Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2003 13:16:52 -0400
From: Tom Medvetz <tmm-AT-socrates.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Re: [BOU:] Where's the agency in agent?


Hi,

I joined this list serve the other day, so let me introduce myself. 
My name is Tom and I am a doctoral student in the UC-Berkeley 
sociology department.  I am working on my dissertation, which is 
informed heavily by a Bourdieuian framework.  It is a historical 
study of American political think tanks and policy research.  My 
interest in Bourdieu goes back to my first years as a sociologist, 
but during my time at Berkeley I have had the benefit of learning 
from Loic Wacquant, Bourdieu's protege and collaborator.  His 
Bourdieu seminar, in particular, was a formative experience.

The message below struck my interest, especially since I have heard 
Loic talk about this issue on many occasions and with great 
enthusiasm.  I do not have time for a thorough response, but I want 
to register my disagreement with the thrust of this interpretation -- 
and argue that Bourdieu, quite unapologetically, allows no "room for" 
unconditioned agency in his theory, and that this is neither a 
weakness nor an "unfair" characterization.  Bourdieu quite plainly 
calls himself a 'hyperdeterminist' (in Pascalian Meditations, if 
memory serves) and attributes any attempt to "leave room" for agency 
as an unscientific impulse.

Bourdieu's method is resolutely scientific.  Just as a physical 
scientist does not "leave room" for the agency of the objects of his 
analysis, neither should the social scientist relinquish some 
dimension of practice to an inscrutible 'Agent.'  (I recall Loic 
saying that the hypothetical equivalent of this preoccupation with 
agency would be a chemist who insists that there is some portion of a 
chemical reaction that lies beyond his explanation.)  The real 
question is why some insist so adamantly that Bourdieu's commitment 
to science is some kind of theoretical weakness.

It is a fantasy of the Western imagination to believe in the agent as 
an original generative force.  The purpose of the notion of habitus 
is precisely to historicize the agent and to illustrate the texture 
of practice as distinct from mindless rule-following.  The habitus is 
nothing more than social structures internalized as schemata of 
perception, appreciation, and action.  The fact that the agent 
experiences himself as having intentionality does not mean that any 
portion of the action is undetermined.

The reason a structuralist analysis inevitably produces fuzzy, 
imprecise, or probabalistic predictive statements is that the 
analysis itself is imprecise (much like a map, which cannot reproduce 
every detail of the terrain it summarizes).  In principle, though, a 
very fine-grained analysis could produce more determinative 
predictions.  Practice is the (always intelligible) product of a 
confrontation between a socialized subjectivity and a social 
structure.  There is nothing "outside" of these social and mental 
structures.

Finally -- important point -- the message below conflates "a place 
for agency" with the "capacity for [political?] dissent."  These are 
simply two different things.  Agency, in the metaphysical sense, is 
an ontological question about the generative principles of action. 
The capacity for dissent, by contrast, refers to the chances that an 
agent or group will overturn or transform some existing structure of 
power.

all the best,
Tom




>Apologies about the lack of brevity, the billiard balls of ideas in my
>mind kept on ricocheting for hours.
>_______
>
>Let me get this straight. The problem of "lack of a place for agency"
>or the mystery of where the "capacity for dissent" is located, is the
>problem of HOW the complicity of the agent/habitus with their
>field/structures/worlds IS NOT straight determinism?
>
>The habitus' structured and structuring structures affect dispositions,
>producing representations, strategies and actions without strictly
>determining them. What comes out of the ontological complicity of
>social space & the habitus are regularities, dispositions and
>tendencies -  but /never/ determination.
>
>Bourdieu writes "the passage from the highest probability to absolute
>certainty is a qualitative leap which is not proportionate to the
>numerical gap" (Outline of a Theory of Practice, p9). It is in the gap
>between highly-probable actions and what the agents actually do that
>agency is or can or should be found.
>
>Of course, the question is nearly, as Hiro wrote, "[w]hether actors
>have a capacity to seize this opportunity to challenge what has been
>hitherto hegemonic" ... but I disagree that this is 'an "empirical
>question" alone. It is very much a question to be asked of Bourdieu's
>Theory of Practice itself, in the mode of Bryan's initial query. There
>is a place for agency in Bourideu's theories, and I think that
>considering it ineffable, stubbornly mysterious or absent is unfair.
>
>FIRSTLY: The fallacy of determination...
>
>Certainly, there is plenty of scope to experience life or to analyse a
>life as being determined by the habitus and the field...
>
>"What we are justified in describing as a /mechanism/, in the interests
>of making a point, is sometimes experienced as a kind of /infernal
>engine/ (we often speak of the 'hell of success'), as though agents
>were no more than tragic cogs in a machine that is exterior and
>superior to them all." (Practical Reason, Bourdieu, p26)
>
>...but this is a kind of 'bad faith' which uses hindsight to intepret
>actions as directed towards particular goals, whereas "[e]ven when they
>look like the realization of explicits ends, the strategies produced by
>the habitus and enabling to cope with unforseen and constantly changing
>situations are only apparently determined by the future." ('Stucture,
>Habitus, Practice', p61)
>
>There's a near circularity to habitus apprehending the world as it
>wants it to be, so it can propose the same strategies as before, so the
>world will continue being as it wants it to be (ie, homologous to the
>world in which the habitus was produced).
>
>But if we try to close this circle out and say that the structures of
>the habitus and its field DETERMINE the agents behaviour we approach
>the fallacy of saying that by sheer will alone the agents (or the
>dominant agents of a field) can make the world just the way they want
>it to be. Just because you treat the world as "an infinite market for
>blockbuster movies" does nothing to ensure that it will behave like
>one. More to the point, just because the world behaved like "an
>infinite market for blockbuster movies" YESTERDAY doesn't mean that it
>will behave like one tomorrow.
>
>Certainly, in the centre of Bourdieu's theory is the idea that the
>habitus apprehends a present that resembles the past and effectively
>reproduces further circumstances of the same kind in the future. The
>dominant agents in a field with a certain degree of power and a certain
>degree of success can pull of this conservative strategy a lot. But
>never perfectly.
>
>Bourdieu writes "the near circular relationship of near perfect
>reproduction... is completely valid only when the conditions of
>production of the habitus and the conditions of its functioning are
>identical of homethetic" (SHP,p63)
>
>Objectively, there is always more to the world than the structures of
>the various habitus and fields we are entwined with, and although we
>can't see that "objectively" the world is really there and will really
>change which opportunities & strategies are both available and 'best'
>for the agents.
>
>The world - as material reality & as intersecting social spaces - is
>something that NO structure can totally encompass, and the agent must
>negotiate that gap between the habitus' best guess of the situation
>being faced and the reality of what's there, as well as between the
>habitus' best guess of what to do & what is acutally done.
>
>SECONDLY: Where can you see that agency really being taken up?
>
>(1) AS SCIENCE/KNOWLEDGE/WISDOM: As described by Peter King, 'we' have
>the capacity to render CONSCIOUS the structures that so profoundly, and
>usually unconsciously, render the world around us and inform our
>practices. With this awareness we can critique & manipulate the
>structures around us and the behaviours they inspire.
>
>There's a power-thing to be considered here about how successfully
>anyone can change the world around them... and also a finitude thing:
>The deal with rendering unconscious structures conscious is that
>unconscious structures inform that behaviour. Science & Philosophy have
>(apparently) become increasingly aware of the finitude of their
>understandings, and the inability to transcend the situatedness of
>human being, and the effect of this for relying on knowledge of
>structures to facilitate effective agency is that an agents will tend
>only to know what they're 'supposed' to know, given the structure
>around them.
>
>(2) INTERSECTION OF FIELDS: As described by Hiro "one field is said to
>be always coterminous, overlapped, and intersected with other fields."
>So, agents within one field with its ways of seing and ways of being,
>receive interference from the agents and insitutions of other fields.
>Encountering this, agency is exercised is choosing how to deal with
>other ways of seeing the world - and those choices may reinforce,
>amend, augment or substitute the habitus/field/capital in which the has
>been entwined.
>
>Here, again power and finitude come into the mix, habitus & fields have
>their particular ways of dealing with the intrusions of aliens
>(Distinction!!).  The interference of fields fits together with the
>making structures conscious - thinking of Bakhtin "a culture exists
>only on the border of other cultures" or Mikhail Epstein's transculture
>writings.
>
>(3) HYSTERESIS: Things change, life is flux etc, something about 'can't
>step in the same river twice'  etc. The embodied history of the
>habitus, and the institutionalised history of the fields work hard to
>perpetuate themsleves... but in Hiro's words they "can never achieve
>total saturation." As things in the world change the AGENT must CHOOSE
>how much attention to pay to the 'fact' that the present differs from
>the past the habitus will want it to resemble. At some point,
>continuing to do things as they have always been done (the habitus is
>embodied history FORGOTTEN as history) isn't the best strategy
>anymore. 
>
>Bourdieu notes that the habitus, as an embodied history communicating
>with objectified history (the field), is susceptible to an hysteresis
>effect that can result in the actions it calls into existence achieving
>the kinds of negative sanctions it always intends to avoid "because the
>environment they actually encounter is too different from the one to
>which they are objectively adjusted" (SHP, Bourdieu, p62).
>
>(4)CREATIVE/ARTISTIC: To me, the most interesting exercise of agency is
>the ARTIST. As suggested by George Free, there is something about the
>fields of cultural production & social transformation. In general,
>there are two strategies available for retaining/gaining symbollic
>capital: the first is to play the current game well, and the other to
>move to a novel (sub) field with its own rules. For the artist, this
>issue comes out in the Schools of Art, or "fashions" - the artist must
>choose whether to continue the tradition of which s/he is a part, or
>else go against the fashion, and defy the prevailing conventions.
>Neither the choice to defy convention nor the practices coming out of
>that defiance can be wholly determined by the structures (including the
>habitus) of that field.
>
>So, even though the artistic habitus may propose the strategy of
>defying the conventions as an opportunity to gain advantage in the
>artistic field, the habitus cannot provide the conventional way to defy
>artistic conventions - here is the space for the agency.
>
>Likewise, the habitus may provide the strategy of "adjusting to the new
>world after some time has passed" to keep some advantage but the
>habitus cannot provide the answer on exactly what adjustments need to
>be made - here is the space for some agency. (ie 3)
>
>In the same manner, the habitus will propose strategies of what to do
>when other habitus and other fields interfere with an agent's world,
>but the habitus can't provide the answer on whether the new ways of
>seeing & being are to be rejected, adopted or modified or whatever
>because a habitus (from the past) intrinsically doesn't understand
>things in the novel way of another  - here is the space for agency. (ie
>2)
>
>As for the human sciences, the habitus may instruct an agent to develop
>an understanding of the structures of the field and the habitus around
>it, or those of others - but the knoweldge that is thus gained is
>intrinsically unknown to the habitus, so the strategy of what to do
>with that knowledge and what it means can't come from the habitus -
>here is the space for agency. (ie 1)
>
>* * *
>
>Cam
>--------------------
>csmann-AT-bigpond.com
>
>"you will never understand how it feels to live your life with no
>meaning or control" - Common People, PULP
>
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