Re: [xmca] ego, self, etc.

I try to incorporate Bourdieu's habitus into my reading of Hegel by taking
Bourdieu's habitus as a more concrete and defensible description of what
Hegel called "Subjective Spirit". I think "Objective Spirit" (Right,
property, morality and ethics, system of production, civil society,
government, world history, etc.) cannot be subsumed into a Bourdieuian habitus.

Andy
At 09:21 PM 1/02/2008 -0800, you wrote:
>Martin,
>
> I enjoyed your synopsis of habitus and field very much. However I
> think that Bourdieu's framework actually can provide for developmental
> understandings and I'm not sure Bourdieu would have viewed theoretical
> compatibility with Hegel's philosophy of history qua spirit as a
> theoretical necessity or desirable objective.
>
> As I understand it, the concept of habitus only acquires theoretical
> meaning in relation to a specific field of activity developed around the
> acquisition of different types of capital. Habitus would be totally
> abstract without field and of course incapable of providing an
> alternative to anything.
>
> I think a case can be made for studying activity systems as fields and
> vice versa. Activity systems/fields have become more complex over since
> proto-hominids began using tools and the creation of new needs and
> systems for satisfying them have accompanied the extinction of old
> activity system/fields as this social differentiation has unfolded. The
> "unfolding of the spirit" within this dialectical field-habitus unity
> within a specific object oriented practices as the resolution of
> contradictions of different kinds. It would not be found in some
> abstract, free-floating habitus detached from reference to any specific
> field of practice.
>
> Paul.
>
>
>
> I'm not completely convinced that habitus provides an adequate
> alternative account of the human subject - alternative to the Kantian
> one, I mean.
> It doesn't seem to have room for some of the complexities of, for example,
>Hegel's account of the unfolding of the subject.
>
>
>
>
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  Andy Blunden : http://home.mira.net/~andy/ tel (H) +61 3 9380 9435,
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Received on Fri Feb 1 22:00 PST 2008