Yo animal orchestra team. Bigups to matt for setting this up. I'm excited, where do we begin?
So i'm reading for my honours thesis that Bourdieu says:
“By doing away with giving explicitly to everyone what it implicitly demands of everyone, the education system demands of everyone alike that they have what it does not give. This consists mainly of linguistic and cultural competence and the relationship of familiarity with culture which can only be produced by family culture and upbringing when it transmits the dominant culture.”
He uses this term habitus, which basically means world view/disposition.
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"it is generated by one’s place in the social structure; by internalizing the social structure and one’s place in it, one comes to determine what is possible and what is not possible for one’s life and develops aspirations and practices accordingly."
In other words, how we think the world is and how we are isn't really it, and we're mostly unconscious of our interpretations. So we kind of hit the human potential movement:
How do we limit ourselves? How do people change? Is this just a contemplative pass-time for tossers who have time to consider it?
I don't think so, i reckon understanding worldviews and structures of consciousness is crucial for social mobility and an updated, post-marxist social movement.
What do you guys think? Do you know what the hell i'm talking about?
Clinton said something like this, check it out:
(www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEjKr2gA8Wk)
I have no idea what the 'human potential movement' might be, and my dialup's too crap to watch YouTube, but I think the idea of habitus/worldview - something that {somehow} structures available subjectivities/modes of being, linguistic ontologies, shared values - is really interesting and (possibly) very important. So here's 11 questions that I think any notion of habitus etc. immediately provokes:
(1) What is included in the habitus? What are its manifestations? Do we include stuff like founding myths, aesthetic styles, religious beliefs, senses of humour? Material stuff like architecture/urban design?
(2) Is habitus an 'emergent' structure?
(3) What is the relation between habitus and individual consciousness? A little paradoxical at least: Individual consciousnesses make it up, and without them habitus would surely not exist, but at the same time individual consciousness is shaped (determined?) by habitus. Some kind of mutual co-determination?
(4) How is habitus passed down from generation to generation - what are the mechanisms of transmission?
(5) How does habitus 'act' on individuals, how does it exert its 'influence'? (Almost certainly the wrong type of language here...)
(6) How can we come to know habitus, since we are always enframed by it?
(7) Correspondingly (i think this is what you were getting at Jules) can we go beyond it? (i.e. how and to what extent does it structure/bound our thoughts/values/actions?)
(8) Is habitus a 'distortion' of something? of what?
(9) What then, is 'revolutionary' action? Is nothing revolutionary? Is every act revolutionary? Questions of social norms as performatively maintained.
(10) Are Bordieu's Habitus, Durkheim's collective consciousness, Wilber's Worldspaces, Foucault's episteme's etc all refferring to the same thing? Different aspects of the same thing?
(11) How the heck do you go about describing habitus? A (highly) dynamic, (massively) multidimensional evolving system - constantly being maintained and constantly dissolving.
Ok, so how helpful is it just to raise a heap of questions? Not very, I know, but it maps out some places we could head…any takers?
Ah, the sweet sensation of being heard, and feeling like i can respond however i want, with whatever language. So nice. So many questions, some of them i don't understand or have good responses to, but i like that your mind goes to 11.
First of all my julespedia: the human potential movement basically grew out of the humanistic psychology stuff: Maslow, Huxley a few others. After the human-is-a-complex-robot wave of behaviouralism (Skinner/Pavlov etc). These cats suddenly looked at Piaget's stages (and shit like that) and went, whoah, what if consciousness could just keep expanding. And not, like stop at the rational 'adult' of 18 or 25. (i'm sure a better post exists on wikipedia)
I think i should lay my 'cards' on the table early on, because it seems some of these questions go to the heart of my interests.
I don't think it's helpful to think of Habitus as a 'thing', but as a process. Originally when i was trying to understand it, i drew a Venn diagram of 3 circles with a person in the middle. Each circle represented a form of 'capital': economic, social and cultural. The combination of the 3 over time inform 'habitus'. I suppose Bourdieu was trying to extend the marxist tradition to a more subtle understanding of the human psyche/condition. It feels like a sociologist venturing into developmental psychology to explain why social systems seem to be reproduced, and this can't be merely solved by changing the physical conditions. The concept is at least 30 years old.
It was also (i think) an attempt to bridge the old structure/agency problem. Is inequality chiefly the result of unequal physical conditions for life chances? (of which i would lean towards socialism). Or is it chiefly the result of individual effort and commitment? (of which i would lean towards liberalism).
I think habitus was in part Bourdieu's attempt to save marxist philosophy by arguing that external 'structures' become 'internalised' and entrenched in world view/habitus.
Increasingly i feel such political questions depend on how we understand a human being, and human change. Even Wilber, a kind of champion of human development says we just don't understand why some people 'develop' and others don't.
(we can argue what 'develop' means on another post ;)
Despite bringing it up, i don't find it the most useful way of conceptually mapping this 'process'. I find it useful as a 'spring board' from sociology to developmental psyche. Basically because the academics i encountered at Uni in my department seemed to respect Bourdieu, but not Piaget/Kohlberg (let alone Wilber...haha).
It was like a trojan horse: "oh so you admit habitus is important, that 'worldviews', literally how we view/interpret/distort the world is important?". This gave an opening to look at phenomenology/structrualism/Piaget's genetic epistemology etc...
(i know there's a lot here, but we may as well use some of these terms ...i've already checked out 'emergent structures' on wikipedia...still don't understand it ha)
I could keep writing all day, but if anyone is still reading at this point, i owe you a twinkie...x
Hey Im too tired and jet lagged to read all of this, but there is a lot of work I am reading about in the New Yorker and Harpers which starts looking at these issues in regards to insurgencies and then in turn how you "fight" the global insurgence right now.
more. later
"To go outside the mythos is to go insane..."
- Pirsig, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, p. 350
Good afternoon fellow tree dwellers. Simon here, friend of Julian and fellow graduate of the International Studies program. I'm sure thousands if not millions of quasi-philosophical blogs exist in the online universe, but I'm glad to witness the beginning of this, shall we say, little bang.
This back-tracks to Julian's initial posting on Feb 5 where he raised the questions:
"How do we limit ourselves? How do people change?"
Perhaps, to upon this question, can an individual revise their 'naturalised' habitus, given its overwhelming weight? How do we think outside the square, if we don't even know the square is there? (I haven't defined habitus, but at this stage let's assume that we all have a general understanding or perception of what habitus is, without having to reduce it's meaning to a pretty, concise sentence.)
This reminds me of the old mythos versus logos conundrum in Greek philosophy. The term 'logos', the root word of 'logic', refers to the sum total of our rational understanding of the world. 'Mythos' is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos. The general mythos-over-logos argument states that one can gain greater insight into the complex logos 'tree' by examining its simpler, 'mythos' roots.
For example, in cultural derivatives of ancient Greece, one finds a strong subject-object differentiation because the Greek mythos presumed a sharp division between subjects and predicates. Conversely, in cultures such as Chinese, where subject-predicate relationships are not so rigidly defined by grammar, we find the genesis of a unique, Eastern habitus. This is just one example, and there are many, many more which I believe are crucial for understanding social mobility, ontology and perhaps most importantly our conception of change.
Here is an interesting quote from Pirsig:
"The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing myths, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard the mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is... To go outside the mythos is to become insane..."
Whilst I don't necessarily agree with this statement, it raises some interesting questions. How then does the mythos evolve? It can be deduced from Pirsig's statement that he believes change comes from within the mythos, not outside it, is he right? If we go too far outside of the square, do we risk insanity?
A few thoughts.
SS.
I think the question/paradox of agency within structure still deserves a lot of attention. I have been thinking about it for years and have had glimpses of ways forward but am still not satisfied with any particular approach. Maybe Jules could have a go at giving some more details on how Bordieu's habitus helps us to short circuit this problem. To speak a bit more generally, i think focussing in on unsolved/unsolvable paradoxes in theory, while it can be frustrating, is a great thing to do. Because it precisely highlights areas in which contemporary ways of understanding are just not sufficient. It doesn't help you make the next leap, but it can orient you to where the leap needs to be made from. E.g. I'm sure everyone has a strong intuition that the structure/agency dilemma is not in fact a dilemma. It can't be, we negotiate this dilemma with comparative ease every second of our life that we are consciously acting. It seems so bizzare that our theoretical account of our reality can't even grasp such an intuitively simple process...
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