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What originally drew me
to Bourdieu was his conceptualisation of symbolic capital and the habitus
with its almost subconscious (I prefer to use the Jungian term over the Freudian
one of unconscious which seems more in keeping with Bourdieu's focus on symbolism)
way of being formed or to be more precise still, shaped. The Outline of a
Theory of Practice, that the title refers to, is derived from the text being
motivated by a conjoining of the theorist's early ethnographic work in Algiers
and the subsequent development of a general sociological theory for social
and cultural interaction and reproduction.
Bourdieu approaches this task from a phenomenological point of view. That is, he explicates his general theory "to make explicit the truth of primary experience of the social world, i.e. all that is inscribed in the relationship of familiarity (author's emphasis) with the familiar environment, the unquestioning apprehension of the social world which, by definition, does not reflect on itself and excludes the question of the conditions of it own possibility" (Bourdieu 1999:3). This excerpt also gives the reader a hint of Bourdieu's very descriptive style of writing. But his point is that the theory of practice constitutes a kind of 'third-order knowledge' (Bourdieu 1999:5) that is in essence, it is a dialectical synthesis of both phenomenological analysis and objectivism while retaining the theoretical usefulness of both with out transcending either.
Habitus is a case in point, in defining the objective limits of phenomenology (Bourdieu uses the term phenomenology interchangeably with ethnomethodology) Bourdieu points to how, from this perspective, actor-to-actor interactions are reduced to the "…experimentally controlled characteristics of the situation…" (Bourdieu 1999:81) neglecting the "…present and past positions in the social structure that biological individuals carry with them, at all times and in all places, in the form of dispositions which are so many marks of social position and hence of the social distance…" (Bourdieu 1999: 82). He refines this idea further by stating that these dispositions " functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions…" (author's emphasis)(Bourdieu 1999:83). This underscores the symbolic nature of habitus while also opening the way for Bourdieu's theories of symbolic capital.
Symbolic capital takes different forms for example, educational capital, political capital, and of course economic capital; and it is precisely the symbolic nature of Bourdieu's capital, which makes its primary function of interchangeability possible. For instance, educational capital can be changed into political capital just as both can also be changed into economic capital. This opens up immeasurable possibilities for symbolic capital but at the same time Bourdieu limits the possibilities open to habitus when he invokes a structuralist approach. "Through the habitus, the structure which has produced it governs practice, [then as if to shake off Marx] not by the processes of a mechanical determinism, but through the mediation of the orientations and limits it assigns to the habitus's operations of invention" (Bourdieu 1999:95). But it is the formulation of symbolic capital which allows Bourdieu to evolve his theory of practice beyond the economic fixity of historical materialism.
What is of interest in Outline of a Theory of Practice is Bourdieu's theories on cultural reproduction and discourse. Bourdieu has devoted a great deal of energy to the analysis of culture but this being one of the theorist's first major translations into English it only contains the basic outline of what would be expanded on later. So to return to habitus and the nuances and perceptions that give form to it is also to return to how this is expressed culturally. The constitutive matrix of form that is the habitus is also bound into the cultural function that is realised through cultural expression. It is in this way that privileged relationships are reproduced culturally whereby the same discourse that gives rise to habitus also gives rise to the expression of social relationships and the domination which is constitutive of those same relationships.
This also raises the point of determinism, in trying to free (symbolic) capital from the shackles of historical materialism and its inherent determinism the habitus becomes entrenched in exactly the same mire. With his theory of practice, Bourdieu overcomes the Marxist problematic of capital, successfully freeing it from the fixity of economic determinism. This is a point that is of great interest to me from the point of view of a computer-mediated society. I see this as, to use classical terminology, a 'democratisation of the means of production'. I also think that this is where, to a certain degree, Bourdieu and Baudrillard meet. But to return to Outline of a Theory of Practice, while capital is, again to a certain extent, freed from restraint the same is not true of habitus.
In the 3rd paragraph of the translator's notes, Richard Nice describes Bourdieu's break with Anthropology, which is due to the contradictions inherent to the ethnographic practice itself, this being "one factor in Bourdieu's subsequent move into the field of sociology, where the separation (authors emphasis) which is the hidden condition of all academic activity - most insidiously so in the behavioural sciences - could itself be grasped scientifically in the course of inquiry into the social functions of scholarship and the mechanisms of cultural and social reproduction" (Bourdieu 1999:vii). The focus of Outline, both in the text and the theory laid out within it, is reflexivity. But a central part of Bourdieu's proposition, habitus, is not accorded the same awareness, or the same freedom of movement. "In short, the habitus, the product of history, produces individual and collective practices, and hence history, in accordance with the schemes engendered by history" (Bourdieu 1999:82). Bourdieu situates habitus within both economic and historical confines effectively reducing the possibility for a truly objective reflexivity.
Bourdieu offers no way out of this dilemma, in this text at least, but instead promulgates an actor who operates at little more than the micro-sociological level. However that being said, Bourdieu's theories on the symbolic nature of capital and the reproduction of dominant social relationships has much to offer discourse analysis. As this excerpt intimates, "The system of symbolic goods production and the system producing the producers fulfil in addition, i.e. by the very logic of their normal functioning, ideological functions, by virtue of the fact that the mechanisms through which they contribute to the reproduction of the established order and to the perpetuation of domination remain hidden" (Bourdieu 1999:188).
Finally, as a text I enjoyed reading Bourdieu's fluid almost poetic style of prose which helps to give the reader a sense of where to situate this work and where he might possibly take subsequent analysis to. Although, it seems to me the idea of habitus is flawed, I think it is salvageable by the very nature of its (symbolic) constitution. Symbolic capital and the reproduction of dominance however have more to offer social analysis at the intersection of the cultural and the social.