2
The Social Body
I don’t think concepts have any relevance in religion. Analogy is not concept. It is community. It is resonance. . . . I think of Jasper, Bergson, and Buber as very inferior conceptualist types, quite out of touch with the immediate analogical awareness that begins in the senses and is derailed by concepts or ideas.[115]
The Critique of Theoretical Reason
A liturgical anthropology is a strange beast: it offers a theoretical model of the human person that emphasizes that we are not primarily theorizers. It is an intellectual project that argues for the relativization of the intellect. A liturgical anthropology is a theoretical attempt to appreciate our pretheoretical navigation of the world—a theory about the primacy and irreducibility of practice.
As such, the development of a liturgical anthropology parallels Pierre Bourdieu’s project in the social sciences. In particular, Bourdieu’s fieldwork led him to a realization of the limits of anthropology as a science: while the anthropologist is ultimately trying to understand a (foreign) world of practice, his methods involve a distance and objectification that effectively erase the integrity of that “world.” “It took me a long time to understand,” Bourdieu confesses, “that the logic of practice can only be grasped through constructs which destroy it as such, so long as one fails to consider the nature, or rather the effects, of instruments of objectification.”[116] This is because the theoretical stance of the social scientist is characterized by an “epistemological break”—a stepping back from involvement in a community of practice to reflect on and “understand” the practice from outside, in a sense. This epistemological break introduces a distance that is foreign to those immersed in the community of practice—an “objectifying” distance not characteristic of practitioners. This is why the epistemological break is also “a social discontinuity” (LP 26, 33): theoretical observers, by their very distance and objectivity, have effectively excused themselves from the community of practice, even if they might be present for the ritual or involved in the ceremony. So the very project of a “scientific” understanding of practice seems to be doomed from the start.
But Bourdieu wasn’t willing to give up on science itself or castigate theoretical reflection as inherently problematic (LP 11). There is a virtue to theoretical reflection on practice and the attempt to understand what’s at stake in communities of practice. So it’s not a matter of choosing between theory or practice. Instead, what Bourdieu is after is an adequate theory of practice that is a sort of two-edged sword: on the one hand, this calls for an adequate understanding of the nature of practice as its own irreducible know-how; on the other hand, an adequate theory of practice requires a theoretical account of what we’re doing when we scientifically reflect on practice.[117] What social scientists had failed to do, he argues, is objectively consider their own objectifying relation to what they study (LP 14–15); they had never made the practice of study a matter of study. Recognizing the limits of a science of practice is not reason to abandon science but rather an occasion to reconsider the assumptions that science brings to its consideration of practice.[118]
Thus Bourdieu describes his task, with a Kantian echo, as a “critique of theoretical reason.” A critique of theoretical reason is not a rejection of theoretical reason but rather, per Kant, a consideration of its limits and conditions. Such “critical reflexion on the limits of theoretical understanding is not intended to discredit theoretical knowledge.” Rather, the point is to give theoretical interpretation of practice “a solid basis by freeing it from the distortions arising from the epistemological and social conditions of its production”; that is, “it aims simply to bring to light the theory of practice which theoretical knowledge implicitly applies and so to make possible a truly scientific knowledge of practice and of the practical mode of knowledge” (LP 27). The problem isn’t theoretical reflection on practice; the question is whether our theoretical analysis of practice is working with assumptions that honor the unique nature of “practical knowledge”—the irreducible “logic of practice.” For example, interpretations of practice too often smuggle in assumptions that effectively construe practitioners as thinkers, constituting the world of practice in the image of the scientist. Bourdieu describes this as “intellectualocentrism” but emphasizes that science need not be inherently intellectualist (LP 29). One can imagine theory otherwise; one can engage in constructive, theoretical interpretations of practice informed by assumptions that do justice to the irreducible logic of practice. It is just such a theory of practice that Bourdieu is after, and it is directly germane to the task of a liturgical anthropology.
At one point Bourdieu describes his goal as “a theory . . . of what it is to be ‘native’”: “One has quite simply to bring into scientific work and into the theory of practices that it seeks to produce, a theory—which cannot be found through theoretical experience alone—of what it is to be ‘native,’ that is, to be in that relationship of ‘learned ignorance,’ of immediate but unselfconscious understanding which defines the practical relationship to the world” (LP 18–19). Natives—that is, practitioners “unselfconsciously” embedded in a community of practice—are not primarily theorists. They are not “thinking” their way through the world; they are not reflecting on what they’re doing—which is precisely why any adequate interpretation of what’s going on in such a community of practice will need to resist the temptation to construe practitioners as implicit theorizers. Instead, a theory of what it is to be “native” will need to honor and appreciate a “pre-logical logic of practice” (LP 19).[119]
Bourdieu’s “critique of theoretical reason” has two different targets in view: what he describes as “objectivism” and “subjectivism,” or what we might call intellectualism and voluntarism. Against intellectualist accounts of practice, Bourdieu aims to articulate a nuanced theory of practice that does justice to the irreducibility of practical knowledge—that sort of know-how that is “carried” in practice. As such, he will be constantly critical of what we might call a theoretism[120] that remakes practitioners in the image of the theorist.[121] Such theorists “adopt the viewpoint of an ‘impartial spectator’ who seeks to understand for the sake of understanding and who tends to assign this hermeneutic intention to the agents’ practice”—as if practitioners were really just anonymous academics. In other words, the “theoreticizing” theorist studies a community of practitioners “as if they were asking themselves the questions he asks himself about them”—as if they were curious Western spectators rather than embedded practitioners (LP 31, emphasis original).[122] Bourdieu illustrates this with the case of linguists who construe language as if it were some impartial means of trading symbols rather than a relational network for getting something done[123]—who imagine language in the hands of spectators rather than employed by users, as if we were primarily grammarians rather than orators. “Unlike the orator, the grammarian has nothing to do with language except to study it in order to codify it. By the very treatment he applies to it, taking it as an object of analysis instead of using it to think and speak, he constitutes it as a logos opposed to praxis” (LP 31).[124] The intellectualist theorist unwittingly substitutes “the observer’s relation to practice for the practical relation to practice” (LP 34). Bourdieu is out to resist this by articulating a methodology that recognizes the unique and irreducible nature of the practitioner’s relation to practice, which will require articulating the unique “logic of practice” at work for practitioners. This will be the focus of our exposition below.
On a second front, and in ways directly germane to our concern with a philosophy of action, Bourdieu will also challenge a “subjectivism” that fails to properly understand practice because it assumes a flawed picture of freedom. While Bourdieu’s poster child for subjectivism is Sartre, this voluntarist model of the human person is widely assumed in “rational choice” theory and other social science paradigms. Such a model is a kind of “decisionism” that paints a picture of the subject as radically autonomous, each action the fruit of an unencumbered decision. Such a human being borders on being a kind of god.[125] “Refusing to recognize anything resembling durable dispositions or probable eventualities, Sartre makes each action a kind of antecedent-less confrontation between the subject and the world” (LP 42). In sum, the subject is seen as a “consciousness without inertia,” without an environment or a past impinging on its autonomy.
Bourdieu is concerned that when interpretations of practice work with this assumption about autonomy they fail to truly understand what drives action in a community of practice. Once again, the theorist ends up remaking the world of practitioners in his own image: “Just as objectivism universalizes the theorist’s relation to the object of science, so subjectivism universalizes the experience that the subject of theoretical discourse has of himself as a subject. A professional exponent of consciousness committed to the illusion of ‘consciousness without inertia,’ without a past and without an exterior, he endows all the subjects with whom he decides to identify . . . with his own experience as a pure, free-floating subject” (LP 45–46). Herein lies one of the “anthropological fictions” that Bourdieu is out to debunk (LP 47). We simply are not autonomous animals who float in the world unencumbered except by our own freedom. The autonomous “rational actor” is without dispositions or inclinations—without habits—and that is precisely the problem: such a theory of human persons will never truly understand human action because it fails to recognize the “inertia” of habitus, the complex of inclinations and dispositions that make us lean into the world with a habituated momentum in certain directions. We don’t “decide” our way into every action. Our being-in-the-world is characterized by inclinations that propel us to all sorts of action “without thinking.”[126] Thus one of the core contributions of Bourdieu’s “theory of practice as practice” (LP 52) is to recognize the centrality of habitus, of habituated inclinations that spawn meaningful action. In fact, for Bourdieu, the “logic of practice” and the centrality of habitus are inextricably linked: habit is the embodied know-how (the “practical sense”) that is “carried” in a community of practice. The remainder of this chapter will further explicate these central concepts in Bourdieu with a view to marshaling them to reframe liturgical practice—both Christian and “secular.”
Habitus as Practical Sense
In trying to (theoretically) understand the “logic of practice,” we need a properly calibrated theoretical radar. If we approach practice with a theoretical radar set by “intellectualist” assumptions, Bourdieu worries we will end up missing what is unique and irreducible about “practical sense”—that visceral knowledge that is carried in a community of practice even if it is not (and cannot be) articulated in propositions. So if we’re going to do justice to practice in our scientific and theoretical reflection on practice—that is, if we are going to get a handle on “a reason immanent in practices, whose ‘origin’ lies neither in the ‘decisions’ of reason understood as rational calculation nor in the determinations of mechanisms external to and superior to agents” (LP 50)—then we need a “theory of practice as practice” (LP 52, emphasis added) rather than a theory of practice as if it were just some mode of “expressing” what we think. We need to try to understand practitioners as practitioners, as fundamentally “doers” who are acting in and upon their world, not just “thinkers” who happen to be “doing” stuff.
So Bourdieu’s project is to develop a “theory of practice as practice” that evades intellectualism without falling prey to a mechanistic determinism—an account of practice that avoids the twin reductionisms of seeing human action as either “rational action or mechanical reaction” (LP 50). It is with this concern in mind that he introduces a concept central to his account, the notion of habitus: “The theory of practice as practice insists, contrary to positivist materialism, that the objects of knowledge are constructed, not passively recorded, and, contrary to intellectualist idealism, that the principle of this construction is the system of structured, structuring dispositions, the habitus, which is constituted in practice and is always oriented toward practical functions” (LP 52). This dense introduction of the term requires some unpacking. The language of habitus has a philosophical echo that reverberates from Aristotle’s account of virtue, in which habits are those dispositions that incline us to a certain end. Bourdieu’s invocation of the term activates that echo, but also stretches it in new directions. Note that habitus is shorthand for what he calls a “system of structured, structuring dispositions.” But dispositions toward what? Well, dispositions to construct (or constitute) our world in certain ways. We aren’t just blank slates that passively “record” the world, as empiricism and materialism would have us believe; we constitute and construct our world. But contrary to intellectualism, that constitution happens “in practice” and is oriented toward action (a “practical function”),[127] not mere observation. Habitus, then, is shorthand to refer to those “dispositions” we have to constitute the world in certain ways—the habitual way that we construct our world. And those dispositions and habits are not primarily intellectual or rational; they are certainly not something we “think about.”
Thus Bourdieu glosses habitus to emphasize this point that a habitus is always sort of bigger than me—it is a communal, collective disposition that gets inscribed in me. It is always both personal and political. Thus he describes habitus as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them” (LP 53). Here we see some new features of habitus. First, a habitus is both durable and transposable—something that endures over time and is communicable, able to be shared and passed on. In this sense, a habitus is a kind of embodied tradition, not as some external “deposit” of data or content but as a handed-down way of being. It is in this sense that a habitus is a “structured” structure—it is something that comes to me, from outside me, conditioning and enabling my constitution of the world. And it functions as a structuring structure because it inclines me to constitute the world in certain ways, conditioning my construction of meaning.
This is why habitus is intertwined with institutions. On the one hand, “the habitus, which is constituted in the course of an individual history” is “what makes it possible to inhabit institutions, to appropriate them practically” (LP 57). I will be “at home” in a community of practice just to the extent that the shared habitus of the community has become inscribed in me, absorbed into my “individual history.” I learn how to be in community by acquiring from the community and its institutions a habitus.[128] On the other hand, that habitus inscribed in me “is what enables the institution to attain full realization: it is through the capacity for incorporation,[129] which exploits the body’s readiness to take seriously the performative magic of the social, that the king, the banker, or the priest are hereditary monarchy, financial capitalism or the Church made flesh” (LP 57). In other words, “an institution, even an economy, is complete and fully viable only if it is durably objectified not only in things, that is, in the logic, transcending individual agents, of a particular field, but also in bodies, in durable dispositions to recognize and comply with the demands immanent in the field” (LP 58). I need the community and social body to enable me to perceive the world; however, the social body needs my body to instantiate its vision and practice.[130]
Second, this handed-down disposition to constitute the world in certain ways functions without “conscious aiming”; the constituting engine of habitus can run quietly under the hood without me ever thinking of it, sort of like the silent engine of a Prius that takes you to the market even if you forget it’s running. You don’t need to hear the engine running in order for it to do its work. Habitus is that nexus of dispositions by which we constitute our world without rational deliberation or conscious awareness. This doesn’t mean that habitus excludes deliberation or is somehow opposed to “strategic calculation.”[131] Bourdieu notes that it is possible to “perform in a conscious mode the operation that the habitus performs quite differently” (LP 53). I can now “consciously” pick up the cup beside me, whereas up to this point I simply did so “without thinking about it.” Bourdieu’s only point is that the unconscious direction of habitus is primary. It is because I always already navigate the world by habitus that I can step back to deliberate and calculate.[132] I “think about” the world second; first I’m engaged in it as an actor whose motivations and ends are practical and largely “unconscious.” It is habitus that is “the basis of perception” and all subsequent experiences (LP 54). Indeed, in some significant sense, experience is only possible because of habitus.
But because habitus is doing all of this work under the hood, it can be forgotten and “taken for granted” (LP 56, 58). Indeed, the constitutive operation of habitus can be so seamless and “automatic” (LP 58) that one could mistakenly think it is natural, some kind of hardwiring accrued through evolutionary adaptation and now rooted not just in our bones but in our genes. But that would be the materialist reduction that fails to recognize that habitus is acquired, that it has a history that is both collective and individual.
The habitus—embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history—is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product. As such, it is what gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present. This autonomy is that of the past, enacted and acting, which, functioning as accumulated capital, produces history on the basis of history and so ensures the permanence in change that makes the individual agent a world within the world. The habitus is a spontaneity without consciousness or will, opposed as much to the mechanical necessity of things without history in mechanistic theories as it is to the reflexive freedom of subjects “without inertia” in rationalist theories. (LP 56)
So habitus is very much like an Aristotelian habit: it is acquired, and therefore has a history; it carries an entire past with it (LP 54). But it has been appropriated and incorporated to such an extent that it is as if it were natural—it becomes “second nature.” So it’s not natural, and therefore not just instinctual reaction; but neither is it conscious or deliberative. Once again, like Merleau-Ponty’s praktognosia, Bourdieu’s habitus is a “between.”
For just this reason, Bourdieu sees the concept of habitus as a way to break out of false dichotomies between freedom and determinism, intellect and instinct. “As an acquired system of generative schemes, the habitus makes possible the free production of all the thoughts, perceptions and actions inherent in the particular conditions of its production—and only those” (LP 55). A habitus is a condition of possibility: like horizons of expectation, a habitus circumscribes just how we’ll be inclined to constitute the world. However, a habitus is also a condition of possibility: rather than being some limit on my range of possible experiences, it’s what makes any experience possible. The habitus both governs and enables perception.
This infinite yet strictly limited generative capacity is difficult to understand only so long as one remains locked in the usual antinomies—which the concept of the habitus aims to transcend—of determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity, consciousness and the unconscious, or the individual and society. Because the habitus is an infinite capacity for generating products—thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions—whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditioning. (LP 55)
Habitus, then, is a kind of compatibilism. As a social being acting in the world, I’m not an unconstrained “free” creature “without inertia”; neither am I the passive victim of external causes and determining forces. Neither mechanical determinism nor libertarian freedom can really make sense of our being-in-the-world because our freedom is both “conditioned and conditional.” Both our perception and our action are conditioned, but as conditioned, it is possible for both to be spontaneous and improvisational. I learn how to constitute my world from others, but I learn how to constitute my world. The “I” that perceives is always already a “we.” My perception is communal, a debt I owe.
What if we thought of the goal of Christian education and formation, not in terms of the acquisition of a Christian “worldview,” but instead as the acquisition of a Christian habitus? Might we not better capture the essence of Christianity in the “between” concept of habitus—as an orientation to the world that is carried in a way of life and oriented fundamentally toward action, toward tangible being-in-the-world? We would then need to attend to the nexus of belief and the body.
Belief and the Body: The Logic of Practice
You’ll notice that Bourdieu regularly bumps up against the limits of a lexicon. When it comes to philosophical anthropology (and even “folk” anthropologies—the functional views of humans that we assume in everyday practice), our vocabulary tends to be dualistic and reductionistic: intellect or instinct, freedom or determinism, minds or bodies, rational or irrational, conscious or unconscious, and so forth.[133] Bourdieu, like Merleau-Ponty, is trying to honor the messy complexity of our being-in-the-world that is between all of these and thus in danger of falling between the cracks because we lack appropriate concepts and terms to even name what’s operative here. So he resorts to an old, dead language and invokes habitus to name this “between” way of intending the world that is not quite “knowledge” but enough like knowledge to still be named in that ballpark. This is why he also continues to avail himself of the language of “logic,” even as he’s describing something that is a million miles from what we usually associate with logic. So Bourdieu adopts two heuristic terms in his analysis of habitus: “practical sense” and “the logic of practice.” On the one hand, there’s something wrong with each of these terms; on the other hand, we need some concepts to articulate a theory of practice as practice. Let’s unpack each of these in turn so we might better understand the dynamics of habitus. What will emerge is something like Bourdieu’s (quasi) epistemology.
“Practical sense,” Bourdieu stipulates, “is a quasi-bodily involvement in the world which presupposes no representation either of the body or of the world, still less of their relationship. It is an immanence in the world through which the world imposes its imminence, things to be done or said, which directly govern speech and action. It orients ‘choices’ which, though not deliberate, are no less systematic, and which, without being ordered and organized in relation to an end, are none the less charged with a kind of retrospective finality” (LP 66). “Practical sense” is the know-how that resides in the body, that unique sort of understanding of the world that is identified with a habitus. In this dense definition, Bourdieu highlights important features of this comportment to the world. First, as we’d expect, it is a bodily orientation to and involvement in the world. Practical sense is not an intellectual or mental processing of objective inputs; it is more a kind of adept immersion in an environment. This is why it is not representational: it’s not a distanced observation of objects by a body, or images generated on the internal screen of my consciousness. Practical sense is not that sort of knowledge; it is more a kind of proficiency, a mastery—what Bourdieu calls “a feel for the game” (LP 66). To have acquired practical sense is a matter of being adroit rather than having some encyclopedic knowledge.
He also describes practical sense as an “immanence,” something that “exists,” for lack of a better term, in our relationship to the world, not in some mind that is “above” the world. Practical sense, in that respect, isn’t really “in” me—it’s not located in some interiority; rather, it is a kind of halo effect that is forged between me and my environment, enacted in my being-alongside-the-world. This is why Bourdieu describes practical sense as an immanence “through which the world imposes its imminence”—the urgency of “things to be done or said,” the nitty-gritty necessities that call for a response from me and thus “directly govern speech and action.” It is practical sense that clarifies the million little invitations and invocations that call to me each day, whether it’s responding to the whistle of the teakettle or responding to a deranged neighbor banging on my door at three in the morning. Practical sense is operative across a wide spectrum of praxis and action, from the mundane to the moral.[134] It is the submerged operations of practical sense that effect a “take” on these situations and thus generate action on my part. So it is in this manner that practical sense “orients [my] ‘choices.’” Bourdieu puts the scare quotes around “choices” because these are intentional actions, and they are actions for which I am responsible; but they are not actions that are outcomes of rational deliberation, nor are they consciously “chosen.” They are “chosen” in the sense that they are actions prompted from me in response to a situation; they are actions I undertake because practical sense has unconsciously surveyed a situation and my habitus has already inclined me toward certain ends.[135] They are actions generated by the dispositions I’ve acquired that have made me the kind of person who is inclined to respond in certain ways in certain situations because I’ve absorbed a sensibility that “makes sense” of the world—and to functionally “see” the world in that way is already a practical, ethical take on the world.
So practical sense is still a kind of “sense” (sens)—a way of meaning the world, a way of “making sense of” the world. But it is a “making sense” that is not consciously, mentally processed or even thought about. It is, Bourdieu suggests, more like a feel for the game. And one can have a masterful feel for the game without ever being able to articulate what one “knows” in that respect. There are all kinds of virtuoso players who make terrible coaches, precisely because their practical sense and feel for the game does not necessarily translate into the ability to communicate and teach what they know. The didactic expression required to coach is of a different order than the feel for the game one needs in order to play.
Working in this “between” space with boundary concepts, Bourdieu is willing to describe practical sense as a kind of “belief”—the sort of belief that is “an inherent part of belonging to a field” (LP 67). This is not that sort of belief we define as assent to propositions but rather a functional, enacted trust and entrustment to a context and a world. In fact, for Bourdieu, this belief is something that resides in the body:
Practical belief is not a “state of mind,” still less a kind of arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines (“beliefs”), but rather a state of the body. Doxa is a relationship of immediate adherence that is established in practice between a habitus and the field to which it is attuned, the pre-verbal taking-for-granted of the world that flows from practical sense. Enacted belief, instilled by the childhood learning that treats the body as a living memory pad, an automaton that “leads the mind unconsciously along with it,” and as a repository for the most precious values, is the form par excellence of the “blind or symbolic thought” which Leibniz refers to, . . . and which is the product of quasi-bodily dispositions, operational schemes, analogous to a line of verse whose words have been forgotten. (LP 68–69, emphasis original)
So practical sense is a “belief” in the sense that it is a disposition of the body to inhabit its world in certain ways. It is an attunement to the world that is a “pre-verbal taking-for-granted.” But such “enacted belief” is not just mundane, like counting on the table to hold up my soup or trusting that the buses will run on time. Such a “state of the body” is also “a repository for the most precious values.” It’s not just trivial or mundane beliefs that are “carried” in the body, as it were, it is also our ultimate beliefs, our defining beliefs, our “most precious values.” It’s not that beliefs about can openers and changing diapers are housed in the body while big, ethical, metaphysical beliefs about God and justice are reserved for the mind. On Bourdieu’s account, practical sense is comprehensive.
Practical sense, then, is a communal habitus that has been absorbed to such an extent that it now orients my perception of the world without me realizing it. To have acquired a practical sense[136] is to have imbibed embodied beliefs in such a way that I “naturally” relate to my world and my environment on those terms.[137] Practical sense (sens), as Bourdieu summarizes, is “social necessity turned into nature, converted into motor schemes and body automatisms, is what causes practices, in and through what makes them obscure to the eyes of their producers, to be sensible, that is, informed by a common sense” (LP 69). A “common” sense is precisely what “we” can normally take for granted, what is widely shared, the sense and understanding that is a communal heritage and possession. To have acquired a practical sense is to have absorbed communally shared plausibility structures that constitute the world in certain ways—not just “seeing” the world from a certain perspective but intending the world as an environment that calls for certain responses and invites us to certain kinds of projects. To have acquired practical sense is to know more than you think. Practical sense is that “sense” that is operative in action. It’s not just knowledge so that I can act; it is to know by acting.[138] This is not “practical knowledge” in the sense of mental, propositional content that I can then “apply” in practice; it is a unique “sense” that is enacted belief (LP 68). “It is because agents never know completely what they are doing that what they do has more sense than they know” (LP 69).
Practice has a logic of which “logic” knows nothing (to invoke a fittingly Pascalian dictum). Or as Bourdieu puts it, “Practice has a logic which is not that of the logician” (LP 86)—“a logic that is performed directly in bodily gymnastics” (LP 89). It’s not just that practical sense is a clunky, unrefined version of “real” logic.[139] His point is that practical sense has its own irreducible “logic”: what “makes sense” on the order of practice conforms to standards of sensibleness that are fundamentally different from discursive rationality. Something can “make sense” on the order of habitus that cannot be diagrammed as a syllogism. If we fail to recognize this, then we will end up “asking of [practice] more logic than it can give, thereby condemning [ourselves] either to wring incoherences out of it or to thrust a forced coherence upon it” (LP 86).
For example, practical sense is a mode of understanding and orientation that operates without concepts.[140] The logic of practice “dispenses with all the operations required by the construction of a concept. Practical sense ‘selects’ certain objects or actions, and consequently certain of their aspects, in relation to ‘the matter in hand,’ an implicit and practical principle of pertinence” (LP 89–90). You might say practical sense operates with the “so what?” meter dialed way up. It is inherently pragmatic, not in the sense of being cynically instrumentalizing, but in the sense of being primarily concerned with action, with not just being-in-the-world but doing-in-the-world. This is why any attempt to theoretically understand practice is fraught, because “the concepts that the analyst is forced to use . . . to give an account of the practical identifications that ritual acts perform are quite alien to practice” (LP 90). So if the scientist puts conceptual questions to a practitioner, the answers almost have to be false. Indeed,
there is every reason to think that as soon as he reflects on his practice, adopting a quasi-theoretical posture, the agent [i.e., practitioner] loses any chance of expressing the truth of his practice, and especially the truth of the practical relation to the practice. Academic interrogation inclines him to take up a point of view on his own practice that is no longer that of action, without being that of science, encouraging him to shape his explanations in terms of a theory of practice that meshes with the juridical, ethical or grammatical legalism to which the observer is inclined by his own situation. Simply because [the practitioner] is questioned, and questions himself, about the reasons and the raison d’être of his practice, he cannot communicate the essential point, which is that the very nature of practice is that it excludes this question. (LP 91)
Like those Native Americans who are categorized as “unemployed” only when a consumer economy defines what counts as “work,” so the practitioner is only “irrational” once a rationalism has defined what counts as “sense.” Bourdieu, in contrast, is trying to avoid this “theoretization effect” by beginning with a theory of practice as practice, which recognizes—and, in a way, honors—the irreducible logic of practice. But he also realizes that he’s straining against the limits of his lexicon.
The idea of practical logic, a “logic in itself,” without conscious reflexion or logical control, is a contradiction in terms, which defies logical logic. This paradoxical logic is that of all practice, or rather of all practical sense. Caught up in “the matter in hand,” totally present in the present and in the practical functions that it finds there in the form of objective potentialities, practice excludes attention to itself (that is, to the past). It is unaware of the principles that govern it and the possibilities they contain; it can only discover them by enacting them, unfolding them in time. (LP 92)
Practical logic, then, is distinguished from “logical logic”—the rational, deliberative, deductive logic of thinking. Practical sense makes sense, but it does so according to different rules. Indeed, one can have a practical “intelligence” without ever being able to propositionally articulate such knowledge. It is a know-how that is enacted. As such, practical logic “can only be grasped in action”—whereas “the professional dealers in logos want practice to express something that can be expressed in discourse, preferably logical” (LP 92).
Bourdieu’s case in point here is of direct relevance to our present concerns. First, he considers “rites” to be the instance par excellence of practices that resist conceptualization. “Rites, even more than most practices,” he emphasizes, “might almost be designed to demonstrate the fallacy of seeking to contain in concepts a logic that is made to do without concepts[,] of treating practical manipulations and bodily movements as logical operations” (LP 92). A ritual logic defies conceptualization in a particularly intense way, almost to the extent that rites seem “designed” to point up the limits of conceptual analysis and articulation. They are not “expressing” what can be known by other means; rites affect what they do. A rite is “a performative practice that strives to bring about what it acts or says” (LP 92). So rites are a particularly intense mode of practice that, “even more than most practices,” resist analytic paraphrase.[141] “Rites take place because, and only because, they find their raison d’être in the conditions of existence and the dispositions of the agents who cannot afford the luxury of logical speculation, mystical effusions or metaphysical Angst” (LP 96).[142]
With this claim in mind, Bourdieu then invokes a specific example (one that even resonates with the cover of this book): “the religion of the knights” (LP 295n8). In this case, Bourdieu, following Georges Duby, is critical of the “mentalism” that dominates religious studies,[143] taking religion to be a system of ideas and propositions. But as Duby points out,
The religion of the knights “came down entirely to a matter of rites, gestures and formulae,” and he emphasizes the practical, bodily character of ritual practices: “When a warrior took an oath, what counted most in his eyes was not the commitment of his soul but a bodily posture, the contact that his hand, laid on the cross, the Scriptures or a bag of relics, had with the sacred. When he stepped forward to become the liege man of a lord, it was again an attitude, a position of the hands, a ritual sequence of words which only had to be uttered in order to bind the contract.” (LP 295n8, emphasis original)[144]
It’s not that the knights were insincere or “didn’t mean it”; such concerns about sincerity are still operating with a dualism that assumes we “go through” rituals because “inside” we first believe something—that rituals externally “express” some prior, mental interiority. But that fails to recognize (and honor) the integrity and irreducibility of the logic of practice. “By cutting practices off from their real conditions of existence, in order to credit them with alien intentions, out of a false generosity conducive to stylistic effects, the exaltation of lost wisdom dispossesses them of everything that constitutes their raison d’être, and locks them in the eternal essence of a ‘mentality’” (LP 96). In contrast, Bourdieu wants to honor the distinctive logic of practice by recognizing the irreducibility of enacted belief. Ritual is the way we (learn to) believe with our bodies.
Incorporation and Initiation: Writing on the Body
We’ve unpacked in more detail the dynamics of habitus. But we still haven’t quite answered the question above: how do we acquire a habitus? Habitus, we’ve seen, is Bourdieu’s shorthand concept for that nexus of dispositions that makes it possible for us to perceive the world, to experience our environment, to constitute a context, and act therein. It is the visceral plausibility structure by which we make sense of our world and move within it. But the question is, how is such a visceral plausibility structure learned and absorbed?
To invoke a metaphor we encountered earlier, this is the same as asking, how does one become a “native”?[145] We can now say that being a “native” is a matter of having acquired a habitus that has become second nature—which is also a matter of one’s having absorbed, and been absorbed into, the plausibility structures of a people. “Because native membership,” says Bourdieu, “implies a feel for the game in the sense of a capacity for practical anticipation of the ‘upcoming’ future contained in the present, everything that takes place in it seems sensible” (LP 66). You know you’ve become a native when you know what’s coming next, when you can anticipate the next move in social discourse because you are now acclimated to a “world” on a level that no longer requires conscious deliberation or processing. You now make sense of your world with others, but in a way you no longer notice because it’s become “natural” for you. You also act accordingly: since you are now primed to automatically perceive the world in habituated ways, you’re also inclined to act in certain ways because your perception of the world enables you to perceive what’s at stake, what’s required of you, what you’re called to—not because you’re thinking about relevant rules but because, as a “native,” you now can’t imagine seeing the world otherwise. It will just seem that this is “the way things are,” and you will generally act accordingly.
We shouldn’t forget, however, that becoming a native is in fact a kind of cultural accomplishment. It is the cumulative effect of habituation that shapes you as a native. While you can be born into a community, no one is born a “native” in Bourdieu’s sense because “nativity” is not genetic—it’s not just a matter of blood or location. You are formed into a native. And even if you want to join, you cannot simply choose to do so: “one cannot enter this magic circle by an instantaneous decision of the will, but only by birth or by a slow process of co-option and initiation which is equivalent to a second birth” (LP 68).[146] In putting it this way, Bourdieu is just a little sloppy, since even if I am born into a community, I am not born with its habitus; that will also require a “slow process of co-option” and incorporation—an “initiation.” It’s just that if I am born into the community, this will seem like the only option, the natural path. But if I am a “convert” of sorts—if I am going to acquire a new habitus when I have already absorbed others—then that process of co-option and incorporation is also going to bump up against my prior (or concurrent) formation by other communities of practice. There will be other habitus already inscribed within me.
The acquisition of a habitus, then, is described by Bourdieu as a slow process of co-option, initiation, and incorporation. But how exactly does that work? How are we co-opted? What are the means and dynamics of initiation? How is incorporation accomplished? In answering such questions, Bourdieu develops a notion of embodied pedagogy that provides unique resources for us to conceive how liturgical formation works, including how secular liturgies tacitly form in us a distinctive habitus.
Not surprisingly, my incorporation into a social body is effected through the social body co-opting my body. The dynamics of initiation are kinaesthetic. The operation is almost Proustian: “Every social order systematically takes advantage of the disposition of the body and language to function as depositories of deferred thoughts that can be triggered off at a distance in space and time by the simple effect of re-placing the body in an overall posture which recalls the associating thoughts and feelings, in one of the inductive states of the body which, as actors know, gives rise to states of mind” (LP 69). States of the body “give rise” to states of mind: here is the refusal of intellectualism and the recognition that our most fundamental orientations to our world (habitus, practical sense) are embedded in our bodies. So a social order or social body recruits me by conscripting my body through the most mundane means: through bodily postures, repeated words, ritualized cadences. The body politic implants in me a habitus by immersing me in an array of tangible movements and routines that effectively “deposit” an orientation within. This is the mechanics of initiation and incorporation: to incorporate bodies into the social body and to inscribe a common habitus into our bodies in such a way that we “sense” this in ways we don’t know. In this way, the very posture of our body can be a kind of cognizance—and our body can “know” even when our conscious mind might be otherwise engaged. Indeed, the posturing of our body can call up an entire world of “sense,” a web of associations and understandings that reframe our being-in-the-world. When a social body has successfully incorporated me through ritual formation, then what I “know” in this way is triggered by the same movement and postures, even “at a distance” from ritualized space. (This is Proust’s madeleine, of course.)[147] The embodied, ritualized formation begins to spill over, shaping and priming my perception of the world in other spheres of experience.[148] In other words, the ritual is not an end in itself or merely a script for one “compartment” of a life. Because it effectively implants a habitus in the body, that habitus begins to govern action across one’s life. “Thus the attention paid to staging in the great collective ceremonies derives not only from the concern to give a solemn representation of the group,” Bourdieu notes, “but also, as many uses of singing and dancing show, from the less visible intention of ordering thoughts and suggesting feelings through the rigorous marshaling of practices and the orderly disposition of bodies” (LP 69). By putting the body through these paces, the social body marshals my body to act as a kind of organ of that wider body—and so primes my action in ways that resonate with the vision of the social body well beyond the specific ritualized sites.
In ways that resonate with my description of cultural practices as “pedagogies of desire,” Bourdieu describes these formative cultural rituals as pedagogies with “cosmic” dimensions. “One could endlessly enumerate the values given body, made body, by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy which can instill a whole cosmology, through injunctions as insignificant as ‘sit up straight’ or ‘don’t hold your knife in your left hand,’ and inscribe the most fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of a culture in seemingly innocuous details of bearing or physical and verbal manners, so putting them beyond the reach of consciousness and explicit statement” (LP 69, emphasis added). This implicit pedagogy is not didactic; it is kinaesthetic. The cosmology is instilled, not through the dissemination of ideas and beliefs and doctrines, but through more oblique measures that operate on the body and thus bypass consciousness. While a child is learning to sit straight or hold her knife she is unconsciously absorbing a social imaginary, a picture of social order, a vision of the good life—even if her “teachers” might not realize they are passing it on. To learn how to stand or how to walk is to learn how to comport oneself to the world, which is, in turn, to learn how to constitute one’s world. We are being taught how to perceive the world when we are taught to sit up straight; we are learning how to constitute our social world when we’re trained to line up in single file; and when we are enjoined to kneel for confession an entire cosmology is instilled in us. “The body,” he rightly notes, “takes metaphors seriously” (LP 71–72).
“The cunning of pedagogic reason,” Bourdieu concludes, “lies precisely in the fact that it manages to extort what is essential while seeming to demand the insignificant, such as the respect for forms and forms of respect which are the most visible and most ‘natural’ manifestation of respect for the established order, or the concessions of politeness, which always contain political concessions” (LP 69, emphasis added). He later invokes an example: “The Kabyle woman setting up her loom is not performing an act of cosmogony; she is simply setting up her loom to weave cloth intended to serve a technical function. It so happens that, given the symbolic equipment available to her for practically thinking her own practice—in particular her language, which constantly refers her back to the logic of ploughing—she can only think what she is doing in the enchanted, that is to say, mystified, form that spiritualism, thirsty for eternal mysteries, finds so enchanting” (LP 96). This is not a criticism of the Kabyle woman but a caution to those who would try to (theoretically) understand her practice: there is a distinct meaning to her practice because of its placement in a wider ritual network. This is not something she could necessarily articulate, nor is it something she’s been instructed in by didactic means. By learning to weave she has woven the fabric of a world, a world that is also woven into her.
Such pedagogies are effective precisely because they work this way, not in spite of the fact. Values are “given body, made body.” And it is because they are incarnate pedagogies that they are “cunning,” operative even when we’re not setting out to be trained or formed. These are pedagogies that “teach” us even when—and perhaps especially when—we haven’t signed up to be taught.[149] Rhythms that are “seemingly innocuous” are, in fact, fundamentally formative; while seeming to demand only the insignificant, in fact they are extorting what is essential. Our bodies are students even when we don’t realize it, and because we are so fundamentally oriented by this habitus, this incarnate education ends up being the more powerful. The effect of such implicit pedagogies is that these dispositions become “possessed” by the body—what Bourdieu, availing himself of another Aristotelian notion, calls a “bodily hexis.” “Bodily hexis is political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking” (LP 69–70). In this way a worldview is materialized, incarnated.
It is just to the extent that a social body—and its social vision—is incarnated that it will be pedagogically successful, able to incorporate members into the body politic and inscribe in them the habitus that defines a people or a polis. So my acquisition of a habitus is always at the same time a matter of my being acquired by a people or a polis. I am incorporated into the body politic just to the extent that the social vision of the community is embedded in my body. Habitus is acquired, is learned, by incarnate pedagogies that in oblique, allusive, cunning ways work on the body and thus orient the whole person. “What is ‘learned by the body’ is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is” (LP 73). To have been so educated is to have become a new person.
Picturing the Pedagogy of Insignificance with Carson McCullers
Bourdieu helps us to see that learning what seems insignificant can be training us for (and about) what’s essential—that what’s ultimate can unwittingly be at stake in what appears to be innocuous. Pedagogies are “cunning” just when they extort what is essential from what seems banal—which means, of course, that nothing is banal, nothing is insignificant. Even the most mundane can instill a whole cosmology.
Which is to say that we learn to love from the little stuff. There is a habituation and training of our desire in our relation to the most mundane. This is beautifully pictured in Carson McCullers’s celebrated short story, “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud.”[150] In the early morning hours at a streetcar café, a young boy stops in for a coffee as he nears the end of his paper route. A number of the regulars are there in the respectful quiet of predawn, some just finished the night shift, others on their way to the mill. Hunched in the corner is an unfamiliar man, his nose in his beer, making the others nervous. As the boy pays up, the strange man calls out, “Son! Hey Son!”
The older man buttonholes the boy as if he were the Ancient Mariner with a life-or-death tale to tell. Grasping him by the shoulders, then turning the boy’s face from side to side, the old man says slowly, “I love you.”
Guffaws come from the counter while the boy sidles away, sheepish and awkward. Seeing the boy’s distance, the old man seeks to explain. What follows is a story of love lost—of a woman who got away. But the man offers it as the culmination of his learning, offering the findings from his empiricial observation. “I am talking about love,” the man said. “With me it is a science.” These findings were hard won, for he had much to learn.
“It was like this,” the man continued. “I am a person who feels many things. All my life one thing after another has impressed me. Moonlight. The leg of a pretty girl. One thing after another. But the point is that when I had enjoyed anything there was a peculiar sensation as though it was laying around loose in me. Nothing seemed to finish itself up or fit in with the other things. Women? I had my portion of them. The same. Afterwards laying around loose in me. I was a man who had never loved.
But then she came along, the woman who, the man said, “was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?”
The boy did not. He didn’t know what to think.
And, of course, the old man is here with his nose in a mug because this woman—this assembly line for his soul—left him. At first he searched valiantly, frantically, frenetically, around the country, for two years. But in the third year of her absence, he says, “a curious thing began to happen to me.” He began to forget her. He could no longer picture her. He would try to think about her and his mind would be a blank. “But a sudden piece of glass on a sidewalk. Or a nickel tune in a music box. A shadow on a wall at night. And I would remember. It might happen in a street and I would cry or bang my head against a lamppost.”
The boy continued to be puzzled, “A piece of glass?” he mused, quizzically.
“Anything,” the man said. “I would walk around and I had no power of how and when to remember her. You think you can put up a kind of shield. But remembering don’t come to a man face forward—it corners around sideways. I was at the mercy of everything I saw and heard. Suddenly instead of me combing the countryside to find her she begun to chase me around in my very soul. She chasing me, mind you! And in my soul.”
But it was not until the fifth year of her absence that he finally hit upon his science—a strange science, almost like a “logic” of practice. And while it’s “hard to explain scientifically,” the old man gives it his best shot for the sake of the boy. He is a veritable evangelist for his science of love that begins with recognizing “what is wrong with us.”
“ ‘Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with? . . . A woman,’ the old man said. ‘Without science, with nothing to go by, they undertake the most dangerous and sacred experience in God’s earth. They fall in love with a woman.’ ”
“They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love?”
The old man reached over and grasped the boy by the collar of his leather jacket. He gave him a gentle little shake and his green eyes gazed down unblinking and grave.
“Son, do you know how love should be begun?”
The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old man leaned closer and whispered:
“A tree. A rock. A cloud.”
For six years since, he has schooled himself differently. He has approached love from the other end: he has learned to love a tree, a rock, a cloud, and has thus trained himself for bigger things. He has learned to love the insignificant and in so doing has prepared himself to love what’s ultimate. “For six years now,” he continues, “I have gone around by myself and built up my science. And now I am a master. Son. I can love anything. No longer do I have to think about it even. I see a street full of people and a beautiful light comes in me. I watch a bird in the sky. Or I meet a traveler on the road. Everything, Son. And anybody. All stranger and all loved!”
Our erotic habits and inclinations are cultivated by the mundane. We learn to love by pedagogies of (seeming) insignificance. And the God who is Love meets us in our banalities and teaches us to love from our end. Word. Wine. Bread.
