how people are acquired by values

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Sat, 02 Jan 1999 17:29:09 -0500

My use of Bourdieu was not trying to be reductionistic about values, but
just to suggest that he at least provides some basis for an inquiry into
how we come to have _our_ values, and how they so often resemble those of
others with similar historical trajectories in social space. It _is_
reductionistic to claim that broad categories of social position determine
personal values and the associated identities. This claim is only grounded
on the fact of statistical similarities within social position categories;
it does not, as Edouard and others correctly note, also explain differences
within those categories. I

t also does not provide a detailed model of how anyone winds up with a
particular set of values; really it only gives a sort of Darwinian
contrafactual argument: if someone in social position X did NOT end up with
such-and-such values, they would be radically misfit to their life chances
and probably deeply unhappy, frustrated, and perhaps rebellious. Too much
such discontent and society would not have the structure it does. Of course
many people do find themselves in just such an uncomfortable position, and
they are as much enabled to arrive there by prevailing social conditions as
are those who end up less at odds with their social positioning. If we
throw in a bit of Bakhtin's heteroglossia theory (generalized to practices
and valuing practices/discourses, ala 'heteropraxia'), we are likely to
notice that ANY values someone winds up with are likely to be the normal
values for SOME social position (or mix of positions), and that we all have
complex positionings in the system of social values ... plus a few values
that are profoundly idiosyncratic, though these tend to get buffered in
ways that make them matter less on larger social scales -- ie. where
Bourdieu is looking.

Bourdieu sees part of the picture: to some degree a lot of us do wind up
with values which are relatively typical for our gender, class, epoch, age
group, life trajectory, etc. and we certainly acquire these from features
of the social environment shared with many other people. But there _is_
more that matters. To some degree most of us also wind up with values
shared with people of OTHER genders, groups, etc. ... sometimes several
others, sometimes just one other, and sometimes, because of heteropraxia,
with their typical values that conflict with those of most people of our
OWN gender, class, etc. And in addition, most of us have in some sense
developed highly individual values, or versions of values, or something
like a value but more specific, that is importantly different from the
values of others of ANY gender, class, age group, etc.

We are dealing here with classic issues of social structural theory ...
including the basic issues of diversity within social categories, and the
origins of new practices/discourses/values in the social system as a whole.
We have the problem of just how specific social categories ought to be (two
genders, twenty genders? five social classes, twenty-five?), how high the
dimensionality of social space needs to be for descriptive or explanatory
adequacy, etc. We also have the dynamical problems of how the dimensions of
difference or variation get produced/maintained/changed. We have the fact,
and the importance, of hybridity and other sorts of individual (and group)
"misfitness". And we have questions about the origins of uniqueness/novelty
and about the determinants of how it may spread, be censored out, or be
buffered so as to affect only some levels of organization/scale.

People often criticize Bourdieu, or at least note the limitations of his
models, regarding an account of HOW a class-specific habitus is actually
produced along a life-trajectory typical of the class (or other category,
sub-category, intersection of such). This is what I was comparing to our
theme of identity formation; the interesting similarity is as regards
values. For B. all practices/habits/dispositions are part of the habitus,
or at least are under its broad influence, and we often think of values in
these terms as well (as opposed say to explicit values-calculus for
decision-making) ... enduring, not-too-specific, valuational, volitional
dispositions.

I would like to apply a timescales analysis to these issues, because I
suspect that what counts as a VALUE is different on different timescales,
and so also on different social scales. A personal value is not the same
thing as a cultural value. There are differences of specificity determined
by the different scales over which we must take 'averages' to define
invariants or commonalities. I will leave this till I've had more time to
think it through.

A similar set of considerations would apply to notions of identity that are
not just values. We could perhaps stretch a notion of values to include
unverbalized values, and embodied values ... values as feelings or bodily
dispositions. We could imagine that every actional disposition of the body
has a valuational aspect. The we might be getting close to my exaggerated
thesis that our identity is nothing but our values.

to be continued ... JAY.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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