It is in the dialectical relation between the body and a space, (…) that one finds the form par excellence of the structural apprenticeship which leads to the em-bodying of structures in the world, that is the appropriating of the world of a body thus enabled to appropriate the world. (Bourdieu 1977:89)
I don't have many comments on this either, this work somehow turned into part of common sense now. I agree focusing on practice is a useful start point, and also help us solve problems of agency, structure and individual. So he gives us an initial push away form looking for stable mechanisms of social interactions, but more importantly away form discourse per se as a privileged force effecting power.
He also gives good advice to ethnographic work (and even though his ethnography is not exactly fantastically innovative) especially in regards to the ethnographers projection of order into the field. It is now a bit of a handy cliché to say that ethnography is a mutual construction of knowledge through practice, but is still an interesting departure point. The problems of Bourdieu are probably that is not so clear the way the tension reproduction - innovation is resolved or which is the point in which the tension is no longer sustainable, in this the process of subjectification is more a given than something he examines. In relation to this the internalization-externalization processes remain a bit obscure, into what exactly is internalized and how objectification happens (through repetition, discipline, external glance, a conduct of conduct for improving self?). Or what is the mediation between sensorial experience - internalization.
If the different fields: of the social, economic, symbolic are independent and each holds its particular struggles, but somehow are in correlation (thus more symbolic power is linked to more economic power) is not so clear how this relation between fields happen and what type of power is created in the relation between fields. How to explain with Bourdieu moments in which art is devaluated altogether or how popular knowledge suddenly becomes dominant during a popular government, how productions of a field become appropriated by other field. This rises the question of how to understand the overlaps of fields, even he does some of this in relation (more cultural capital = more differed economic capital) in his analysis cultural capital. Political patronage is more about social capital in the construction of a net of followers, about access to a little economic capital, about maintaining an ethic principle of return of favour, is it symbolic in as much as signs of peronism for example are a necessary part of reassuring the circle, is it just symbolic violence that inverts the term of the debt.
Maybe the generative is not very clear for me either. It is clear that structures are arbitrary and are a created by people, it is also clear his proposition of the need to bring the doxa into the field of the critique, but then is not so clear how the new structures appear, is it just an effect of the critique, or the irruption of a subordinated aspect of a field that turns to be dominant.
Ok here again, my extended notes on the text
Bourdieu understands social relations in a circular movement: the individual generates the social structure of the world through practice. The structure of the world moulds the individuals. With the concept of practice, as social action directed by a social system of dispositions, but also with room for innovation and individual decision making, he bridges the tension between these terms. At the same time he recognizes practice as the concrete base of cultural perception, meanings and actions. Culture is then not an abstract structure through which people conceive the world but a set of material conditions of existence result of practice. The structure is for him an equivalent of the objective conditions, the concrete organization of the social world. Practice is the result of the strategic use by individuals of social dispositions. This dispositions differ form rules as they are not rigid determination, but conforms a habitus a that are themselves the result of a concrete social interaction. Structure, Bourdieu argues, is a dynamic result of action and originated in different and superposed dispositions for action, thinking and feeling.
His proposition of a theory of practice implies having a dialectical view of the relation between practices and structures, between objective conditions and subjective experience. For him we should be able to understand how “rules” only exist as much as are actualized and reproduced through practice, “structuring structures”. Structures structure movement which create and recreate the structures. But also how we are always already in a structure, or for him the objective world (aunque B no lo dice me gusta esta frase, para recordar que siempre aparecemos en un campo politico). A practice that is material and performed through people’s culturally informed bodies that sense, think, feel and act in the world, producing its objective conditions. In this sense he proposes not only to analyze practice, but that the act of analysis is itself a practice. A practice as the researcher is interacting with the group he is studding, trying to understand the dispositions that motivate action, as well as understanding all the variations and particularities of what he observes.
For Bourdieu practice is not just the result of a mental activity of an individual that liberates himself by thinking (in Sartre’s terms). Neither is practice just the mechanical repetition of a social structure. Practice is the concrete action of people in the world. Practice is the result of a person’s previous past experience, of his position in the social system, the knowledge produced in this experience, and particular expectations and way of feeling. Practice is the activity that creates the social conditions of the world. In this sense practice is the “object”, the production of knowledge and method.
Habitus is an embodied system of dispositions that generate and delimits directions action. This concept recovers the individual will and decision making yet showing how we can understand repetitions and continuity in human action. Habitus a then an unconscious way of doing and thinking inscribed in people’s bodies through their interaction with the world, a socially produced field of interactions. A world, that was previously produced by antecessors and has been incorporated by each individual through his past experience. This previous experience, heterogeneous and not necessary coherent, unrecognized by people, orients his future assumptions and strategies in the world. Every new interaction forces a readjustment of the conception of the appropriate – in-appropriate action, but at the same time each situation opens new possibilities. Thus, different people (and the same person under different circumstances) use rules in accordance to particular and contingent interests, in order to gain power by positioning in a better place in the social system. So we can understand practice as the result of different level of assumptions, some deeply internalized (particularly the ones acquired in early childhood) and unconscious, and some that are object of reflection.
Synthetically, the author establishes a circle from objective conditions that are the structure the world to people internalization and use of those conditions. Then from people’s actions that are material and have particular meanings and create those objective conditions. In other words he is looking for the social dispositions that limit and frame human agency as part of unequal power relations, and are reinforced (and veiled) symbolically through symbolic violence. In this I think that he is somehow echoing Marx in that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” (frase ya muy citada pero que me sigue pareciendo muy potente)
Bourdieu understands the doxa as the field of the taken for granted, the unquestioned. The doxa is also what is not conscious and what cannot be reflected on. It is a set of ideas but more generating schemes. This is ways of thinking, acting and perceiving the world, that produce a sense of reality. The base of the doxa and its power is the misrecognition of the individuals of the limits it imposes, by presenting this limits as natural limits. Therefore people operate following these schemes producing the objective conditions. By doing so people reproduce the objective conditions without recognizing the power relations and the arbitrariness of the limits they are contributing to reproduce.
Symbolic capital also follows a homologous organization to that of economic and social capital. But the homology is not to be understood as a reflection of one structure upon the other but rather as interconnected systems. Economic capital is a result of economic capital accumulation. Inverting the terms, economic capital accumulation depends on a process of veiling of the objective power relations involved in it through symbolic violence. But symbolic violence is not just “ideology”, but a more general veil of the arbitrariness of social organization, hierarchies and status included as well as economic accumulation, this is done through the imposition f categories and ways of perception by those who have more symbolic capital upon those who have less who recognize it as just a “right” or proper way of acting.
Modes of domination, this is, ways of accumulation of symbolic, social and economic capital, in societies which have no institutionalized state or education system or market, have to be constantly reproduced through strategic actions. In these societies domination is produced in the interpersonal relations, a tension that must be masked under the veil of symbolic relations, thus producing symbolic violence. In contrast, in state and market societies, power relations are fixed in the processes of institutionalization, which reinforces the Doxa. In this cases law guarantees a set of relations and subject position in them, so personal relations are no longer the basis of reproduction. In these cases the social system becomes an objective reality materialized in the institution and people’s relations to them.
Maybe the generative is not very clear for me either. It is clear that structures are arbitrary and are a created by people, it is also clear his proposition of the need to bring the doxa into the field of the critique, but then is not so clear how the new structures appear, is it just an effect of the critique, or the irruption of a subordinated aspect of a field that turns to be dominant.
Ok here again, my extended notes on the text
Bourdieu understands social relations in a circular movement: the individual generates the social structure of the world through practice. The structure of the world moulds the individuals. With the concept of practice, as social action directed by a social system of dispositions, but also with room for innovation and individual decision making, he bridges the tension between these terms. At the same time he recognizes practice as the concrete base of cultural perception, meanings and actions. Culture is then not an abstract structure through which people conceive the world but a set of material conditions of existence result of practice. The structure is for him an equivalent of the objective conditions, the concrete organization of the social world. Practice is the result of the strategic use by individuals of social dispositions. This dispositions differ form rules as they are not rigid determination, but conforms a habitus a that are themselves the result of a concrete social interaction. Structure, Bourdieu argues, is a dynamic result of action and originated in different and superposed dispositions for action, thinking and feeling.
His proposition of a theory of practice implies having a dialectical view of the relation between practices and structures, between objective conditions and subjective experience. For him we should be able to understand how “rules” only exist as much as are actualized and reproduced through practice, “structuring structures”. Structures structure movement which create and recreate the structures. But also how we are always already in a structure, or for him the objective world (aunque B no lo dice me gusta esta frase, para recordar que siempre aparecemos en un campo politico). A practice that is material and performed through people’s culturally informed bodies that sense, think, feel and act in the world, producing its objective conditions. In this sense he proposes not only to analyze practice, but that the act of analysis is itself a practice. A practice as the researcher is interacting with the group he is studding, trying to understand the dispositions that motivate action, as well as understanding all the variations and particularities of what he observes.
For Bourdieu practice is not just the result of a mental activity of an individual that liberates himself by thinking (in Sartre’s terms). Neither is practice just the mechanical repetition of a social structure. Practice is the concrete action of people in the world. Practice is the result of a person’s previous past experience, of his position in the social system, the knowledge produced in this experience, and particular expectations and way of feeling. Practice is the activity that creates the social conditions of the world. In this sense practice is the “object”, the production of knowledge and method.
Habitus is an embodied system of dispositions that generate and delimits directions action. This concept recovers the individual will and decision making yet showing how we can understand repetitions and continuity in human action. Habitus a then an unconscious way of doing and thinking inscribed in people’s bodies through their interaction with the world, a socially produced field of interactions. A world, that was previously produced by antecessors and has been incorporated by each individual through his past experience. This previous experience, heterogeneous and not necessary coherent, unrecognized by people, orients his future assumptions and strategies in the world. Every new interaction forces a readjustment of the conception of the appropriate – in-appropriate action, but at the same time each situation opens new possibilities. Thus, different people (and the same person under different circumstances) use rules in accordance to particular and contingent interests, in order to gain power by positioning in a better place in the social system. So we can understand practice as the result of different level of assumptions, some deeply internalized (particularly the ones acquired in early childhood) and unconscious, and some that are object of reflection.
Synthetically, the author establishes a circle from objective conditions that are the structure the world to people internalization and use of those conditions. Then from people’s actions that are material and have particular meanings and create those objective conditions. In other words he is looking for the social dispositions that limit and frame human agency as part of unequal power relations, and are reinforced (and veiled) symbolically through symbolic violence. In this I think that he is somehow echoing Marx in that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” (frase ya muy citada pero que me sigue pareciendo muy potente)
Bourdieu understands the doxa as the field of the taken for granted, the unquestioned. The doxa is also what is not conscious and what cannot be reflected on. It is a set of ideas but more generating schemes. This is ways of thinking, acting and perceiving the world, that produce a sense of reality. The base of the doxa and its power is the misrecognition of the individuals of the limits it imposes, by presenting this limits as natural limits. Therefore people operate following these schemes producing the objective conditions. By doing so people reproduce the objective conditions without recognizing the power relations and the arbitrariness of the limits they are contributing to reproduce.
Symbolic capital also follows a homologous organization to that of economic and social capital. But the homology is not to be understood as a reflection of one structure upon the other but rather as interconnected systems. Economic capital is a result of economic capital accumulation. Inverting the terms, economic capital accumulation depends on a process of veiling of the objective power relations involved in it through symbolic violence. But symbolic violence is not just “ideology”, but a more general veil of the arbitrariness of social organization, hierarchies and status included as well as economic accumulation, this is done through the imposition f categories and ways of perception by those who have more symbolic capital upon those who have less who recognize it as just a “right” or proper way of acting.
Modes of domination, this is, ways of accumulation of symbolic, social and economic capital, in societies which have no institutionalized state or education system or market, have to be constantly reproduced through strategic actions. In these societies domination is produced in the interpersonal relations, a tension that must be masked under the veil of symbolic relations, thus producing symbolic violence. In contrast, in state and market societies, power relations are fixed in the processes of institutionalization, which reinforces the Doxa. In this cases law guarantees a set of relations and subject position in them, so personal relations are no longer the basis of reproduction. In these cases the social system becomes an objective reality materialized in the institution and people’s relations to them.
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