I generally agree I think with Chuck Bazerman's thoughtful
application of a somewhat dynamicized and personalized notion of
habitus ala Bourdieu to the problem of social position and
abstract reflexivity.
It seems to be a consequence of most of the models I know that
abstract reflexivity (the habit of seeing one's own actions and
desires as part of larger social processes, and as particular
options among categories of such options) is associated with
middle-class rather than lower-class habitus, and is in fact a
distinguishing class-difference marker, at least as seen from the
middle-class viewpoint of those who make these theories. We all,
of course, as language-users, formulate alternatives to the here
and now and project possible futures, but we do not all do so
(the classic argument says) in terms of relationships and models
that go beyond our personal needs, interests, and experiences. We
are not all in the habit of adopting abstract, non-experience-
based models as tools for action, or of using such models
according to the canons of some sort of formal, categorial logic.
(I'm more persuaded of this last version.)
There are endless middle-class (patriarchal) explanations for the
'deficit' of those who do not do so: Kids because they haven't
yet learned to. Women because they are hormonally incapable. Non-
europeans because they lack the self-discipline needed for formal
thinking, or are mired in superstition. Workers and peasants
because they are forced to be too preoccupied with survival needs
to have time or interest in 'higher' things, or because their
lives are too limited in scope and 'wider' social models seem
irrelevant to them (one of the more charitable and currently
popular theories, cf. Bernstein on the effects of the division of
labor). I don't think Bourdieu really gives an explanation; he
only seems to say that the habitus is a product of the kinds of
lives such people typically lead, presumably implying that in
such lives these abstract-reflexive dispositions are not
inculcated, do not seem especially necessary.
Needless to say, I think we should be skeptical of all such
explanations, and indeed of the formulation of the phenomenon
itself.
Since I am leading a faculty seminar tomorrow on Bruno Latour's
_We Have Never Been Modern_, I am tempted to use some of his
interesting logic to reformulate the issue. Latour argues in
WHNBM that modern european societies have a clever mythology
about ourselves that, among other problematic consequences,
strives to divide us radically from 'primitives' and premoderns
of all sorts. It involves the usual stuff about our rationalism,
scientific approach, etc. Latour dismisses such _qualitative_
formulations of difference in favor of an interesting sort of
'quantitative' difference: in the length and complexity of the
chains of people, things, and social-theoretical constructs that
we can manage to hold together. We have embroiled ourselves with
more things, at greater distances, and invented more intermediate
links do so, in the process changing ourselves as the products of
our participation in all these far-flung networks. Think of the
ramifications of even the simplest consumer technologies we use,
and then apply the same reasoning to our social and intellectual
'technologies'.
The classic transposition of the great class divide to this model
would say that either middle-class people trace out longer and
more complex such networks, or adopt models that enable us to
respond locally in terms of more global pictures of the
ramifications, influences, consequences, etc. But there is the
other possibility: that the difference is only in _which_
ramifications we trace out and model for guiding our responses.
Latour's theory is a lot 'flatter' than traditional ones; there
are different networks and subnetworks, but not necessarily any
basis for constructing a natural hierarchy among them. While it
may be a little hard to shake class prejudices about such matters
(especially for intellectuals), the analogous argument along
gender lines seems to favor the reinterpretation, I think. The
traditional patriarchal characterization of the difference
between masculine and feminine 'thinking' seems pretty close, in
matters of the disposition toward abstractions, to the one for
class differences (cf. Walkerdine). But it seems in this case far
more reasonable, to me at least, to suppose that the difference
is in _which_ networks are traced and modeled than in the
extensiveness of the networks.
JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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