdieu says conveys a sense ofthe spontaneous activity of speech and behavior in ordinary humanlife. This is perhaps what motor schemes and body automatismsmean. But the image cannot be right if we are supposed to understandthe particular utterances and acts that instantiate the habitus by acommon sense (as Bourdieu puts it). Either it does not address theright issue or it is the wrong image.These are provocative charges: I must show them to be fair complaints. The passages cited remind us, of course, of the remarkablefluency of the improvisational play of ordinary human life. Bourdieuis fond of reminding us of that: it's essential to the theme of the


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Pierre Bourdieu Habitus and the LogIC of Practice 69habitus. Partly, I believe, it confirms the intrinsic failure of LeviStrauss's and 'Sartre's alternative visions of a human science; and,pardy, it confirms the need to insist that a valid theory must centeron [he features of the habitus itself. So much is reasonahle and wellworth emphasizing. But if we ask what the habitus is, what the tellingfeatures of its functioning structures are, what we get from Bourdieujis a kind of holist characterization that never comes to terms with itsloperative suhstructures. For, consider that the spontaneous play of;ordinary life is ot like an actor's performance: the actor's skilled'"inductions" (in Bourdieu's image) are triggered by a finished andfantiliar script; whereas (to continue the image) the ordinary human ;agent (in "acting his part") creates a fresh script nearl}' always and Jcontinually.

The nagging impression I have is that the image of the actor s theone Bourdieu wants. It's the key to his brand of structuralism. Recall,for instance, that, in his critique of Levi-Strauss's absurd account ofthe exchange of gifts, Bourdieu astutely remarks: "the [structuralist]model which shows the interdependence of gift and counter-giftdestroys the practical logic of exchange, which can only function ifthe ohjective model (every gift requ,ires a counter-gift) is not experienced as such. And this misconstrual of the model is possible [he says]because the temporal structure of exchange (the counter-gift is notonly different, but deferred masks or contradicts the objective structure of exchange."llWhat Bourdieu is very good at providing are non-structuralist(non-algorithmic) analyses of structuralist puzzle-cases. To use hisown idiom: he supplies a modus opermtdi for an opus operatum;whereas what he needs (pursuing his example) is an open process inwhich the gift that will be given is not yet, in the very process, telicallyobliged - "doomed" - to be a gift I fear that when he treats thehabitus globally, he treats it in a genuinely openended way hutdoes not then identify its microstructure; and when he gives us adue about its substructure, he reverts to the structuralist orientationbut not to its failed theory. (He appeals to "strategies" but not to"rules," to binarism but not to formalism.) That is what I gatherfrom his having remarked that the counter-gift is "deferred." Ofcourse it is, but that's why it cannot capture the work of the habitus- if, that is the habitus is meant to be the ubiquitous feature ofordinary life. t may be that, here and there, there arc highl" ritualizedforms of life - life around the Kahyle house, for instance11 - that are \best construed as a continually re-enacted script, but that cannotpos.'iihlr he the exemplar of post-traditional modern society.u Or,so claim. .


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70 oseph Margolisf you grant the force of saying this, you should begin to worryabout Bourdieu's treatment of body and mind. I agree that it is thebodily aspect of an act that makes it sensible, robust enough to beperceived at all. But I cannot agree with Bourdieu's pointed comment

that practical belief is not a 'state of mind' . . . but rather a state of thebody. Doubtless, he says this in part to distance himself rhetoricallyfrom Levi-Strauss and Sartre. But the fact is the habitus is meant toovercome the disjunction benveen mind and body - within thedynamics of a puhlic culture. That now generates a puzzle we havenot yet acknowledged. How we may ask, do hody automatismswork? Either Bourdieu fails to say, or, if he does explain, his cluecannot serve.It's true he adds the followingAlthusser: against Levi-Strauss and

I wanted . . . to reintroduce agents that Levi-Strauss and the structuralists,among others, Althusser, tended to abolish, making them into simple epiphenomena of structure 1 am talking about dispositions acquired throughexperience, thus variable from place to place and time to time. [Bourdieumeans that he is attracted to Chomsky'S universalism but is not talking aboutinnate dispositions.) This feel for the game, as we call it, is what enables aninfinite number of moves to be made, adapted to the infinite number ofpossible situations which no rule, however complex, can foresee. And,I replaced the rules of kinship [in the example given) with matrimonialstrategies. 14But, if what I've said is reasonably correct, then the feel for thegame can t capture the (full range of the) habitus. Bourdieu neverquestions the notion of a move ; he questions only the adequacy ofstructuralistic rules for explaining the infinite variety of moves or(as with the counter-gift) why we should hold to rules and not tostrategies. I agree that strategies are better than rules, but theywon't do either.

At the risk of insisting too pointedly then, let me show you why. Iwant to say that Bourdieu is entirely right in his global use of habitusor hexis, and entirely wrong in his detailed reading of his own model.Adopting a phrase of Proust's, he says, one might say that armsand legs are full of numb imperatives. One could endlessly enumeratethe values given body, m de body, by the hidden persuasion of animplicit pedagogy which can make a whole cosmology, throughinjunctions as insignificant as 'sit up straight' or 'don't hold yourknife in your left hand', This is exactly right and beautifully put.But it goes wrong at once: The logic of scheme transfer (Bourdieugoes on] which makes each technique of the body a kind of pars


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Pierre Bourdieu abitus and the Logic of Practice 71t ta/is predisposed to function in accordance with the fallacy of parspr toto and hence to recall the whole system to which it belongs,gives a general scope to the apparently most circumscribed and cir-cumstantial observances. The cunning of pedagogic reason lies pre-cisely in the fact that it manages to extort what is essential whileseeming to demand the insignificant Bodily hexis is politicalmythology realized, em-bodied turned into a permanent disposition,a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feelingand thinking. l SThere are two weaknesses lurking here, neither entirely explicit,sometimes even opposed: one, the presumption that there is a totalitya system) of some kind (open or closed) that each act or dispositionto act recalls, subtends, perhaps in some way signifies; theother, the presumption that that alone accounts for the fluency ofour acts and dispositions and, therefore, the privilege assigned thebody.

I say that there is no evidence at all that ordinary life is a system ofany kind. It is true that Wittgenstein speaks of a form of life as asystem, but Wittgenstein means to emphasize the improvisationalcontinuity of an openended practice in v.,hich neither rules norstrategies could yield sufficient c1osure. 6 (Bourdieu is drawn toWittgenstein.) Perhaps the Zuni once approximated a closed societydevoted to the magical repetition of their particular form of life (asdescribed by Ruth Benedict);17 but, as I say, it is a model that cannotpossibly be convincing in the modern world.

I think it is just Bourdieu's adherence to this subtler structuralismthat explains hath his attraction to the importance of the supposedbinarism of gender and to the faulty metaphor of mind and body.The opposition hetween male and female is realized in posture, Ihesays,] in the gestures and movements of the body, in the form of theopposition between the straight and the bent, between firmness,uprightness and directness and restraint, reserve and flexibil-ity these two relations to the body are charged with two relationsto other people, time and the world, and through these, to twosystems of value. I I realize that Bourdieu has the Kabyle in mind;but does he mean that binarism works in their world but not in ours;or does he mean that ours, like theirs, is a system for which, thoughstructuralist rules will not do, more flexible strategies will? Thelatter reading seems more likely.

f the Belief and the Body paper is a reliable clue, then Bourdieucannot be but read as a subtler advocate of structuralism andbinarism. Keep that in mind as a possibility: the binary division oflabor between the sexes in the Kabyle world is not in any sense a


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72 oseph Margolisconfirmation of binarism in that or any other world; and the validityof binarism in the Kabyle world poses a puzzle that cannot be dis-joined from the fate of any would-be objective account of the life ofany society.

Let me come at this from an altogether different direction. Considertwo very large philosophical questions that any model of Bourdieu'ssort must ultimately address: (a) that of the ontic relation bet\veenculture and physical nature and the distinctive properties of thecultural world; (b) that of the epistemic problem of predication, ofreal generality, of the spontaneous extension of general predicatesto instances that are not first learned as the exemplars of their acceptable usc. For brevity's sake, let me say that my own resolution of a)accords with the items of my original tally (which Bourdieu wouldprobably not oppose); and, regarding (b), the resolution I offer rejectsall versions of the theory of universals as utterly hopeless andbeside the point) and locates the solution in the consensual (but notcriterial) practices of historicized Lebensformen. 9 I don t believeBourdieu would agree to this.My complaint amounts to this: regarding (a), the rhetorical disjunction between mind and body, which bears on the generativebinarism of the sexes, cannot, on y view, possibly accommodatethe distinction between the natural and the cultural or Bourdieu's owninsistence on overcoming dualism ;20 and, regarding (b), there;s nostructured or algorithmic way to ensure a resolution, among the aptmembers of any historicized society, of the problem of objectivepredication that would entrench (cognitively or practically ) thegenerative binarism of the sexes or any substitute, whether hiologicalor cultural. The resolution of a) admits the importance of the physical embodiment of cultural life and behavior, but not anything like thesemiotics of the ody - except metonymically, assigned in a subalternway from the vantage of the emergent em-bodied) culture. And theresolution of (b) requires, everywhere, the reidentification of predicative similarities - a fortiori, structural similarities - within the consensual practices of a particular Lebensform (within some society'Sform of life, or, more accurately, within some society'S form of life asobserved by us observing our doing just that).There is no way of overcoming the dualism of mind and body or ofnature and culture except by construing the mental and thecultural predicatively; and, there is no way of doing that except


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Pierre Bourdieu Habitus nd the Logic of Practice 73by construing the entities to v.'hich the relevant predicables areascribed as suitably emergent with respect to physical nature andindissolubly embodied as the complex entities they are,21 Thisaffords the only viable strategy for resolving (a), short of embracingsome form of physicalism. Bourdieu has no interest in supportingphysicalism. But if one proceeds thus, it is at least problematic -impossible, I should say, for reasons that will soon appear - that thecategorization or description of any culture should privilege the movements or dispositions of the bod) . The body is implicated, of course, inevery socially significant act or disposition but not separably from thesignificative. Otherwise, only a version of hat has come to be calledsupervenience (or nonreductive physicalism ) could possibly vindicate Bourdieu's metaphor. As I see matters, this is precisely what isrisked in structuralism and what is resolved (if indeed it is resolved),however inchoately, in Hegelian, Marxist, Foucauldian, and feministaccounts. Once you admit culture and history and the enculturedcompetence of human selves, you cannot denv that, ultimately, mate-riality and signification are inseparable.21

I insist that Bourdieu's intention must have been metaphoric (whenhe declared that practical belief is not a 'state of mind' but rathera state of the body ): if he had meant it literally, his entire theorywould have collapsed at once, on the assumption (which he evidentlyshares) that the cultural cannot be reduced to the physical or treatedas supervenient,,;23 and if he meant it figuratively, then the formulacould not but be profoundly incomplete. There is no conceptualreason why supervenience should not be false, and there is no empirical reason to believe it is true. 24

f you grant the argument, a graver difficulty begins to surface.There is first of al1 something of a suggestion of extensional equivalence between the cultural and the physical, in Bourdieu, in addition tothe standard structuralist equivalences he wishes to construe in termsof strategies rather than rules. For he explicitly says:When the properties and movements of the body are socially qualified, themost fundamental social choices are naturalized and the body, within itsproperties and its movements, is constituted as an analogical operator establishing all kinds of practical equivalences among the different divisions of thesocial world - divisions between the sexes, between the age groups andbetween the social classes - or, more precisely, among the meanings andvalues associated with the individuals occupying ptactically equivalent positions in the spaces defined by these divisions.1sThere is certainly no way to support this thesis either in a modal orcontingently universal sense. There m y be societies that exhibit such


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74 oseph a r g o l i ~extraordinary correspondences, but they could not behave in anysignificantly historicized way.What Bourdieu adds leads t the quite remarkable thesis that heputs this way: The relation lof social distinctions] t the body is afundamental dimension of the habitus that is inseparable from arelation to language and to time . . . Social psychology is mistakenwhen it locates the dialectic of incorporation at the level of repres-entation with body image What is 'learned by body' is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, butsomething that one is:,26 Perhaps; but this touches only on thefluency of naturally acquired habits of life. It has nothing to do withbinarism or correspondence or supervenience or structuralist systemsor practical belief. It makes a mystery of the enculturing process,and it enlists us ingeniously into supporting Bourdieu's own structuralism. What s the analogical operator after all? In the 'Fieldworkin Philosophy' paper, Bourdieu warns us to pay attention to thehistoricization of lour] concepts, warning against premature fixitiesthat hinder and imprison thought. 27 Why should we not turn thewarning against Bourdieu's own binarism?Furthermore, what is 'learned by body' is confirmed, shaped andendorsed, legitimated, by the collective. consensual practices of anencompassing Lebensform: it cannot be shown t be valid simply asthe spontaneous responsiveness of an individual body. The knowledge assigned the body lies in its spontaneity and fluency all right;but its fluency s what s consensually so judged. and what is so judgeds the cultural alJtness of the relevant properties of what we do andmake and judge relative to an evolving Lebensform. The fluencybelongs to the individual agent or body ; but its cognitive aptnessis a function of the wayan agent shares the practices of an encompassing society. There are no predicative rules or strategies for individual agents to internalize, or what mles or strategies there are areparasitic on these deeper enabling powers. There s nothing funda

mental in being culturally apt that could be governed by an internalanalogical operator. The operation in question is inseparablefrom the ongoing consensual coherence of the aggregated behaviorof the members of a viable society. Bourdieu's formula does not definethe logic of predication - it therefore fails to define the logic ofpractice. Predication is not an analytical operator internal to anyor all of us. There is no such thing. take this to be the principaldistinction between Bourdieu and Wittgenstein on the matter ofLebensform and habitus.This brings me to problem b) and its connection with (a). Twothemes are needed. For one thing, the cultural is a blunderbuss


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7notion. I call the mark of the cultural the Intentional and collectunder it an endlessly varied assortment of predicables concerned withmeaning, significance, signification, srmbolic import, semioticimport, language, representationalit}', expressivity, referentialit}',truth, metaphor, rhetoric, style, genre, purpose, historicity, institutions, practices, habits, traditions, rules, and the like. 8 The Intentional incorporates the intentional (of Brentano and Husserl) andthe intensional (the non-extensional), but it goes beyond thosenotions in being ascribed primarily to instantiations of the collectivelife o a society (as the other notions are not) - to whatever rightlyfalls within a Lebensform. The slightest reflection on the Intentional pretty clearly shows that the human sciences must treat it assui generis.

Now then, the second theme affects the methodological fortunes ofthe Intentional as well as the natural or physical. For, if as I havesuggested, the valid predication of general attributes is a function ofthe consensual practices of a historical society, i he Intentional is suige1ler;s i the consensual use of general terms affects discourse aboutthe phrsical world as well as the cultural, then there can be verr littlereason to suppose that there is an analogical operator (interior tothe body ) that functions to ensure binarism or, more specifically, thegenerative function of the opposed sexes and a sense of the infinitelymany moves of the social game in accord with some such gen-erative binarismBourdieu has very little to say about classificatory practices, exceptto fall back to some version of the logic of practice of the sortalready mentioned. 9 More than that, there is no principled distinction between the folk competence of basic predicative discourse andits professionalization; there is only a difference between the varioussocieties whose Lebensformen are invoked. U

VI have been contesting Bourdieu's theory of practice, primarilybecause I agree with his general sense of the dynamics of social life.I draw back at two points. For one thing, I detect in his own discoursethe vestiges of canonical structuralism and an existential phenomenology, despite his effective escape. At any rate, I cannot be sure howstrongly entrenched his hinarism is, or ultimately how different hisstrategies are from structuralist rules. For a second, I cannot findin Bourdieu a sustained and frontal account of the cognitive aspect ofthe logic of practice. My sense is that he abandons the first, though,


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76 oseph argolisif he does, 1 cannot see that he could then hold on for long to theuniversalism that seemed to surface in his admitted attraction toChomsky's views (with the qualification already acknowledged). Onthe other hand, I find that Bourdieu admits the point in a forthrightway - correctly, if I may intrude my assessment. For, in answering theinterviewer's question about a comparison with Habermas's insistence on universal norms, Bourdieu explicitly says: I have a tendency to ask the problem of reason or of norms in a reasonablyhistoricist way. Instead of wondering about the existence of 'universalinterests', I will ask: who has an interest in the universal? .. I thinkhistoricism must be pushed to its limit, by a sort of radical doubt, tosee what can really be saved. ,,31 Clearly, a strict binarism would beincompatible with this concession. My own formulation is very similar to Bourdieu's: historicism and universalism, 1 claim, are incompatihle.32 1 have put the thesis to Hahermas in person, but he hasnever ans\',rered.) Furthermore, Bourdieu perceives that the argumentleads to the dictum: To say that there are social conditions for theproduction of truth is to say that there is a politics of truth. 33

t is the relative neglect of an analysis of the conditions of knowledge operative in practice that concerns me most. I cannot see howto ensure the theoretical contribution o(the habitus without a reasonably detailed account of the cognizing process of social life. That iswhat I meant by the problem of predication and the irrelevance of thebody's fluent and spontaneous aptitude.l have myself witnessed theskill of the Greek peasant equivalent of the Yugoslav gus ar in combining the formulaic and the improvisational in songs about immediate events.34 But that is merely a site of the paradigmatic exercise ofencultured aptitudes: it cannot replace their analysis.I am inclined to believe that it is because he conflates the two issues

that BOllrdieu is dra n to binarism in the explication of practicaltaxonomies.,,35 This is the only way to read the careful phrasing:The habitus continuously generates practical metaphors, that is tosay, transfer (of which the transfer of motor habits is only one example) or, more precisely, systematic transpositions required by theparticular conditions in which the habitus is 'put into practice' ,,36First of all, Bourdieu assigns to the habitus an active role, which canonly be a metaphor for the processes of the knowledge that belongs topractice (not otherwise explained). Secondly, it leans in the direction of the old structuralism. Thirdly, it is ultimately incompatihlewith Bourdieu's insistence that the habitus is variably constituted andreconstituted by the aggregated behavior of the apt members of asociety. 'The habitus, he says, is not only a structuring structure,which organizes practices and the perception of practices, but also a


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Pierre Bourdleu abitus an? the Logic of PractICe --. ;..7.;. .7structured structure: the principle of division into logical classeswhich organizes the perception of the social world is itself the productof internalization of the division into social classcs.,,37Clearly, the historicizing theme and the reflexive and reciprocalprocess of structuring and being structured cannot support anythinglike Levi-Strauss's structuralism; but there s no evidence that Bour-dieu s adjustment does ot support binarism. On the contrary, there isever} evidence that Bourdieu is himself a binarist:inevitably inscribed within the dispositions of the habitus [Bourdieu says,) isthe whole structure of the system of conditions, as it presents itself in theexperience of a life-condition occupying a particular position within thatstructure. The most fundamental oppositions in the structure (highllow, richpoor etc.) tend to establish themselves as the fundamental structuring principles of practices and the perception of practices.38Binarism constitutes Bourdieu's most pointed approach to the logic ofpredication and (therefore) to the "logic of practice." But binarismdoe. not explain the first logic, it presupposes it; and binary distinctions neither confirm hinarism nor are more perspicuous, predicatively, than other categorical schemes.Bourdieu explicitly says (as he must, on his own thesis): "theconditions associated with a particular class of conditions of existenceproduce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices andrepresentations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomeswithout presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.,,39 Thisconfirms the sense in which Bourdieu regularly favors the theme offluency over the cognizing "logic" of the habitus - and the possibilitythat he believes binarism relieves him of the need to go further.

The critical point is that the extensi01t of general predicates,whether Intentional or physical, whether in accord with binarism ornot, can (so I am arguing) onl}' be explained in terms of the collective,consensual, and historicized drift of the lebensformlich practices ofparticular societies. There may be some biologically favored "disposition toward certain classifications. Short of innatism, however, thereis no way to understand the matter in terms of the internalized aptitudeof individual "bodies" (or agents). The aptitude is itself a function ofthe consensual validation of the diverse acts and dispositions of theaggregated members of a society. The habitus, I should say, cannot bethe cognizing aptitude of practice: there is no such aptitude; it is ratherthe running abstraction of the collective thread of the convergingf1uencies (and their "correction") of aggregated individual life. It has


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_ 8 =J =.o:::...se::.J:p:.:.c.h_t argolisno criterial function of any sort. Alternatively put the analysis of thehabitus must accord with the analysis of the knowledge of realgenerals. No one like Bourdieu, who favors tebensformen and historicity, could come to any other finding. So the resolution of thispuzzle - remarked in an earlier tally - is one that can accommodatethe theme of strategies replacing rules, but it need not restrict itselfin this way any more than in the structuralist's way.Perhaps the point may be put thus: practice is a logical space, not acognizing faculty of any sort. Similarly, habitus is not the work of anyagency, but rather the abstracted chronicle of the fluent processes bywhich whatever work is done is done. What specifically belongs tocognition and intelligence in cultural space is not clarified by thelogic of practice : it is presupposed by it f I am right, there isnothing in Bourdieu that comes to terms \ irh the microprocesses ofcognition in the world of practice. I frankly believe Bourdieu misconstrues the matter. He thinks of practical knowledge almost facultatively, as providing an alternative to Aristotle's well-known contrast(between the theoretical and the practical) and s arising s such as aresult of the cultural embodiment that habitus signifies. I accept thenotion of cultural embodiment; I deny that that gives us a sense of thenature of the perception, judgment, or effective action that the fluencyof cultural life endlessly confirms. You may think I misread Bourdieu,but here is his own statement:This relation of practical knowledge is not that between a subject and anobject constituted as such and perceived as problem. Habitus being the socialembodied, it is 'at horne in the field it inhabits, it perceives it immediately asendowed with meaning and interest. The practical knowledge it procuresmay he descrihed hy analogy with Aristotle's phronesis or, hetter, with theorthe doxa of which Plato talks in Meno: just as the right opinion fallsright, in a sense, without knowing how or why, likewise the coincidencebetween dispositions and position, between the sense of the game and thegame, explains that the agent does , hat he or she has to do without posingit explicitly as a goal, below the level of calculation and even consciousness,beneath discourse and representation.40Again, I say this captures beautifully the sense of the fluency ofcultural life; but it has nothing to do with the analysis of the cognizingprocess that fluency is meant to qualify.The point at stake s this: the cognizing powers of theoreticalknowledge, as in (he sciences, is similarly marked by the fluency ohabitus Theorizing discourse is a form of practice. There's thereversal of Aristotle and the common discovery of Marx and Wiu-genstein. Bourdieu speaks as if there were a certain new competence


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Pierre Bourdieu Habitus and the Logic o Practice 79that we manifest in specifically cultural life; whereas the truth is, thereis nothing that is paradigmatically human (that is, manifest in thoughtand knowledge and practice and technology) that is not a form ofcultural life. Since it would not be responsive to account for thecognizing power of the sciences in terms said to function below thelevel of calculation and even consciousness, it cannot be responsiveto appeal to it in addressing the logic of practice. The reason isplain: even at the level of calculation and . . . consciousness, /luenc)1functions beneath discourse and representation - or, better, discourse and representation function fluently beneath the level atwhich whatever they single out they single out.We have no idea how, effectively, \ve are or become fluent; but ourfluency is not a distinct cognitive power. It cannot be admitted without analysis. t is only the site of an extraordinary competence. Thereis, in Bourdieu, no account of referential and predicative competence.That cannot be different in theoretical and practical life. But Bourdieu speaks as if it is. It is because of that that he is attracted tobinarism. Binarism suggests that there is a certain subterraneouscognizing competence - perhaps akin to an instinct I admit I amtempted to read Bourdieu thus) - that sees in the relative fixity of thebinarism of the sexes a competence to generate through that tacitpower (interacting with its environment) whatever further binaryarticulations may be wanted for the form of life of this or thatsociety:ll I am inclined to think that Bourdieu means what he sayshere - literally. He speaks of a competence that has directly absorbed(internalized, learned) the structural or structuring powers of one'ssociety's habitus That competence is not fixed by rules, it is true; itproceeds by strategies (which are very much in accord with Wittgenstein's notion of knowing how to go on ). But this itself may beconstrued as rejecting an inflexible model of animal instinct and as(merely) preferring the somewhat more flexible (but ultimately inflexible) models of theorists like Tinbergen and Edward Wilson. In anycase, I cannot see that Bourdieu has gone beyond this.f that is so, then Bourdieu has been gravely misled; first, becausehinarism is a purely formal, not a cognitively active, principle; second,because there are neither a priori nor empirical reasons for thinkingthat binarism is true; third, because the cognizing competence ofacting in accord with rules or by way of strategies is ultimately thesame; fourth, because the fluency of practical life would show thesame apparent autonomy, whether it proceeded by rules or by strategies; and finally, because there is no way to equate the reporting of thefluency of our cognitive powers and their analysis, or to infer convincingly that the admission of the first obviates the need for the second.


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8 Joseph MargolisThe essential clue is this. Cognitive competence of any kind isassignable only to individual agents. Habitus signifies the collectivefluency of a form of life. For conceptual reasons, therefore, habituscannot be a cognitive power. Q.E.D. Nevertheless, the cognizingpowers of humans entail internalizing the forms of life of whichhabitus is the abstract thread: the cognizing powers of aggregatedagents is collective that is it is, in every individuated token, anexercise of an ability that cannot be characterized except in collectiveterms. For instance, only individual agents speak a language, but alanguage is a collective possession. To speak is to utter, as an individual, tokens of language that manifest (in an individual) the enablingpower of the habitus of a particular form of life; it is also the effect(in collective life) of the thus-enabling power of speech to alter thecontinuing habitus by which others (including ourselves) are able to

speak aptly at a later moment. At no point will there be a collectiveagent, however. Fluency addresses the congruity between aggregatedagency and the abstracted habitus of a viahle society: it presupposeshut does not explore the cognizing process br which it works. Theprocess can only be fathomed in the way in which perception andunderstanding and reference and predication actually function. Thereason the matter is important is simply that the clues that the habitusprovides are regularly ignored hy epistemologies that take as theirparadigm our knowledge of the physical world. In a curious way, thatwas the fault of structuralism nd existentialism. Bourdieu should Isuggest) have gone on, therefore, to account for our cognizing powersin terms of the way the internalized culture functions in perceptionand reference and predication and the like. That is missing In nearlyall epistemologies. I confess I find it missing in Bourdieu.

otes1 S ~ e , for instance, Pierre Bourdieu, Fieldwork in Philosophy' (an inter

V I C ~ V , With Honneth, H. K,ocyba, and B Schwibc, ~ a n s April, 1985:O n g ~ n a l l , y Der Kampf urn dlc sybohschc Ordnung, Asthetik und Kom-

m l l l ~ ' k a t l U n XVI, 1986), In Other W urds: Essays tuwards a ReflexiveSOCIOlogy trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford, 1990). The interview hasappeared also as The Struggle for Symbolic Order,n trans. J Bleicher,Theory Culture and Society III (1968).2 Pi erre B o u ~ d i e u , I r r e ~ i s t i b l e Analogy, Tbe Logic of Practice trans.Richard ~ I c e (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p, 210. J regard thereferences t o the Prcsocratics as confirming an important part of myown analYSIS


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Pierre Bourdieu Habitus and the Logic o Practice 83 This is the sense, for instance, of 'Fieldwork in Philosophy', p. 9.4 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice(Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 72.5 Outline of a Theor 1 of Practice, p. 74.6 Bourdieu reports his findings in just this vein, in 'Fieldwork in Philo-sophy', p. 8. See also, he Logic of Practice, Introduction.7 Belief and the Body, he Logic of Practice p. 293n9.8 Ibid., pp. 77-8.9 See John Money and Anke A. Ehrdhardt, Malt \X omalt, Boy Girl;The Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Concep-tion to Maturity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).

10 Pierre Bourdieu, Belief and the Body, The Logic o Practice, pp.68-69.'''fieldwork in Philosophy', p. 23, also, Pierre Bourdieu, The Work ofTime, The Logic of Practice.12 See Pierre Bourdieu, The Kabyle House or the World Reversed, TheLogic of Practice.13 See Alvin W. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology; heOrigins, Grammm , and Future of Ideology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), chs 1-2.14 'Fieldwork in Philosophy', p. 9.15 Belief and the Body, p p. 69-70.16 See Joseph Margolis, Wittgenstein's 'Form of Life': A Cultural Template for Psychology, in Michael Chapman and Roger A. Dixon (eds),Meaning and the Groulth o Understanding; Wittgensteill s Significancefor Developmental Psychology (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1987).17 See Ruth Benedict, Patterns o Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1934), ch. 4.18 Belief and the Body, p. 70.19 My own resolution of (a) appears in Texts without Referents; Reconcil-ing Science and Narrative (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), ch. 6. Myresolution of (b) appears in The Passing of Peirce's Realism, TheTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, XXIX (1993).

20 Bourdieu himself says that the notion of habitus is related to anattempt to hreak with Kantian dualism and [for instance} to reintroducethe permanent dispositions that are constitutive of realized morality(Sittlichkeit), as opposed to the moralism of duty, 'Fieldwork inPhilosophy', p. 12. The only point I would reserve judgment on concerns the interpretation of permanent dispositions.21 A summary of the argument is given in Texts without Referents, eh. 6.

22 You may find it instructive to compare the contest regarding the priority of body or sign, in the recent feminist discussions of the distinctionbetween the male and female. Sec for instance, Judith Butler, BodiesThat Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), particularly p. 31. I havebenefited, here, from Dorothea Olkowski, Materiality and Language:Butler's Interrogation of the History of Philosophy, PhilosophySocial Criticism, XXIII (1997).


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8 Joseph Margolis23 The supervenience theory has been championed by Donald Davidson,Mental Events, The Material Mind, Essays on EtJents and Actions(Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). The supervenience theory holds that therecannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in somemental respect, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respectwithout altering in some physical respect, p 214 ( Mental Events ).

For a rigorous critique, see Simon Blackburn, Supervenience Revisited, in Ian Hacking (ed.), Exercises in Analysis: Essays by Studentsof Casimir Lewy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Seealso, Jaegwon Kim, Supervenie7 lu and Mind: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).24 Herbert Feigl had, some years ago, formulated a pertinent worry of hisregarding (what he called) the many-many problem: that is, that, forany significant action (signaling, making a chess move), t h ~ are indefinitely many physical movements that might embody that action; that,for any particular movement, indefinitely many different actions may beembodied in it; and that there is no rule or algorithm that could legitimate reliable inferences in either direction. Pertinent judgments dependon context, intention, history, form of life. Feigl never developed theaccount needed. I may add that I have heard him mention the many -many problem several times, but I have not found it in his publishedpapers.25 Belief and the Body, p 71.26 Belief and the Body, pp. 72-3.27 '''Fieldwork in Philosophy', p. 16; see also, p. 17

28 I give an account of this range in Texts without Referents, ch. 6; in TheFlux of History and the lux of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and in bzterpretation Radical Bilt Not Unruly: TheNew Puzzle of the rts and History (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1995).29 See, for instance, Bourdieu, Social Space and Symbolic Power, InOther W ords, particularly pp. 130-1; and lrrcsistable Analogies.

3 Compare Pierre Bourdieu, The Practices of Reflexive Sociology (TheParis Workshop), in Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D Wacquant, nInvitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 19921, for instance pp. 241-3; and Homo Academiws, trans.Peter Collier (Stanford: Stanford University 1984), Postscript.31 '''Fieldwork in Philosophy', p. 31.

32 See Joseph Margolis, Pragmatism without Foundations: ReconcilingRealism and Relatitlism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), ch 2.33 'Ficld, ork in Philosophy', p. 32.34 See Belief and the Body, pp. 74-5.35 See Irresistible Analogy.36 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement ofTaste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1984), p. 173.


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Pierre Bourdieu Habitus nd th Logic of Practice7 Distinction p. 170.8 Distinction p. 172.

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39 Bourdieu, Structures, Habitus Practices, The Logic ofPractice p. 53.4 Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, '< fhe Purpose of ReflexiveSociology (The Chicago Workshop), n Invitation to Reflexil1e Socio-logy p. 128.41 For a sense of the aptness of this analogy, see N. Tinbergen, The Study ofInstinct (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

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