Date: Sun, 24 Dec 1995 11:39:39 -0800 (PST)
From: Charles Bazerman <bazerman-AT-humanitas.ucsb.edu>
Subject: Re: Using Pierre and using the list


I have been lurking on this list since it was initiated and have been 
using the posts in two ways--
1) to forward selected posts to a seminar I 
taught this term on Discourse,Social Action, Culture, and Consciousness to 
add a few more voices and perspectives to the two weeks we devoted to 
readings from THE FIELD OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION and LANGUAGE AND SYMBOLIC 
POWER. The participants were from literature, linguistics, and education.
2) to enrich my own views of what kind of resources one can draw Bourdieu 
for a range of problems I am interested in.

The problems that interest me in Bourdieu I think of as quite specific. 
For many years I have been thinking about literate interactions within 
organized social fields.  As a writing teacher I have been interested in 
the socialization of individuals into discursively organized fields of 
interaction with their particular practices, the possibilites of 
expression and activity and cooperative accomplishment within those 
fields, the development of mind and consciousness as individuals 
participate in particular discursive fields  and sets of fields, the 
perception/interpretation/evaluation of others utterances within these 
structured activity fields and the placing of one's own position and 
stance intertextually and interactively within such fields, the relations 
of multiple discursive fields with each other as well as with fields of 
material practice, and similar issues that try to understand what it 
means to read and write as social actions with cognitive and material 
correlates. Over the years I have drawn on structural, structurationist, 
phenomenological, and micro- sociologies; social, socio-cultural, 
interpersonal, and cognitive psychologies; functional, pragmatic, and 
socio-linguistics; literary, rhetorical, and genre theory (though careful to 
avoid the narrowly textualized versions of each of those); and science 
studies.
	Within these nexuses, I have found habitus a very useful way to 
get at the position and disposition from which one writes within a 
somatically sensed and in-part cognitively perceived social environment. 
My emphasis on habitus as "habitat for action" changes, I am aware, 
Bourdieu's emphasis on habit as the enduring source of habitus (although 
I am also very interested in understanding the enduring cognitive and 
discursive frame we carry with us).  
	To put this another way, in much of 
B's writing on habitus it seems to me that he is most concerned with 
class reproduction through the enduring evaluational and behavioral 
dispositions we carry with us--a reproduction that we can only free 
ourselves from by reflection which allows a distancing from the machinery 
of social reproduction.  In some of his more recent writing (such as in  
Language and Symbolic Action, Intro to Reflective Sociology, and Field 
of Cultural Production) he has brief passages which suggest the more 
positive possibilities of reflective action as a mode of social 
engagement and social change as well as entertaining that class is not 
the only salient aspect of social structure and that groupings and fields 
may organize around a variety of principles, activities, or affiliations.
He also has been exploring, or at at least recognizing the possibility 
of, the evolving habitus of individuals as they move through a variety of 
experiences in a variety of fields.
	These more recent movements match more closely my concerns to 
understand literate participation of an individual who develops 
cognitively, behaviorly, and in access to resources, within and through 
social experiences, such experiences carried out within a highly 
differentiated society at this moment in time--differentiated not only at 
the level of major institutions such as commerce, science, law, and 
religion, but within elaborate internal differentiation (often maintained 
through the circulation of documents) such as between high energy 
theoretical physics and experimental biophysics or between production 
management and product development within a single corporation or between 
the spheres of public values discussion and mass entertainment 
production. Many of the problems of modern society have to do with 
effective communication within and between these highly differentiated 
spheres.  The problem of class (however we may characterize it) is only 
one part of the complex of differentiations that people are confronted 
with in the modern world, although class issues may be widely relevant in 
differential acess, participation, goals, and resources within these varied 
fields of activity.
	Coordinately, I keep looking for those moments when B becomes 
more behaviourly concrete about habitus, as he does in some passages on 
hexus. That is, the cognitive/evaluative aspect of habitus which B seems 
to most refer to ought to have some dialectical relationship to specific 
practices one engages in--habitually, socially imitative or 
responsive practices that position one so 
as to have certain experiences which one might perceive in particular 
ways, or behavioral practices that derive from one's reflectioons on 
one's perceived position in relation to perceived and evaluated others, 
or behavioral practices that evoke responses from others which then 
provide grist for one's own evaluation of the others one is surrounded 
with and the social stuctures one participates in.
	So I am interested as much as possible in understanding whatever 
I can wring out of B's discussions of habitus and its relation to fields. 
I also have further questions about B's concepts of fields and power, but 
I will leave those for future moments in the discussion.  Right now I 
would appreciate any observations people have about different 
perspectives they have on habitus, and how they might give us a more 
concrete and nuanced description of what habitus might be.

Thank you,

Charles Bazerman
English Department
University of California, Santa Barbara