Introduction
The habitus can be characterized as the forgetting of history that determines the present—that is, as a naturalization of dispositions acquired, at the level of accretion, across a subject’s socio-cultural trajectory, but understood as ‘the way things are and the way I am’. As Bourdieu’s critics point out (Jenkins 1992), there is little room for subjectivist notions of agency within this schema. Bourdieu rejects the idea of a knowing, transcendental consciousness (along the lines of the Cartesian cogito) that is separated from and independent of history, social trajectories and cultural frameworks. All activity and knowledge—and this includes both disinterested scientific or scholarly work, and the most tacit (and therefore virtually unconscious) physical movements or personal dispositions—are always informed by a relationship between the agent’s history and how this history has been incorporated on the one hand, and their context or circumstances (both in a general sense and ‘of the moment’) on the other. A subject’s practices are always the result of a coming together of the habitus and the specific cultural fields and contexts in which agents ‘find themselves’, in both senses of the expression, and it is in this conjunction that the habitus appears. The habitus ‘reveals itself only with reference to a situation…it is in a relationship to a certain situation that habitus produces something’ (Bourdieu & Chartier 2015: 57).
In the previous chapter, we referred to how Bourdieu’s work in the immediate post-Algerian period attempted to address the limitations of the two dominant approaches within the social sciences, namely objectivism (largely in the form of anthropological and Marxist versions of structuralism) and subjectivism (which was associated with existentialism and phenomenology). Bourdieu (1978: 2) makes his position clear in Outline of a Theory of Practice:
It is significant that ‘culture’ is sometimes described as a map; it is the analogy which occurs to an outsider who has to find his way around a foreign landscape and who compensates for his lack of practical mastery, the prerogative of the native, by the use of a model of all possible routes.
In order to avoid falling into this epistemological trap, he states that it is necessary ‘to abandon all theories which explicitly or implicitly treat practice as a mechanical reaction, directly determined by the antecedent conditions and entirely reducible to the mechanical functioning of pre-established assemblies, “models” or “roles”’ (1978: 73). However, he is equally insistent that
rejection of mechanistic theories in no way implies that…we should bestow on some creative free will the free and wilful power to constitute, on the instant, the meaning of the situation by projecting the ends aiming at its transformation, and that we should reduce the objective intentions…of actions…to the conscious and deliberate intentions of their authors (1978: 73).
In Outline, and in subsequent texts such as In Other Words (1990b), The Logic of Practice (1990c), An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992), Practical Reason (1998c) and Pascalian Meditations (2000), Bourdieu argues that one of the most significant deficiencies with any objectivist theory of practice is that it functions as a convenient framework whereby academic scholarship can both produce, and then organize and formalize, the results of empirical research and fieldwork. This process can produce a detailed account of socio-cultural identity as an authorized or conventionalized schema, but without being able to demonstrate, at an empirical level, that there is a continuity between that schema and cultural practices. From this perspective, objectivism effectively replicates Saussure’s privileging of the rules and systems of language over its uses and practices, while overlooking the regularities of practice that are not in any way commensurate with the notion of the rule. Subjectivism, on the other hand, can only put forward, as an explanation for these objective regularities of practice, an abstract sense of calculation that is belied by the identifiable affiliations and continuations between those objectivities and the socio-cultural contexts and spaces (class, educational, linguistic, gender and age demographics, for instance). In other words, in the domain of socio-cultural practice, there are regularities ‘which do not appear to be explicable in a satisfactory manner either by the invocation of the rules…or in terms of brute causality’ (Bouveresse 1999: 49).
The theoretical problem is that practices are carried out by subjects who are clearly involved in and oriented by the world, without being in any way mechanistically reproductive of the objective rules of the world. The notion of the habitus, however,
seems effectively indispensable for a satisfactory account of regularities of a certain type: regularities which have as part of their essence a certain amount of variability, plasticity, indetermination, and imply all sorts of adaptations, innovations and exceptions…the sort of regularity in short which characterizes the domain of the practical, of practical reason and the logic of practice. (Bouveresse 1999: 62)
A second, and related, set of theoretical tasks that Bourdieu sets himself is to identify and explain, first, how and why socio-cultural contexts are able to affiliate themselves, consistently and continuously, with subjects; second, the techniques whereby this affiliation of the world and the subject is developed and maintained; and third, the processes by which the subject’s immersion in the world generates practices that are both compliant with regard to, but also capable of negotiating, the different temporal and spatial conjunctions of the world. The great value of the habitus is that it addresses all these issues in a manner that both explains and is commensurate with regard to the objectivities of practice. The key element is the formulation of the habitus as the means by which the world and its categories of perception and evaluation are incorporated, at the level of bodily hexis, as a form of belief that never knows itself as such. The habitus is not in any sense aligned with notions of the subject as a reasonable, rational and self-knowing entity, able and disposed to calculate moves and actions in terms of competing options or probabilities of profit or interest: it is animated not by the things of logic, but by the logic of things, and the theoretical source and antecedent that underpins it is not Descartes, but Pascal. Bourdieu (2000: 12) writes in Pascalian Meditations that:
To speak of a decision to commit oneself to…any…of the fundamental investments of life—vocation, passion, devotion…is, as Pascal himself was well aware, almost as absurd as evoking a decision to believe, as he does, with few illusions, in the argument of the wager. To hope that the unbeliever can be persuaded to decide to believe because he has been shown by cogent reasons that he who gambles on the existence of God risks a finite investment to win infinite profit, one would have to believe him disposed to believe sufficiently in reason to be sensitive to the reasons of that demonstration. But as Pascal himself very well puts it, ‘we are as much automatic as intellectual; and hence it comes that the instrument by which conviction is attained is not demonstration alone. How few things are demonstrated! Proofs only convince the mind. Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs. It inclines the automaton, which persuades the mind without thinking about the matter.
There are a number of influences upon which Bourdieu draws in his formulation of the concept of the habitus, including ‘authors as different as Hegel, Husserl, Weber, Durkheim and Mauss, all of whom used it in a more or less methodical way’ (Bourdieu 1990b: 12). He emphasizes two interrelated features that he acquired from these antecedents: the habitus is explicable only with regard to the socio-cultural conditions and contexts from which it was derived, but it also functions as an extension rather than a simple reproduction of socio-cultural frameworks and contexts. He states (1990b: 12–13), ‘I wanted to insist on the generative capacity of dispositions, it being understood that these are acquired, socially constituted dispositions.’ The habitus provides subjects with an epistemological facility that enables them to grasp and negotiate the world in a manner that is commensurate with the world, but not as a set of rules or formulae. The situations in which subjects find themselves are rarely negotiable in terms of rules or practices derived from algorithms. On the contrary, and as Bourdieu (2005c) points out, social exchanges and relations are invariably informed by, or subject to, regimes of authority (symbolic power) that operate both without disclosure and not in accordance with the objective rules, conventions, explanations and discourses of a society. The habitus does not have to function at a level that is conscious of the actualities of symbolic power in order to be literate, at a tacit level, with the practical and pragmatic conditions and consequences of decision-making: if the subject is embarked by the habitus, it is always with a capacity that facilitates a practical choice among choices. The notion of the habitus as a set of dispositions rather than rules means that it retains a predictive function (there will be a correlation between the objectivities of the socio-cultural context with which the habitus is associated and the logic of practice of the subject) and enables the subject’s relative ease within the world, while allowing for a certain flexibility in the face of ‘of the moment’ demands and requirements, variations (both temporal and spatial) in and across cultural fields, and the difficulties encountered through changes in its socio-cultural trajectory:
The habitus, as the system of dispositions…is an objective basis for regular modes of behaviour, and thus for the regularity of modes of practice, and if practices can be predicted…this is because the effect of the habitus is that agents who are equipped with it will behave in a certain way in certain circumstances. That being said, this tendency to act in a regular manner which, when its principle is explicitly constituted, can act as the basis of a forecast…is not based on an explicit rule or law. This means that the modes of behaviour created by the habitus do not have the fine regularity of the modes of behaviour deduced from a legislative principle: the habitus goes hand in hand with vagueness and indeterminacy. As a generative spontaneity which asserts itself in an improvised confrontation with ever-renewed situations, it obeys a practical logic, that of vagueness, of the more-or-less, which defines one’s ordinary relation to the world. (Bourdieu 1990b: 77–8)
Another direct influence on Bourdieu’s development of the notion of habitus was Panofsky’s work, specifically ‘two articles by Panofsky which up to that point had never been looked at together; one on Gothic architecture where the word habitus was used as an “indigenous” concept, to explain the effect of scholastic thinking in the area of architecture, the other article on the Abbot Suger’ (Bourdieu 1985: 13). These texts helped Bourdieu to develop his theory of how the scholarly point of view-as-habitus informed and helped produce the objects of scholarly research. As well as enabling Bourdieu to account for the connection between French colonialism and scholarship in Algeria, it also led to him undertaking specific research projects—his Béarn work, Homo Academicus (1988)—in which he could study the theoretical and methodological consequences of his own personal and professional habitus. From here, the concept of the habitus served as the cornerstone of his research into and theorizing of the ways in which students’ educational status and experiences facilitated the reproduction of symbolic power and domination, and produced class affiliations and patterns of cultural consumption and evaluation. It also explained how and why cultural fields were imagined into existence, how they interpellated and inculcated their members, and why they were able to naturalize their epistemological regimes and forms of cultural capital, and maintain their consistency and durability.
The concept of the habitus underwent major refinements from the time of being detailed in Outline (1978) through to Bourdieu’s redevelopment of the notion of the embodied habitus in Pascalian Meditations (2000). The most significant issue involved whether and to what extent the habitus might be said to have a strategic orientation or dimension. Bourdieu’s earlier treatment of the issues—for instance, in Outline and his earlier educational texts—emphasizes that the habitus is the source of a ‘series of moves which are objectively organized as strategies without being the product of a genuinely strategic intention’ (Bourdieu 1978: 73), and where practices show signs of being consequent on the calculation of possible benefits and prospects, ‘one strategy among other possible strategies’ (1978: 73) recognized and considered as an option is produced by and through the epistemological categories of the habitus. Other possibilities that might seem perfectly natural or normal to subjects whose habitus has been formed in very different trajectories or fields are simply foreclosed: they are either unthinkable, or the subject, intuiting that the chances of success are slender or impossible, will reject the rejection as ‘not being for me’. To paraphrase Derrida (1976), there is, from this perspective, nothing outside the habitus:
It is, of course, never ruled out that the responses of the habitus may be accompanied by a strategic calculation tending to perform in a conscious mode the operation that the habitus performs quite differently, namely an estimation of chances presupposing transformation of the past effect into an expected objective. But these responses are first defined, without any calculation, in relation to objective potentialities, immediately inscribed in the present, things to do or not to do, things to say or not to say, in relation to a probable, ‘upcoming’ future…which…puts itself forward with an urgency and a claim to existence that excludes all deliberation. Stimuli do not exist for practice in their objective truth, as conditional, conventional triggers, acting only on condition that they encounter agents conditioned to recognize them. The practical world that is constituted in the relationship with the habitus, acting as a system of cognitive and motivating structures, is a world of already realized ends—procedures to follow, paths to take—and of objects endowed with a ‘permanent teleological character’…This is because the regularities inherent in an arbitrary condition…tend to appear as necessary, even natural, since they are the basis of the schemes of perception and appreciation through which they are apprehended. (Bourdieu 1990c: 53–4)
This position was subject to reconsideration during the period of Bourdieu’s cultural turn. While there is a continued insistence and re-emphasis on, and a technical development of, the idea and process of the unconscious bodily incorporation and naturalization of the habitus—see, in particular, Language and Symbolic Power (2005b), Practical Reason (1998c) and Pascalian Meditations (2000)—there is also a gradual recognition that playing the game of the field has the potential to increase the subject’s levels of cultural literacy, and by extension to produce what Bourdieu refers to as an enhanced ‘feel for the game’. In the first essay of The Field of Cultural Production (1993a), titled ‘Is the Structure of Sentimental Education an Instance of Social Self-analysis?’, Bourdieu provides an analytical account of the relation between Flaubert’s literary habitus and his knowledge of and literacy with regard to the field-as-game by way of his fictional characters and narratives, which are read and interpreted as either surrogates of himself and other subject-positions within, or as symptomatic of the culture of, the literary field. While Flaubert is not exactly allowed the same kind of epistemological or theoretical understanding or status of the sociologist, he is credited with the ability to analyse, comprehend and articulate the cultural politics of the field in which he is immersed in a way that, while never openly contradicting or questioning his own illusio-as-habitus, is certainly something other and more than a simple reproduction of literary doxa. Bourdieu (1993a: 158) argues that there are discursive, technical and epistemological orientations, germane to both cultural fields, that effectively differentiate Flaubert’s literary literacy from reflexive sociology:
For the sociologist lays bare a truth that the literary text will reveal only in veiled terms, that is to say only in such a manner as to leave unsaid, by a means of negation, of verneinung, as Freud used the term…The way of withholding things which is characteristic of the literary view of life is the thing which, above and beyond the aesthetic function it fulfils, enables an author to reveal truths that would otherwise be unbearable.
Bourdieu (1993a: 158) asks about the extent to which Flaubert ‘knowingly construct the model’ of the literary field that Bourdieu identifies in Sentimental Education and other texts. His response is that, in a sense, Flaubert cannot know—or if he can, he can’t say he knows—because he is bound, via the interaction-as-interdiction that characterizes the writing and reading of his realist novels, in a kind of complicity of silence with his bourgeoisie readers, and possibly with himself: the ‘appearance of reality which satisfies the need to know is in fact achieved by that semblance of reality which allows the reader to ignore the real state of things, to refuse to see things as they really are’ (1993a: 158). Into this game comes sociology, which ‘breaks the spell’ by revealing the ‘relationship of negation with regard to the reality indicated in the text’ (1993a: 158). Bourdieu makes clear, in a very muddled way, that the truth of sociology is not the same as the truth of the novel. Bourdieu’s sociological reading,
although it reveals a truth that the text says, but in such a way as to not say it, does not reveal the text’s own truth; and it would be completely erroneous if it claimed to give the entire truth contained in a text which owes its specificity precisely to the fact that it does not say what it says in a way a scientific text would say it. It is doubtless the form, the literary form in which objectification takes place, which enables the most deeply buried and the most safely hidden truth to emerge: indeed the form constitutes the veil that allows author and reader to hide from themselves…this repressed truth…in this case, the structure of the field of power. (1993a: 159)
This explains how and why literature is able to reveal ‘truths which social sciences…cannot quite grasp’ (1993a: 159). However, this capacity to represent truth is predicated, first, on literature’s tendency to deal with ‘serious matters without asking to be taken completely seriously’ (1993a: 159); and second, on the necessity of subscribing, at some level or another but at least partly unconsciously, to a form of illusio, which facilitates, ‘The smooth running of all social mechanisms, whether in the literary field or in the field of power’ (1993a: 159).
This epistemological facility is implicitly posited as a form of reflexivity, which Bourdieu had formerly associated, more or less exclusively, with the scientific habitus and field. The key element in this development is Bourdieu’s reappraisal of the notion of disinterestedness. In his sociology of education work, he argues that in scholarly culture, disinterestedness enables and enacts a distancing from and an abstraction of the object of study. Within the educational system, disinterestedness is read as a component and manifestation of the embodiment, on the part of the dominant class, of a naturalized, aristocratic ease. However, in The Field of Cultural Production (1993a) and The Rules of Art (1995), disinterestedness is cast in an altogether different and more generative form: it is reconsidered as potentially facilitating the production of alternative sets of perspectives and accounts of the socio-cultural world that are not necessarily compliant with the meanings and narratives associated with symbolic power. In Practical Reason (1998c), for instance, disinterestedness is associated with the disposition of the scientific field and the autonomous pole of the field of cultural production to take a critical and reflexive position with regard to both their own discourses and those of the field of power. This applies to all forms of critical social analysis, which, in a scholarly, literary, artistic, political or journalistic text, successfully draw attention to or denaturalize the hidden systems, processes and effects of symbolic power, and by doing so are capable of influencing, changing or transforming the habitus. Bourdieu argues, for instance, that:
When you apply reflexive sociology to yourself, you open up the possibility of identifying true sites of freedom, and thus of building small-scale, modest, practical morals in keeping with the scope of human freedom which, in my opinion, is not that large. Social fields are universes where things continually move and are never completely predetermined. (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 199–200)
The relationship between disinterestedness and the acquisition of a critical socio-cultural disposition is a matter of the logics and imperatives of the cultural field, and how this plays out at the level of the habitus. Bourdieu (1998c: 88) writes that, ‘If disinterestedness is sociologically possible’, it can only be brought about
through the encounter between the habitus predisposed to disinterestedness and the universes in which disinterestedness is rewarded. Among these universes, the most typical are…the different fields of cultural production…[and] the scientific field, microcosms which are constituted on the basis of an inversion of the fundamental law of the economic world and in which the law of economic interest is suspended…this does not mean that they do not know other forms of interest: the sociology of art or literature unveils…and analyzes the specific interests which are constituted by the field’s functioning…and for which one is ready to die.
The habitus
Bourdieu (1978: 78) defines the habitus as ‘the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations…[that produces] practices’, but he emphasizes that although the habitus is durable, circumstances and contexts are not necessarily receptive to or in tune with it. The inevitable misfit between habitus and field constitutes the basis of the various negotiations and improvisations that subjects are forced into if they are to function effectively within or across different fields. Such negotiations and improvisations serve to bring about change in the habitus itself by sidestepping its automatic responses in the interests of a more competent navigation of a particular context; they determine the extent to which subjects can attain knowledge of, and negotiate, various cultural fields.
If this sounds like an overly restrictive and mechanistic explanation of practice, it should be pointed out that for Bourdieu the habitus is extraordinarily productive and adaptive. In an analysis of Bourdieu’s supposed ‘determinism’, Jacques Bouveresse (1999) explores what is at stake, theoretically and practically, in the use of terms such as freedom, free will and spontaneity, and how these terms (and the meanings associated with them) fit with the notion of the habitus. His essay makes two main points. The first is that freedom and free will are not concepts that subjects come to without considerable affective baggage, and that they often function as empty signifiers that different groups claim association with, and ‘fill in’ in an arbitrary but motivated way. Regardless of the content, however, the significance of freedom, as an affective catalyst, is that it is something whose loss is dreaded:
If we are more or less terrified of the idea that we might not be free, it is because we have a certain idea of the appalling fate that would be our own if we were not free…literature on this point provides us with a multitude of analogies each more worrying than the last: ‘not having free will would be somewhat like being in prison, or being hypnotised, or being paralysed, or being a puppet’. (1999: 48)
His second point is that there is nothing inherent in Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus that militates against or forecloses the notion of practice resulting from or based on spontaneity. He approaches the question via Wittgenstein’s (1983) theorizing of the relation between and continuity across socio-cultural rules, practices, cultural literacy and consciousness:
As Wittgenstein often remarked, the learning of a game can quite easily involve the explicit formulation and acquisition of the rules which govern it. But one can equally acquire the sort of regular behavior equivalent to a complete mastery of the game without the explicit statement of the rules ever intervening in the process at all. (1999: 51–2)
The habitus, as an acquired and generative set of dispositions, is consistent with Wittgenstein’s (1983) formulation of the status of cultural literacy: it is both productive of and informed by a level of deliberation; and it is often characterized by a level of spontaneity, such as when certain options are dismissed because they might eventually leave the subject ill-at-ease, a ‘fish out of water’. For Bouveresse (1999: 47), ‘what free will…adds to spontaneity is the idea of a decision based on a process of deliberation. Free will can be defined as “spontaneity coupled with deliberation”.’ From this perspective, it matters little whether deliberation runs into and stops short of what are effectively self-imposed limits. To take a path that is bound to lead to ‘rejection’ because certain objective requirements cannot be met is a perverse form of freedom, just as it is unreasonable to characterize a refusal to take an option that is foreclosed as a form of reproduction or mechanistic behaviour. He argues that just because forms of behaviour derive from the habitus, this is:
not a threat to the spontaneity of his action, as the action is not the result of an external constraint, but of a disposition whose seat is in the agent himself. But insofar as the exercise of free will includes deliberation, a good part of our actions, and in particular those which are the result of the habitus, are simply spontaneous and not strictly speaking free. But neither can it be said that they are truly constrained. (1999: 47)
For Bourdieu, the logic of practice is characterized by considerable varieties of movement within, but not outside, the parameters of the field-as-habitus. He argues that the habitus is acquired, first, at an early age; second, across the socio-cultural trajectory-as-history of the subject; third, in an unconscious and naturalizing manner; and fourth, as an embodiment of a series of dispositions that are commensurate with the central discourses, perspectives, values and epistemological categories of the field or context in question. The earliest experiences of the habitus are the most influential and durable, both because they are constitutive of and strongly associated with the subject’s identity and personal orientation (as daughter, student, churchgoer) and because they engage the subject for a relatively long and crucially formative period (in childhood and adolescence). The family, along with educational, socio-cultural and religious institutions (primary and secondary school, sporting teams, church) and socio-cultural texts (television, film, comics, toys, games, the internet), provides the basis of the habitus-as-dispositions which are likely to persist, in some form, into old age and across various cultural fields.
The acquisition of these dispositions allows for a relative predictability with regard to the practices of the subject, without in any way producing a mechanistic reproduction of the rules and conventions of the field, or a conscious adherence to matching or applying the field-as-rule to the situation at hand. The bodily incorporation of the habitus-as-dispositions means that, in most cases, little thought or consideration is required whenever the subject is presented with a set of options: the body learns and the subject follows. As children move through and are immersed in the rituals, conventions and genres of family life, school, church, sport and social activities, along with the media in all its increasingly ubiquitous forms, the habitus is gradually constituted at the level of a bodily hexis, in the form of ways of walking, hand gestures and mannerisms, facial expressions, and levels and styles of activity: ‘It is in the dialectical relationship between the body and a space…that one finds…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’ (Bourdieu 1978: 89).
Dispositions acquired from childhood (family, school) will continue to constitute and orient the subject throughout the transition across socio-cultural identities (as daughter, Roman Catholic, university student, girlfriend, leftist, feminist, academic) and fields (religion, academe, politics, the social field), generally with only minor adjustments and variations:
The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices—more history—in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms. This system of dispositions—a present past that tends to perpetuate itself into the future by reactivation in similarly structured practices…is constantly exerted—is the principle of the continuity and regularity which objectivism sees in social practices without being able to account for it; and also of the regulated transformations that cannot be explained either by the extrinsic, instantaneous determinism of mechanistic sociologism or by the purely internal but equally instantaneous determination of spontaneous subjectivism. (Bourdieu 1990c: 58)
There is a continuity between Bourdieu’s idea of the embodied habitus and Foucault’s notion of the subject as being disciplined, normalized and regulated into existence, and shaped, oriented and maintained in this form by the process of socio-cultural and self-surveillance—a similarity that, for all its obviousness, was only really acknowledged by Bourdieu late in his career (Bourdieu 2000: 141). If there is a significant difference between their approaches, it is that Foucault emphasizes the institutional sites of discipline, regulation and normalization, while Bourdieu is more interested in how ‘the pressure or opposition, continuous and often unnoticed, of the ordinary order of things, the conditionings imposed by the material conditions of existence’ (2000: 141) shape and sustain forms of subjectivity and identity. What also connects these two sets of theories of the subject-as-embodiment (of the habitus; of templates and performances of normalization), however, is that they both tend to underplay the extent to which the media (and various socio-cultural forms and genres), and in particular the capitalist media and its discourses, narratives, imperatives and logics (the privileging of the body as a form of self-commoditization, for instance), constitute one of the most pervasive influences on subject formation and deformation.
The commercial media offer up a storehouse of templates of identity (specific to gender, age, class, ethnicity and profession) that are recognizably both ‘normal’ and desirable, and played out in shorter (advertisements, music videos) and longer (films, television sit-coms and dramas) narrative forms, often attached to various processes of commoditization as self-commoditization (the clothes that both ‘stand in’ for and guarantee a particular style of identity, the sexualized body that functions as cultural capital). Moreover, the increasing ubiquity of media texts, driven by technology that is now eminently portable and multi-platformed, effectively hystericizes the processes of self-surveillance and self-commoditization. This ensures that the habitus is continually subject, at an everyday level (in the gym, walking home, accessing internet dating sites) to an entirely new level of influence of the ‘continuous and often unnoticed…the ordinary order of things, the conditionings imposed by the material conditions of existence’ (Bourdieu 2000: 141). While early experiences provide the template of the subject, the habitus-as-bodily hexis continues to undergo changes and refinements commensurate with its socio-cultural trajectory (the development of the gym-shaped body, the acquisition of a fashion-oriented style of self-presentation) and its immersion in the media-dominated world. For Bourdieu, the habitus is the body and the body is its history: ‘we are disposed,’ he writes, ‘because we are exposed’ (2000: 140).
Despite the speeding up of the usually ‘glacial’ rate of change of the habitus (Appadurai 1997) through contact with the global media, the trajectory of the subject-as-habitus is likely to be consistent with the original acquisition and form of the habitus, because that trajectory is disposed by and usually consistent with regard to—that is to say, is constituted from—the habitus itself. A subject’s perspectives, values and practices are commensurate and consistent with the habitus because it speaks, feels and sees through the subject. As Bourdieu (1978: 18) states, ‘If agents are possessed by their habitus more than they possess it, this is because it acts within them as the organizing principle of their actions.’
As an organizing and organizational principle, the habitus has a productive and dynamic relationship with the world: it both makes what it finds and experiences through a recognition-as-designation of things, people, spaces and situations via its various incorporated categories, genres, discourses and narratives (which produce regularities and objectivities of practice), while simultaneously leaving enough room for navigation through and negotiation of differences that resist integration into the habitus-as-schema. While certain levels or intensities of differences, and the options that they entail, will be foreclosed, this is entirely for pragmatic reasons, derived from and defined by a general economy of practice: either they take the form of the rejection that must be rejected in advance, for the simple reason that to aspire to what is objectively unattainable is, in the end, a form of wasted energy; or they are not taken up because they constitute a destabilizing threat to the habitus-as-field, which is built upon a level of socio-cultural, temporal and psychological commitment that militates against drastic change.
The space that is opened up for dealing with difference and otherness is consequent on the habitus functioning not as the embodiment of certain rules and laws, but rather as a set of dispositions. This aspect is central to Bourdieu’s most detailed and worked through early account of the habitus in Outline:
The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment…produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends…collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor. (1978: 72)
One way of showing what is at stake in the difference between the habitus-as-rule and the habitus-as-disposition is to consider how inauthentic or inappropriate performances of identity-as-field are read, in Schopenhauer’s terms, as ‘pedantically comical’, and elicit laughter ‘provoked by a character when he produces an action that is not inscribed within the limits of the concept which defines him’ (Bourdieu 2005b: 124). The subject who can only apply the discourses, categories, values and narratives of the field-as-habitus to the wider social field, without the ability to adjust to infelicitous or anomalous circumstances, or to recognize that the world is not the field, is potentially a figure of fun and an object of laughter. The best literary example is Don Quixote: what makes him a ludicrous and satirical figure is not so much that he consistently gets things wrong, mistakes windmills for dragons, or employs an anachronistic order of discourse; above all else, he never learns, never comes to understand that his habitus-as-perspective is fundamentally incommensurate with the everyday discourses and categories of perception of the society through which he moves. One of the consequences of a subject or character becoming irredeemably comic is that they are, potentially at least, also irredeemably alienated from the social field: as long as Quixote remains in the world, it will only offer him symbolic or physical violence, and the only recourse he has is to retreat into a society-of-one.
Immersion in a field, particularly over longer duration, gives rise to an ease of movement through the field-as-world. The experience of a prolonged positive correlation between the doxa of a field and its objectivities means that subjects more or less always and automatically ‘know where they stand’—know what to think and feel and do—because the world is perceived as stable, ordered and naturally meaningful. This produces what Bourdieu (1990c: 58) refers to as a ‘common-sense’ understanding of and approach to the world:
Insofar…as habitus are the incorporation of the same history, or more concretely, of the same history objectified in habitus and structures, the practices they generate are mutually intelligible and immediately adjusted to the structures…and endowed with an objective meaning that is at once unitary and systematic, transcending subjective intentions…One of the fundamental effects of the harmony between the practical sense and objectified meanings…is the production of a common-sense world.
At the same time the diachronic field presents a problem to the habitus because it is different from the synchronic field—which is the form that the field usually articulates and represents ‘as itself ’, both to its members and to other fields and the field of power. While the habitus is incorporated by the subject at a bodily level, activated in the various practices of recognizing, seeing, organizing, categorizing, narrating and evaluating the world, and is constitutive of the subject in the world, the fact of being in the world means that there is a constant tension, and something of a dynamic relationship, between the durability of the habitus and the inconstancy and vicissitudes of the subject’s sociocultural trajectory.
Being admitted into or consistently being exposed to a new cultural field constitutes an important and ongoing aspect of the development and deformation of the habitus. However, because the habitus is incorporated and functions at an unconscious level, it remains—much like Kuhn’s (1970) scientific paradigms—‘always itself ’, at least at a formal discursive level, until internal dynamics and/or interventions from the field of power produce a version of the synchronic field that takes its place as the ‘always itself ’. The various versions of the habitus are the product both of the internal dynamics of the field and of relations with (and influences derived from) other cognate fields and the field of power; however, as long as these changes and effects are not incommensurate with the habitus-as-disposition, the field will remain relatively stable. In An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992: 135) refer to an example from the field of religion in France that demonstrates this relation between the habitus-as-disposition and the synchronic and diachronic versions of the field:
Habitus reveals itself—remember that it consists of a system of dispositions…of virtualities, potentialities, eventualities—only in reference to a definite situation. It is only in 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 on the stimuli and structure of the field, the very same habitus will generate different, even opposite, outcomes. I could take here an example of my work on bishops…Bishops live to be very old, and when I interviewed them in synchrony I found myself talking with men ranging anywhere from 35 to 80 years of age…and who had therefore been constituted in very different states of the religious field. The sons of nobles who, in the 1930s, would have been bishops in Meaux, and would have asked the worshippers of their parish to kiss their ring in a quasi-feudal aristocratic tradition, are today ‘red bishops’ in Saint Denis, that is, radical clergymen active in the defence of the downtrodden.
This example of the transformation of the habitus of the religious field in France raises a number of issues about how the habitus functions in times of change, instability, disruption and crisis. Bourdieu (1990b: 78) suggests that when a field is characterized by indeterminacy, ‘One can formulate the general rule that the more dangerous the situation is, the more the practice tends to be codified.’ When, by extension, a field-as-habitus is going through perpetual diachronic adjustments—for instance, when it is colonized or being transformed by the field of power—then the safest and most straightforward course of action is to cite, and perform in accordance with, the verities of the synchronic field, much like the soldier in Pasolini’s Salò who, on being discovered acting in a manner contrary to the values and laws of Mussolini’s Italian state, automatically responds in a manner that affirms his bona fides—that is, by giving a Fascist salute.
Contrary to the perception that the habitus constitutes destiny, Bourdieu insists that it has the capacity to adjust to or negotiate the changing world. The habitus ‘is endlessly transformed, either in a direction that reinforces it…or in a direction that transforms it and, for instance, raises or lowers the level of expectations and aspirations…Habitus can, in certain instances, be built…upon contradiction, upon tension, even upon instability’ (Bourdieu 1990b: 116). The example of the transition from aristocratic to socialist bishops in France, for instance, demonstrates how different versions of the habitus are produced and sustained without leading to the collapse of a field. Cultural fields have the capacity to produce, incorporate, allow for and deal with various versions of the habitus because they can be (and often are) spatially and chronologically differentiated while being sustained, as a socio-cultural identity, by and through a citation of or joint commitment to ‘that which we share and which unites us’, such as a belief in God (the field of religion), the ethos of fair play (sport), the welfare of patients (medicine and health) or the sanctity of justice (law).
The question of which version of the habitus predominates in any period, and in which spaces, is predicated upon the field’s relation to the field of power, and by extension to the relevant regime of cultural capital in operation. To return to the example of the socialist bishops, it is likely that parishioners who have a left-leaning political orientation will welcome the bishops’ initiatives, but they may be deplored by older, right-wing parishioners who insist upon the incompatibility of religion and politics. The habitus
changes constantly in response to new experiences. Dispositions are subject to a kind of permanent revision, but one which is never radical, because it works on the basis of the premises established in the previous state. They are characterized by a combination of constancy and variation…If…accommodation has the upper hand, then one finds rigid, self-enclosed, overintegrated habitus (as in old people). (Bourdieu 2000: 161)
One of the main functions of Bourdieu’s theoretical apparatus is to facilitate the identification and analysis of the principles and logics constitutive of social identity and socio-cultural practice: cultural field, along with habitus, from which it is more or less inseparable, carries the greatest weight in this work. While the imbrication of habitus and cultural field provides the dispositions that are manifested as both embodied subjectivities and their concomitant cultural trajectories and practices, the cultural field is also the primary context (the set of sites, spaces, moments, relations, genres, discourses, texts, rules, regulations and categories) within which subjects and their practices are constituted, monitored, tested, evaluated, refined and recalibrated. In the next chapter, we will provide an account of the role that cultural field plays in the relation between the habitus and subject formation, and in the production of the various forms and categories of identity and identification that characterize the practices and trajectory of the habitus.