Dichotomous Divisions/Distinctions [the '2D' codified vision of society]
By Pierre Bourdieu [the 2nd of 2 concepts he made famous]
Pierre Bourdieu wrote:
THE FIRST SOURCE:
Extract from: The Logic of Practice, Book 2 Chapter 3, ‘Irresistible Analogy’
[Epigraph]
“I think I've made a new theological discovery.”
“What is it?”
“If you hold your hands upside down, you get the opposite of what you pray for!”
Charles M. Schulz, There's No One Like You, Snoopy
The extent to which the schemes of the habitus are objectified in codified knowledge, transmitted as such, varies greatly between one area of practice and another. The relative frequency of sayings, prohibitions, proverbs and strongly regulated rites declines as one moves from practices linked to or directly associated with agricultural activity, such as weaving, pottery and cuisine, towards the divisions of the day or the moments of human life, not to mention areas apparently abandoned to arbitrariness, such as the internal organization of the house, the parts of the body, colours or animals. Although they are among the most codified aspects of the cultural tradition, the precepts of custom which govern the temporal distribution of activities vary greatly from place to place and, in the same place, from one informant to another.
[MGH: Bourdieu’s fieldwork in Algeria informed much of his writing.]
THE GENERATIVE FORMULA
… The fundamental division runs through the social world from end to end, from the division of labour between the sexes and the associated division of the agrarian cycle into labour periods and production period, through ritual practices and into representations and values. The same practical schemes, inscribed at the deepest level of the bodily dispositions, are at the heart both of the division of labour and of the rites or representations that tend to reinforce or justify it.The empirical work that establishes the ‘columns of contraries’ on which each cultural system is based in its arbitrary, that is, historical, singularity, makes it possible to grasp the principle of the fundamental separation, the founding nomos which one is tempted to see as situated at the origin, in a kind of initial act of constitution, and which is in fact instituted in each of the ordinary acts of ordinary practice, such as those regulated by the division of labour between the sexes - this unconscious, collective, continuous creation being the basis of its durability and its transcendence with respect to individual consciousnesses.
The distribution of activities between the sexes can be accounted for by combining three cardinal oppositions: the opposition between movement inwards (and, secondarily, downwards) and movement outwards (or upwards); the opposition between the wet and the dry; and the opposition between continuous actions, aimed at maintaining and managing the united contraries, and short, discontinuous actions, aimed at uniting contraries or separating united contraries. There is no need to dwell on the opposition between the inside, the house, cooking, or inward movement (storing provisions), and the outside, the field, the market, the assembly, or outward movement, between the invisible and the visible, the private and the public, etc.
The opposition between the wet and the dry, which partly overlaps with the former, assigns to woman everything that has to do with water, green things, grass, the garden, vegetables, milk, wood, stone, earth (women hoe barefoot and knead the clay for pottery or the inner walls with their bare hands). But the last opposition, the most important one in terms of ritual logic, distinguishes male acts, brief, dangerous confrontations with the liminal forces - ploughing, harvesting, slaughter of the ox - which use instruments made with fire and are accompanied by prophylactic rites, and female acts of gestation and maintenance, continuous attention aimed at ensuring continuity - cooking (analogous to gestation), rearing children and livestock (which implies cleaning, sweeping, carrying away dung, the smell of which causes livestock and children to fade away), weaving (seen from one standpoint as bringing up a life), managing the reserves, or mere picking and gathering, all these activities being accompanied by simple propitiatory rites. Supremely vulnerable in herself, that is, in her life and her fertility ('a pregnant woman has one foot in this world and one foot in the other’; 'her grave is open from conception to the fortieth day after confinement’) and in the lives for which she is responsible, those of the children, the livestock and the garden, woman, the guardian of the united contraries, that is, of life itself, must manage and protect life, both technically and magically.
THE FUNDAMENTAL DIVISION
Knowing the fundamental principle of division (the paradigm of which is the opposition between the sexes), one can recreate - and therefore fully understand - all the practices and ritual symbols on the basis of two operational schemes which, being natural processes culturally constituted in and through ritual practice, are indissolubly logical and biological, like the natural processes they aim to reproduce (in both senses), when they are conceived in terms of magical logic. On the one hand , there is the reuniting of separated contraries, of which marriage, ploughing or the quenching of iron are exemplary cases, and which engenders life, as the realized reunion of contraries ; and on the other hand, there is the separation of reunited contraries, with, for example, the sacrifice of the ox and harvesting, enacted as denied murders . These two operations, of reuniting that which the fundamental division (nomos: distribution and law, law of partition, principle of division) separates - male and female, dry and wet, heaven and earth, fire (or fire-forged instruments) and water - and separating that which the ritual transgression, ploughing or marriage, the pre-condition of all life, has reunited, are both acts of inevitable sacrilege, necessary and unnatural transgressions of an arbitrary yet necessary limit.
In short, once the fundamental principle of division and these two classes of operations have been identified, it is possible to re-produce the whole set of pertinent data in a constructed description that is quite irreducible to the endless and always incomplete enumeration of rites and their variants which renders most previous analyses so bewildering or bewitching …
…
THRESHOLDS AND PASSAGES
The transitional periods have all the properties of the threshold, the boundary between two spaces, where the antagonistic principles confront one another and the world is reversed.
Boundaries are where battles take place: boundaries between fields, which are the sites or the causes of very real struggles (a well-known refrain refers to old men who ‘shift the boundaries'); boundaries between the seasons, with, for example, the fight between winter and spring; the threshold of the house, where the antagonistic forces meet and all the changes of state occur that are linked to the transition from inside to outside (all the 'first goings-out' - of the woman after giving birth, of the child, the milk, the calf, etc.) or from outside to inside (such as the bride's first entry, the conversion of fallowness into fertility); the boundary between day and night (‘the hour when day and night fight it out').
The rites associated with these moments also obey the principle of the maximization of magical profit. They aim to ensure the concordance of mythical chronology and climatic chronology, with its whims and vagaries, by ensuring that rain comes at the right moment - ploughing time - by accompanying or if need be accelerating the passage from the dry to the wet in autumn, or from the wet to the dry in spring, in short, by striving to precipitate the coming of the benefits brought by the new season while seeking to conserve the profits of the declining season for as long as possible.
Autumn is the point where the course of the world turns round and everything is turned over to enter its opposite, the male into the female, the seed into the womb of the earth, men and beasts into the house, light (with the lamp) into darkness, until the next reversal, in spring, which will set back on its feet a world turned upside down, momentarily abandoned to the supremacy of the female principle - the womb, woman, the house, and the darkness of night. And consumption visibly mimes this paradoxical inversion: autumn food, generated in accordance with the scheme of soaking the dry, is made up of dry foods (cereals, dry vegetables, dried meat), which are boiled in water, unspiced, in the cooking-pot or (which amounts to the same thing) steamed or raised with yeast. The same objective intention also informs all the autumn rites intended to aid the coming of the rain, that is, the descent of the dry male, the fecundating seed, into the wetness of the earth: the sacrifice of an ox (thimechreth), which must not be russet, a colour associated with the dry (it is said of a lazy redhead, 'the red ox leaves its land fallow') or the start of ploughing (awdjeb) which, inasmuch as it ritually mimes the fearful union of contraries, is in itself an invocation of rain. …
… Practical sense, working as a practical mastery of the sense of practices and objects, makes it possible to combine everything that goes in the same sense, everything that at least roughly fits together and can be adjusted to the ends in view. The presence of identical symbolic acts or objects in the rituals associated with such different events in the life of mankind or the field as funerals, ploughing, harvests, circumcision or marriage, has no other explanation …
… The freedom with the constraints of ritual logic that comes from perfect mastery of that logic is what makes it possible for the same symbol to refer back to realities that are opposed in terms of the axiomatics of the system itself. Consequently, although it is not inconceivable that a rigorous algebra of practical logics might one day be written, it will never be done unless it is understood that logical logic, which only speaks of them negatively, if at all, in the very operations through which it constitutes itself by denying them, is not equipped to describe them without destroying them. It is a question of reconstituting the 'fuzzy', flexible, partial logic of this partially integrated system of generative schemes which, being partially mobilized in relation to each particular situation, produces, in each case, below the level of the discourse and the logical control that it makes possible, a 'practical' definition of the situation and the functions of the action (which are almost always multiple and interlocking), and which, with the aid of a simple yet inexhaustible combinatory, generates the actions best suited to fulfill these functions within the limits of the available means. More precisely, one only has to compare the diagrams corresponding to the different areas of practice - the farming year, cuisine, women's work, the structure of the day - to see that the fundamental dichotomy is specified in each case in different schemes which are its efficient form in the area in question: oppositions between dry and wet, hot and cold, full and empty, in the farming year; between dry and wet, boiled and roasted (the two variants of the cooked), bland and spiced, in cuisine; dark and light, cold and hot, inside (or closed) and outside, in the structure of the day; female and male, soft (green) and hard (dry), in the life-cycle. When other structured universes, such as the space of the house or the parts of the body, are added, further principles (up/down, east/west, right/left, etc.) can be seen at work. …
… In other words, all the oppositions constituting the system are linked to all the others, but through longer or shorter pathways (which may or may not be reversible), that is, at the end of a series of equivalences which progressively empty the relationship of its content. Moreover, every opposition can be linked to several others in different respects by relationships of varying intensity and meaning (for example, spiced/bland can be connected directly to male/female and hot/cold and more indirectly to strong/weak or empty/full, through - in the last case - male/female and dry/wet, which are themselves interconnected).
THE SECOND SOURCE:
Extract from: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Conclusion: Classes & Classifications
EMBODIED SOCIAL STRUCTURES
The cognitive structures which social agents implement in their practical knowledge of the social world are internalized, ‘embodied’ social structures. The practical knowledge of the social world that is presupposed by ‘reasonable’ behaviour within it implements classificatory schemes (or ‘forms of classification’, ‘mental structures’ or ‘symbolic forms’—apart from their connotations, these expressions are virtually interchangeable), historical schemes of perception and appreciation which are the product of the objective division into classes (age groups, genders, social classes) and which function below the level of consciousness and discourse. Being the product of the incorporation of the fundamental structures of a society, these principles of division are common to all the agents of the society and make possible the production of a common, meaningful world, a common-sense world.
All the agents in a given social formation share a set of basic perceptual schemes, which receive the beginnings of objectification in the pairs of antagonistic adjectives commonly used to classify and qualify persons or objects in the most varied areas of practice. The network of oppositions between high (sublime, elevated, pure) and low (vulgar, low, modest), spiritual and material, fine (refined, elegant) and coarse (heavy, fat, crude, brutal), light (subtle, lively, sharp, adroit) and heavy (slow, thick, blunt, laborious, clumsy), free and forced, broad and narrow, or, in another dimension, between unique (rare, different, distinguished, exclusive, exceptional, singular, novel) and common (ordinary, banal, commonplace, trivial, routine), brilliant (intelligent) and dull (obscure, grey, mediocre), is the matrix of all the commonplaces which find such ready acceptance because behind them lies the whole social order.
The network has its ultimate source in the opposition between the ‘élite’ of the dominant and the ‘mass’ of the dominated, a contingent, disorganized multiplicity, interchangeable and innumerable, existing only statistically. These mythic roots only have to be allowed to take their course in order to generate, at will, one or another of the tirelessly repeated themes of the eternal sociodicy [justifications of society], such as apocalyptic denunciations of all forms of ‘levelling’, ‘trivialization’ or ‘massification’, which identify the decline of societies with the decadence of bourgeois houses, i.e., a fall into the homogeneous, the undifferentiated, and betray an obsessive fear of number, of undifferentiated hordes indifferent to difference and constantly threatening to submerge the private spaces of bourgeois exclusiveness.
The seemingly most formal oppositions within this social mythology always derive their ideological strength from the fact that they refer back, more or less discreetly, to the most fundamental oppositions within the social order: the opposition between the dominant and the dominated, which is inscribed in the division of labour, and the opposition, rooted in the division of the labour of domination, between two principles of domination, two powers, dominant and dominated, temporal and spiritual, material and intellectual etc.
It follows that the map of social space previously put forward can also be read as a strict table of the historically constituted and acquired categories which organize the idea of the social world in the minds of all the subjects belonging to that world and shaped by it. The same classificatory schemes (and the oppositions in which they are expressed) can function, by being specified, in fields organized around polar positions, whether in the field of the dominant class, organized around an opposition homologous to the opposition constituting the field of the social classes, or in the field of cultural production, which is itself organized around oppositions which reproduce the structure of the dominant class and are homologous to it (e.g., the opposition between bourgeois and avant-garde theatre). So the fundamental opposition constantly supports second, third or nth rank oppositions (those which underlie the ‘purest’ ethical or aesthetic judgements, with their high or low sentiments, their facile or difficult notions of beauty, their light or heavy styles etc.), while euphemizing itself to the point of misrecognizability.
It follows that, when considered in each of their uses, the pairs of qualifiers, the system of which constitutes the conceptual equipment of the judgement of taste, are extremely poor, almost indefinite, but, precisely for this reason, capable of eliciting or expressing the sense of the indefinable. Each particular use of one of these pairs only takes on its full meaning in relation to a universe of discourse that is different each time and usually implicit—since it is a question of the system of self-evidences and presuppositions that are taken for granted in the field in relation to which the speakers’ strategies are defined. But each of the couples specified by usage has for undertones all the other uses it might have—because of the homologies between the fields which allow transfers from one field to another—and also all the other couples which are interchangeable with it, within a nuance or two (e.g., fine/crude for light/heavy), that is, in slightly different contexts.
The fact that the semi-codified oppositions contained in ordinary language reappear, with very similar values, as the basis of the dominant vision of the social world, in all class-divided social formations (consider the tendency to see the ‘people’ as the site of totally uncontrolled appetites and sexuality) can be understood once one knows that, reduced to their formal structure, the same fundamental relationships, precisely those which express the major relations of order (high/low, strong/weak etc.) reappear in all class-divided societies … —the division between the dominant and the dominated, and the division between the different fractions competing for dominance in the name of different principles, bellatores (warriors) and oratores (scholars) in feudal society, businessmen and intellectuals now.
The Sources:
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, translated by Richard Nice, Le sens pratique (1980), Polity Press 1990 [pp. 210-211, 216, 218, 223-224, 228, 267-269]
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, first published in French as La Distinction, Critique sociale du judgement by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, this translation by Richard Nice first published 1984 by Routledge [pp. 467-470]
[MGH: Binary-technical conceptual schemas for understanding social order may succeed — or not — regardless of the normative schemas an author draws on, which, in Bourdieu’s case, and in the dominant sociological intellectual milieu of the 1980s, were more or less restrainedly Marxist, fettered by obligations to class analysis.]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.