Pierre Bourdieu wrote:
[Epigraph to the Introduction]
How am I able to follow a rule?' if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following a rule in the way I do … If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’. (Wittgenstein, 1963, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford).
[A preparatory, from Chapter 1]
It is tempting to quote … a passage in which Wittgenstein effortlessly brings together all the questions evaded by structural anthropology and, no doubt, more generally by all intellectualism, which transfers the objective truth established by science into a practice that by its very essence rules out the theoretical stance which makes it possible to establish that truth:
What do I call ‘the rule by which he proceeds’? - The hypothesis that satisfactorily describes his use of words, which we observe; or the rule which he looks up when he uses signs; or the one which he gives us in reply when we ask what his rule is? — But if observation does not enable us to see any clear rule, and the question brings none to light? — For he did indeed give me a definition when I asked him what he understood by 'N' , but he was prepared to withdraw and alter it. So how am I to determine the rule according to which he is playing? He does not know it himself. — Or, to ask a better question: What meaning is the expression ‘the rule by which he proceeds’ supposed to have left to it here? (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford 1963: 38-9).
[Passages defining ‘habitus’, from Chapter 3, Structures, Habitus, Practices]
… The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without being in any way the product of obedience to [formal] rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor. [1]
[Footnote 1: Ideally, one would like to be able completely to avoid talking about concepts for their own sake and so running the risk of being both schematic and formal. Like all dispositional concepts, the concept of the habitus, which is predisposed by its range of historical uses to designate a system of acquired, permanent, generative dispositions, is justified above all by the false problems and false solutions that it eliminates, the questions it enables one to formulate better or to resolve, and the specifically scientific difficulties to which it gives rise.]
It is, of course, never ruled out that the responses of the habitus may be accompanied by a strategic calculation tending to perform in a conscious mode the operation that the habitus performs quite differently, namely an estimation of chances presupposing transformation of the past effect into an expected objective. But these responses are first defined, without any calculation, in relation to objective potentialities, immediately inscribed in the present, things to do or not to do, things to say or not to say, in relation to a probable, ‘upcoming’ future (un à venir) …
… The practical world that is constituted in the relationship with the habitus, acting as a system of cognitive and motivating structures, is a world of already realized ends — procedures to follow, paths to take — and of objects endowed with a ‘ permanent teleological character’ … tools or institutions. This is because the regularities inherent in an arbitrary condition … tend to appear as necessary, even natural, since they are the basis of the schemes of perception and appreciation through which they are apprehended …
… Unlike scientific estimations, which are corrected after each experiment according to rigorous rules of calculation, the anticipations of the habitus, practical hypotheses based on past experience, give disproportionate weight to early experiences. Through the economic and social necessity that they bring to bear on the relatively autonomous world of the domestic economy and family relations, or more precisely, through the specifically familial manifestations of this external necessity (forms of the division of labour between the sexes, household objects, modes of consumption, parent-child relations, etc.), the structures characterizing a determinate class of conditions of existence produce the structures of the habitus, which in their turn are the basis of the perception and appreciation of all subsequent experiences.
The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices—more history—in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms. [3]
[Footnote 3: In social formation in which the reproduction of relations of domination (and economic or cultural capital) is not performed by objective mechanisms, the endless work required to maintain relations of personal dependence would be condemned to failure if it could not count on the permanence of habitus, socially constituted and constantly reinforced by individual or collective sanctions. In this case, the social order rests mainly on the order that reigns in people's minds, and the habitus, i.e. the organism as appropriated by the group and attuned to the demands of the group, functions as the materialization of the collective memory, reproducing the acquisitions of the predecessors in the successors. The group's resulting tendency to persist in its being works at a much deeper level than that of ‘family traditions’, the permanence of which a consciously maintained loyalty and also guardians. These therefore a rigidity alien to the strategies of the habitus, which, can invent new ways of fulfilling the old functions, It is also deeper than the conscious strategies through which agents seek expressly to act on their future and shape it in the image of the past, such as testaments, or even explicit norms, which are simple calls to order, i.e. to the probable, which they make doubly potent.]
This system of dispositions—a present past that tends to perpetuate itself into the future by reactivation in similarly structured practices, an internal law through which the law of external necessities, irreducible to immediate constraints, is constantly exerted—is the principle of the continuity and regularity which objectivism sees in social practices without being able to account for it; and also of the regulated transformations that cannot be explained either by the extrinsic, instantaneous determinisms of mechanistic sociologism or by the purely internal but equally instantaneous determination of spontaneist subjectivism. Overriding the spurious opposition between the forces inscribed in an earlier state of the system, outside the body, and the internal forces arising instantaneously as motivations springing from free will, the internal dispositions—the internalization of externality—enable the external forces to exert themselves, but in accordance with the specific logic of the organisms in which they are incorporated, i.e. in a durable, systematic and non-mechanical way. As an acquired system of generative schemes, the habitus makes possible the production of all the thoughts, perceptions and actions inherent in the particular conditions of its production and only those.
Through the habitus, the structure of which it is the product governs practice, not along the paths of a mechanical determinism, but within the constraints and limits initially set on its inventions. This infinite yet strictly limited generative capacity is difficult to understand only so long as one remains locked in the usual antinomies—which the concept of the habitus aims to transcend—of determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity, consciousness and the unconscious, or the individual and society. Because the habitus is an infinite capacity for generating products—thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions—whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditioning …
… In short, being product of a particular class of objective regularities, the habitus tends to generate all the ‘reasonable’, ‘common-sense , behaviours (and only these) which are possible within the limits of these regularities, and which are likely to be positively sanctioned because they are objectively adjusted to the logic characteristic of a particular field, whose objective future they anticipate. At the same time, ‘without violence, art or argument’, it tends to exclude all ‘extravagances’ (‘not for the likes of us’), that is, all the behaviours that would be negatively sanctioned because they are incompatible with the objective conditions.
Because they tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the conditions in which their generative principle was produced while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures that constitute the habitus, practices cannot be deduced either from the present conditions which may seem to have provoked them or from the past conditions which have produced the habitus, the durable principle of their production. They can therefore only be accounted for by relating the social conditions in which the habitus that generated them was constituted, to the social conditions in which it is implemented, that is, through the scientific work of performing the interrelationship of these two states of the social world that the habitus performs, while concealing it, in and through practice. The ‘unconscious’, which enables one to dispense with this interrelating, is never anything other than the forgetting of history which history itself produces by realizing the objective structures that it generates in the quasi-natures of habitus. As Durkheim (1977: 11) puts it:
In each one of us, in differing degrees, is contained the person we were yesterday, and indeed, in the nature of things it is even true that our past personae predominate in us, since the present is necessarily insignificant when compared with the long period of the past because of which we have emerged in the form we have today. It is just that we don't directly feel the influence of these past selves precisely because they are so deeply rooted within us. They constitute the unconscious part of ourselves. Consequently we have a strong tendency not to recognize their existence and to ignore their legitimate demands. By contrast, with the most recent acquisitions of civilization we are vividly aware of them just because they are recent and consequently have not had time to be assimilated into our collective unconscious. Durkheim 1977: The Evolution of Educational Thought. Routledge & Kegan Paul (L'Evolution pedagogique en France 1938.)
The habitus—embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history—is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product. As such, it is what gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present. This autonomy is that of the past, enacted and acting, which, functioning as accumulated capital, produces history on the basis of history and so ensures the permanence in change that makes the individual agent a world within the world. The habitus is a spontaneity without consciousness or will, opposed as much to the mechanical necessity of things without history in mechanistic theories as it is to the reflexive freedom of subjects ‘without inertia' in rationalist theories …
… This durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations is a practical sense which reactivates the sense objectified in institutions. Produced by the work of inculcation and appropriation that is needed in order for objective structures, the products of collective history, to be reproduced in the form of the durable, adjusted dispositions that are the condition of their functioning, the habitus, which is constituted in the course of an individual history, imposing its particular logic on incorporation, and through which agents partake of the history objectified in institutions, is what makes it possible to inhabit institutions, to appropriate them practically, and so to keep them in activity, continuously pulling them from the state of dead letters, reviving the sense deposited in them, but at the same time imposing the revisions and transformations that reactivation entails. Or rather, the habitus is what enables the institution to attain full realization: it is through the capacity for incorporation, which exploits the body’s readiness to take seriously the performative magic of the social, that the king, the banker or the priest are hereditary monarchy, financial capitalism or the Church made flesh. Property appropriates its owner, embodying itself in the form of a structure generating practices perfectly conforming with its logic and its demands … An institution, even an economy, is complete and fully viable only if it is durably objectified not only in things, that is, in the logic, transcending individual agents, of a particular field, but also in bodies, in durable dispositions to recognize and comply with the demands immanent in the field …
One of the fundamental effects of the harmony between practical sense and objectified meaning (sens) is the production of a common-sense world, whose immediate self-evidence is accompanied by the objectivity provided by consensus on the meaning of practices and the world, in other words the harmonization of the agents' experiences and the constant reinforcement each of them receives from expression individual or collective (in festivals, for example), improvised or programmed (commonplaces, sayings)— of similar or identical experiences.
The homogeneity of habitus that is observed within the limits of a class of conditions of existence and social conditionings is what causes practices and works to be immediately intelligible and foreseeable, and hence taken for granted. The habitus makes questions of intention superfluous, not only in the production but also in the deciphering of practices and works. Automatic and impersonal, significant without a signifying intention, ordinary practices lend themselves to an understanding that is no less automatic and impersonal. The picking up of the objective intention they express requires neither ‘reactivation’ of the ‘lived’ intention of their originator, nor the ‘intentional transfer into the Other’ … nor tacit or explicit inquiry (‘What do you mean?’) as to other people's intentions. ‘Communication of consciousnesses’ presupposes community of ‘unconsciouses’ (that is, of linguistic and cultural competences). Deciphering the objective intention of practices and works has nothing to do with ‘reproduction’ … of lived experiences and the unnecessary and uncertain reconstitution of an ‘intention’ which is not their real origin.
The objective homogenizing of group or class habitus that results from homogeneity of conditions of existence is what enables practices to be objectively harmonized without any calculation or conscious reference to a norm and mutually adjusted in the absence of any direct interaction or, a fortiori, explicit co-ordination. The interaction itself owes its form to the objective structures that have produced the dispositions of the interacting agents, which continue to assign them their relative positions in the interaction and elsewhere … So long as one ignores the true principle of the conductorless orchestration which gives regularity, unity and systematicity to practices even in the absence of any spontaneous or imposed organization of individual projects, one is condemned to the naive artificialism that recognizes no other unifying principle than conscious co-ordination. The practices of the members of the same group or, in a differentiated society, the same class, are always more and better harmonized than the agents know or wish, because, … ‘following only (his) own laws’, each ‘nonetheless agrees with the other’. The habitus is precisely this immanent law, lex insita, inscribed in bodies by identical histories, which is the precondition not only for the co-ordination of practices but also for practices of co-ordination.[8]
[Footnote 8: It can be understood why dancing, a particular and spectacular synchronization of the homogeneous and orchestration of the heterogeneous, is everywhere predisposed to symbolize and reinforce group integration.]
The corrections and adjustments the agents themselves consciously carry out presuppose mastery of a common code; and undertakings of collective mobilization cannot succeed without a minimum of concordance between the habitus of the mobilizing agents (prophet, leader, etc.) and the dispositions of those who recognize themselves in their practices or words, and, above all, without the inclination towards grouping that springs from the spontaneous orchestration of dispositions …
… Sociology treats as identical all biological individuals who, being the products of the same objective conditions, have the same habitus. A social class (in-itself) — a class of identical or similar conditions of existence and conditionings — is at the same time a class of biological individuals having the same habitus, understood as a system of dispositions common to all products of the same conditionings. Though it is impossible for all (or even two) members of the same class to have had the same experiences, in the same order, it is certain that each member of the same class is more likely than any member of another class to have been confronted with the situations most frequent for members of that class. Through the always convergent experiences that give a social environment its physiognomy, with its ‘closed doors’, ‘dead ends’ and ‘limited prospects’, the objective structures that sociology apprehends in the form of probabilities of access to goods, services and powers, inculcate the ‘art of assessing likelihoods’, as Leibniz put it, of anticipating the objective future, in short, the ‘sense of reality’, or realities, which is perhaps the best-concealed principle of their efficacy.
The Source:
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, translated by Richard Nice, Le sens pratique (1980), Polity Press 1990 [pp. 25, 39, 53-60]
[MGH: In my opinion the passages exhibited here, and the concept of ‘habitus’ — the much nicer Latin word for the English ‘habit’, and, in Bourdieu’s hands, having wider conceptual connotations — exemplify the influence Wittgenstein (and Leibniz) had on Bourdieu. I have summarized Wittgenstein’s relevant ideas (the ‘rule’ equivalent to the ‘habitus’) HERE ➔ Learning Code from Wittgenstein [Part 1] and ➔ Learning Code from Wittgenstein [Part 3]. People who are puzzled by Bourdieu’s passages explaining his influential concept of ‘habitus’ — and I believe I have displayed his principal or central definitions of the term, in his most important book — may find it useful to consult passages I quote from Wittgenstein, and my brief interpretations of them. Wittgenstein was really quite a down-to-earth kind of scholar, not to be feared.]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.