The problems that interest me in Bourdieu I think of as quite specific.
For many years I have been thinking about literate interactions within
organized social fields. As a writing teacher I have been interested in
the socialization of individuals into discursively organized fields of
interaction with their particular practices, the possibilites of
expression and activity and cooperative accomplishment within those
fields, the development of mind and consciousness as individuals
participate in particular discursive fields and sets of fields, the
perception/interpretation/evaluation of others utterances within these
structured activity fields and the placing of one's own position and
stance intertextually and interactively within such fields, the relations
of multiple discursive fields with each other as well as with fields of
material practice, and similar issues that try to understand what it
means to read and write as social actions with cognitive and material
correlates. Over the years I have drawn on structural, structurationist,
phenomenological, and micro- sociologies; social, socio-cultural,
interpersonal, and cognitive psychologies; functional, pragmatic, and
socio-linguistics; literary, rhetorical, and genre theory (though careful to
avoid the narrowly textualized versions of each of those); and science
studies.
Within these nexuses, I have found habitus a very useful way to
get at the position and disposition from which one writes within a
somatically sensed and in-part cognitively perceived social environment.
My emphasis on habitus as "habitat for action" changes, I am aware,
Bourdieu's emphasis on habit as the enduring source of habitus (although
I am also very interested in understanding the enduring cognitive and
discursive frame we carry with us).
To put this another way, in much of
B's writing on habitus it seems to me that he is most concerned with
class reproduction through the enduring evaluational and behavioral
dispositions we carry with us--a reproduction that we can only free
ourselves from by reflection which allows a distancing from the machinery
of social reproduction. In some of his more recent writing (such as in
Language and Symbolic Action, Intro to Reflective Sociology, and Field
of Cultural Production) he has brief passages which suggest the more
positive possibilities of reflective action as a mode of social
engagement and social change as well as entertaining that class is not
the only salient aspect of social structure and that groupings and fields
may organize around a variety of principles, activities, or affiliations.
He also has been exploring, or at at least recognizing the possibility
of, the evolving habitus of individuals as they move through a variety of
experiences in a variety of fields.
These more recent movements match more closely my concerns to
understand literate participation of an individual who develops
cognitively, behaviorly, and in access to resources, within and through
social experiences, such experiences carried out within a highly
differentiated society at this moment in time--differentiated not only at
the level of major institutions such as commerce, science, law, and
religion, but within elaborate internal differentiation (often maintained
through the circulation of documents) such as between high energy
theoretical physics and experimental biophysics or between production
management and product development within a single corporation or between
the spheres of public values discussion and mass entertainment
production. Many of the problems of modern society have to do with
effective communication within and between these highly differentiated
spheres. The problem of class (however we may characterize it) is only
one part of the complex of differentiations that people are confronted
with in the modern world, although class issues may be widely relevant in
differential acess, participation, goals, and resources within these varied
fields of activity.
Coordinately, I keep looking for those moments when B becomes
more behaviourly concrete about habitus, as he does in some passages on
hexus. That is, the cognitive/evaluative aspect of habitus which B seems
to most refer to ought to have some dialectical relationship to specific
practices one engages in--habitually, socially imitative or
responsive practices that position one so
as to have certain experiences which one might perceive in particular
ways, or behavioral practices that derive from one's reflectioons on
one's perceived position in relation to perceived and evaluated others,
or behavioral practices that evoke responses from others which then
provide grist for one's own evaluation of the others one is surrounded
with and the social stuctures one participates in.
So I am interested as much as possible in understanding whatever
I can wring out of B's discussions of habitus and its relation to fields.
I also have further questions about B's concepts of fields and power, but
I will leave those for future moments in the discussion. Right now I
would appreciate any observations people have about different
perspectives they have on habitus, and how they might give us a more
concrete and nuanced description of what habitus might be.
Thank you,
Charles Bazerman
English Department
University of California, Santa Barbara