Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2000 00:12:18 +1200 From: Henry Barnard <H.Barnard-AT-massey.ac.nz> Subject: Re: Bourdieu and Objectivity At 08:33 AM 07/06/2000 +0100, you wrote: --snip-- >Oh, that's what he is saying! I'll have to think about this. What seems like a >vacuous tautology -- In order to be an X, you have to do some X stuff -- is no >doubt more profound. Brubaker's paper, "Social Theory as Habitus", the sole >paper Bourdieu wholeheartedly agreed with, is then no more than the elaboration >of truisms. > A tautology? Perhaps (To be is to do, to do is to be or, in the case of Frank Sinatra, do-be-do-be-dooo...). Vacuous? Certainly not. Giddens, Parsons, Althusser, Alexander, et al think/thought that one can/could be social scientists/sociologists without engaging in research. In one of your postings you say that: "He claims it is possible to transmit and produce a set of dispositions for generating scientific truth." I assume you are making reference once again to the quote from Bourdieu's response to Brubaker's paper. But in that quote he says no such thing: all I hear him saying is that in order to be a position to generate scientific truth (or error) one has to be a practicing scientist and in order to do that one has to go through a form of apprenticeship and engagement in the field just as, if one wants to play soccer (and win or lose it!) one would have to join a team (however rough and ready) and play some games. One is certainly not going to become a particularly competent soccer player by *just* kicking a ball against the wall or driblling down an empty field (and even less so by reading books or watching TV - though some people try to get a good work out by watching others do aerobics!!). These later are good things to do as part of a more substantial engagement with the game. I think all of this is rather obvious (your `vacuous tautology') but nevertheless worth saying given the way in which theoreticist theorising has become a dominant mode of practice in the field of social science. As for disposition: your objection to the concept seem to derive from the critique of the dispositional theory of mind by the likes of Kripke and others. The logic of it seems to be something like: Ryle et al developed a dispositional theory of mind, Kripke et al have discredited it (as did Koestler long before), Bourdieu uses a concept of disposition, ergo Bourdieu is discredited or needs defence. I agree completely with the person who wrote that if one wants a *philosophical* defence of the concept of disposition and one which resonates with Bourdieu's use of the term and which also connects it to the concept of habitus then the work of John Searle and his theory of the Background is a good place to turn to. In one of your earlier postings you wrote: "Whatever they are, dispositions must be distinguished from conscious items of knowledge, or conscious methods, conceptions, theories. So it then becomes very difficult to reconcile what we normally think of as involved in doing science (i.e. exercising various conscious, cognitive faculties) with a practice based on dispositions. At least at first glance, one would think that "scientific habitus" is an oxymoron." Surely you don't believe that "doing science=exercising various conscious, cognitive faculties"? I would have thought that from Archimedes's `Eureka' experience to the Watson/Crick experience connecting spiral staircases to molecular structures and all the habitual practices that different scientists engage in, that "doing science' includes a heck of a lot more than just exercising various *conscious* cognitive faculties. Even in such a cerebral practice as solving mathematical problems it has been my experience that I have often solved intractable ones after sleeping on them. In other words science involves skilled practice, non-conscious mental processes, and, yes, "conscious, cognitive faculties" and much else too. And when Bourdieu talks about "producing and transmitting" a scientific habitus he is talking about creating the conditions where all of this can take place. And this is not something fixed either: different sciences need different conditions and the same science, eg. sociology, has had and will need different conditions for the realisation of the appropriate habitus. But one thing is for sure, a sociologist who sits in an armchair trying to do sociology is like the soccer player trying to play soccer by kicking a ball against a wall or a person trying to turn themselves into a boxer simply by thumping a punching bag. Having said all of that, it would be quite fair to say that Bourdieu hasn't done much work on the empirical problem of socialisation. Thus, the following is a hypothesis and remains as such in his work: "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 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 perception and appreciation of all subsequent experiences." (Logic of Practice, p.54) **** I have found the recent work being done by anthropologists like Ingold (on hunting, gathering and foraging) and Palsson (navigation and sailing) on `enskillment' useful for extending understanding of the processes involved in what Bourdieu might mean by the `production and transmission' of forms of non-familial habitus. Ingold: "Considering how novice hunters actually learn their trade, two points should be made right away. First, there is no explicit code of procedure, specifying the exact movements to be executed under any given circumstances: indeed practical skills of this kind seem fundamentally resistant to codification in terms of any formal system of rules and representations. Second, it is not possible, in practice, to separate the novice's involvement with other persons from that of his involvement with other persons from that of his involvement with the non-human environment. The novice hunter learns by accompanying more experienced hands in the woods. As he goes about, he is instructed in what to look out for, and his attention is drawn to subtle clues that he might otherwise fail to notice: in other words, he is led to develop a sophisticated perceptual awareness of the properties of his surroundings and of the possibilities it affords for action. For example, he learns to register those qualities of surface texture that enable one to tell, merely from touch, how long ago an animal left its imprint in the snow, and how fast it was travelling. We could say that he acquires such know-how by observation and imitation, but not, however, in the sense in which these terms are generally employed by enculturation theorists. Observation is no more a matter of having information copied into one's head, than is imitation a matter of mechanistically executing the received instructions. Rather, to observe is actively to attend to the movements of others; to imitate is to align that attention to the movement of one's own practical orientation towards the environment. Together they lead to the kind of rhythmic adjustment or resonance in the relation between the hunter and his surroundings that is the hallmark of skilled practice. ..the fine-tuning of perception and action that is going on here is better understood as a process of enskilment than as one of enculturation. For what is involved is not a transmission of representations, as the enculturation model implies, but an *education of attention*. Indeed, the instructions the novice hunter receives - to watch out for this, attend to that, and so on - only take on meaning in the context of his engagement with the environment. Hence it makes no sense to speak of `culture' as an independent body of context-free knowledge, that is available for transmission prior to the situations of its application". Isn't Bourdieu, then, talking about the education of attention appropriate to science when he talks about the production and transmission of a scientific habitus? And even though on occasion he makes explicit what some of the dispositions constituting this habitus might be (e.g. "the ability to apprehend research as a rational endeavor rather than as a kind of mystical quest.." (Invitation to Reflexive Sociology p.218) for the most part it would appear that the education of attention takes place on the hither side of codified rules. `The craft of sociology' was the closest he and his colleagues have come to codifying that habitus but he is unhappy with it (so much for the notion that his work is above criticism!) and for good reason. As Bourdieu says: "At bottom, the Craft remains a book by a teacher. And there are a lot negative things in it, which is typical of a teacher: don't do this, don't do that... It's full of warnings. It's both programmatic and negative. It's rather as if one offered a manual of grammar as a way of teaching people how to talk...it presents a didactic discourse which thereby somewhat ridiculous. It constantly repeats that one has to construct, but without showing practically how one constructs" (Craft p. 256). Cheers Henry Bourdieu Bibliography:<http://www.massey.ac.nz/~NZSRDA/bourdieu/home.htm> Henry Barnard Social Anthropology Programme School of Global Studies Massey University - Turitea Campus Private Bag 11-222 Palmerston North New Zealand Email: H.Barnard-AT-massey.ac.nz ********************************************************************** Contributions: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu Commands: majordomo-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu Requests: bourdieu-approval-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005