File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_1996/96-01-02.102, message 7


Date: Tue, 21 Nov 1995 22:17:09 -0800 (PST)
From: Alan Liu <ayliu-AT-humanitas.ucsb.edu>
Subject: Habitus, Incorporation, and Technology


This is a spin-off from the earlier exchange on this list about the 
nature of "incorporation" in the theory of the habitus.

I have been reading in theory of technology from a Bourdieuian perspective
and have come to be especially interested in the following passage from
_Logic of Practice_ (pp. 68-69).  Observe the divergence here between B's
thematization of incorporated body-sense as organic (earlier, p. 55: "the
internal dispositions . . . 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") and his _figuration_ of mechanism or automata:

"Practical belief is not a 'state' of mind', still less a kind of 
arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines 
('beliefs'), but rather a state of the body.  Doxa is the relationship of 
immediate adherence that is established in practice between a habitus and 
the field to which it is attuned, the pre-verbal taking-for-granted of 
the world that flows from practical sense.  Enacted belief, instilled by 
the childhood learning that treats the body as a living memory pad, an 
automaton that 'leads the mind unconsciously along with it', and as a 
repository for the most precious values, is the form par excellence of 
the 'blind or symbolic thought' . . . which Leibniz refers to. . . .  
Practical sense, social necessity turned into nature, converted into 
motor schemes and body automatisms, is what causes practices . . . to be 
sensible, that is, informed by common sense.  It is because agents never 
know completely what they are doing that what they do has more sense than 
they know."

Now, since my current investigation involves an attempt to conceive of
"information society" on the basis of an informatic habitus (perhaps most
colorfully imagined in Virtual Reality and interface-theory research that
pushes at the outer edge of bodily hexis), it has come to me to ask why,
given B's automatic or mechanistic understanding of habitus as an ontology
without epistemology--a way of habitually and materially "being" void of
cognition--he needs to ground habitus in the "organic" and its constant
correlatives in his discourse, the "uniform" and "durable" (as in the
thesis that external social factors become durable and uniform across 
the habitus when imprinted internally in bodily practices)? 

To my mind, the most exciting salients in recent technology theory is the
Continental attempt--in the mode of Felix Guattari on "Machinic
Heterogenesis" and Bruno Latour and his "semiotics" of shared human/device
"agency"--to argue that there is no necessary reason why thinking about
the body must stop at what David Rothenberg (in the title of his book on
technology) calls _Hands' End_.  That is, according to what Wiebe Bijker
and John Law (in _Shaping Technology_) dub the "seamless web" theories of
technology, there is never just the body but always the body and its
delegates, which include both animate and inanimate participants in
distributed agency.  (I.e., it is never a body that arrives on time but a
body-watch-car-speedometer assemblage.)

So the hypothesis might be floated: for the purposes of understanding the 
"age of information" it is not bodily but technological hexis that is the 
crucial issue.  Doxa for us (in Western, wired society) is what McLuhan 
meant when he said--in as doxological a statement as one could wish--that 
"the medium is the message" (contorted in one of his titles into 
retro-bodily form as "the medium is the massage").  And the difference, 
at least at first sight, would be that non-organic foundations for habitus 
are not necessarily either uniform or durable.  Machinic assemblages and 
the habitual practices they encode may be spoken of as having 
"evolutions," "life-cycles," etc.  But the degree of difference in both 
formal and temporal mutation (how old was your last personal computer 
before you felt the need to replace it?) is potentially categorical.

Can anyone who has read "all of Bourdieu" (the seeming impossibility of
which this list has already learned ritually to sign) point me to any
discussion of technology per se?  I think that the interesting question to
pursue in contemporary Western societies (rather than in village or even
"global village" societies) is why habitus--and thus the entire structure 
of class distinction--requires the axioms of relative uniformity and 
durability.  Certain contemporary drugs, after all, are habit-forming in 
a single, swift kick.  As is the habit of our current doxa: information.

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