File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2000/bourdieu.0006, message 60


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

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