Rethinking The Subject

An Anthology Of Contemporary European Social Thought

James Faubion, Paul Rabinow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429977275
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the early seventies, European thinkers have departed notably from their predecessors in order to pursue analytical programs more thoroughly their own. Rethinking the Subject brings together in one volume some of the most influential writings of Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu, Pizzorno, Macfarlane, and other authors whose ideas have had a worldwide influence in recent social theory. This anthology is testament to the central importance of three contemporary themes, each familiar to earlier thinkers but never definitively formulated or resolved. The first two concern the nature and modalities of power and legitimacy in society. The third, and most fundamental, deals with the nature and modalities of the "self" or "subject." These themes owe their special contemporary relevance to an array of events— from the collapse of colonialism to the birth of test-tube babies. James Faubion's introduction traces the historical context of these influential events and themes. It also traces the lineaments of a still inchoate intellectual movement, of which the anthology's contributors are the vanguard. Whether "modernist" or "post-modernist," this movement leads away from a "world-constituting subject," which in one guise or another has served as the ontological ground of social reflection and research since Kant. It points instead toward ontological pluralism and toward polythetic diagnostics of heterogeneous forces that constitute a multiplicity of worlds and subjects.

Part One
Cultured Bodies

Chapter One
Structures, Habitus, Practices

Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu currently holds the chair in sociology at the Collège de France. His bibliography permits of no easy summary. It encompasses work on religion, capitalism, the symbolic organization of space and the structural determination of conceptions of time, modernization, language, education, aesthetics, the Algerian peasantry, and the French elite. Its topical variations nevertheless belie a more limited array of overarching interests and themes. Perhaps the most salient and persistent of those themes centers on sociocultural "reproduction" and especially on the means and modes of the reproduction of domination. Such a theme unites virtually all of Bourdieu's monographs currently available in English, from the Outline of a Theory of Practice (translated by R. Nice [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977]), through Distinction: A Social Critique of the judgement of Taste (translated by R. Nice [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984]) and Homo Academicus (translated by P. Collier [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988]), to The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, coauthored by A. Darbel, with D. Schnapper (translated by C. Beattie and N. Merriman [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991]). An analysis of reproduction might at first sight seem to be the direct, if morally somewhat deflated, offspring of Durkheim's earlier analysis of solidarity. The analyst of reproduction might—and at more than merely first sight—seem a direct, if morally more beleaguered, offspring of Durkheimian functionalism. Bourdieu may well be a "neofunctionalist." But he resists following either Durkheimians or their structuralist successors in reducing society simply to its normative proscriptions and prescriptions. He resists following either in reducing culture simply to its most conventional expressions and collectively most recognizable representations. He accuses both such reductions of an "objectivism" that fails adequately to countenance the import either of the strictly historical particularity or of the dispositional regularity of human practices. In what follows, an excerpt from The Logic of Practice (translated by R. Nice [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990]), pp. 52-65, Bourdieu offers his most concise exposition to date of the conceptual foundations of a theory of action that might escape the shortcomings not simply of objectivism but also of its subjectivist antithesis. At the crux of that theory is the habitus: the socialized body; the dispositional core of the practitioner whose every virtue, subservient and rebellious, is a structural necessity and whose every compulsion, subservient and rebellious, is a structural virtue.

Objectivism constitutes the social world as a spectacle offered to an observer who takes up a 'point of view' on the action and who, putting into the object the principies of his relation to the object, proceeds as if it were intended solely for knowledge and as if all the interactions within it were purely symbolic exchanges. This viewpoint is the one taken from high positions in the social structure, from which the social world is seen as a representation (as the word is used in idealist philosophy, but also as in painting) or a performance (in the theatrical or musical sense), and practices are seen as no more than the acting-out of roles, the playing of scores or the implementation of plans. The theory of practice as practice insists, contrary to positivist materialism, that the objects of knowledge are constructed, not passively recorded, and, contrary to intellectualist idealism, that the principle of this construction is the system of structured, structuring dispositions, the habitus, which is constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical functions. It is possible to step down from the sovereign viewpoint, from which objectivist idealism orders the world, as Marx demands in the Theses on Feuerbach, but without having to abandon to it the 'active aspect' of apprehension of the world by reducing knowledge to a mere recording. To do this, one has to situate oneself within 'real activity as such', that is, in the practical relation to the world, the preoccupied, active presence in the world through which the world imposes its presence, with its urgencies, its things to be done and said, things made to be said, which directly govern words and deeds without ever unfolding as a spectacle. One has to escape from the realism of the structure, to which objectivism, a necessary stage in breaking with primary experience and constructing the objective relationships, necessarily leads when it hypostatizes these relations by treating them as realities already constituted outside of the history of the group—without falling back into subjectivism, which is quite incapable of giving an account of the necessity of the social world. To do this, one has to return to practice, the site of the dialectic of the opus operatum and the modus operandi; of the objectified products and the incorporated products of historical practice; of structures and habitus.

The bringing to light of the presuppositions inherent in objectivist construction has paradoxically been delayed by the efforts of all those who, in linguistics as in anthropology, have sought to 'correct' the structuralist model by appealing to 'context' or 'situation' to account for variations, exceptions and accidents (instead of making them simple variants, absorbed into the structure, as the structuralists do). They have thus avoided a radical questioning of the objectivist mode of thought, when, that is, they have not simply fallen back on to the free choice of a rootless, unattached, pure subject. Thus, the method known as 'situational analysis', which consists of "observing people in a variety of social situations" in order to determine "the way in which individuals are able to exercise choices within the limits of a specified social structure"^[1] : remains locked within the framework of the rule and the exception, which Edmund Leach (often invoked by the exponents of this method) spells out explicitly: "I postulate that structural systems in which all avenues of social action are narrowly institutionalized are impossible. In all viable systems, there must be an area where the individual is free to make choices so as to manipulate the system to his advantage."^[2]

The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively 'regulated' and 'regular' without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor.³

It is, of course, never ruled out that the responses of the habitus may be accompanied by a strategic calculation tending to perform in a conscious mode the operation that the habitus performs quite differently, namely an estimation of chances presupposing transformation of the past effect into an expected objective. But these responses are first defined, without any calculation, in relation to objective potentialities, immediately inscribed in the present, things to do or not to do, things to say or not to say, in relation to a probable, 'upcoming' future (un à venir), which—in contrast to the future seen as 'absolute possibility' (absolute Möglichkeit) in Hegel's (or Sartre's) sense, projected by the pure project of a 'negative freedom'—puts itself forward with an urgency and a claim to existence that excludes all deliberation. Stimuli do not exist for practice in their objective truth, as conditional, conventional triggers, acting only on condition that they encounter agents conditioned to recognize them.⁴ The practical world that is constituted in the relationship with the habitus, acting as a system of cognitive and motivating structures, is a world of already realized ends—procedures to follow, paths to take—and of objects endowed with a 'permanent teleological character', in Husserl's phrase, tools or institutions. This is because the regularities inherent in an arbitrary condition ('arbitrary' in Saussure's and Mauss's sense) tend to appear as necessary, even natural, since they are the basis of the schemes of perception and appreciation through which they are apprehended.

If a very close correlation is regularly observed between the scientifically constructed objective probabilities (for example, the chances of access to a particular good) and agents' subjective aspirations ('motivations' and 'needs'), this is not because agents consciously adjust their aspirations to an exact evaluation of their chances of success, like a gambler organizing his stakes on the basis of perfect information about his chances of winning. In reality, the dispositions durably inculcated by the possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms and necessities, opportunities and prohibitions inscribed in the objective conditions (which science apprehends through statistical regularities such as the probabilities objectively attached to a group or class) generate dispositions objectively compatible with these conditions and in a sense pre-adapted to their demands. The most improbable practices are therefore excluded, as unthinkable, by a kind of immediate submission to order that inclines agents to make a virtue of necessity, that is, to refuse what is anyway denied and to will the inevitable. The very conditions of production of the habitus, a virtue made of necessity, mean that the anticipations it generates tend to ignore the restriction of which the validity of calculation of probabilities is subordinated, namely that the experimental conditions should not have been modified. Unlike scientific estimations, which are corrected after each experiment according to rigorous rules of calculation, the anticipations of the habitus, practical hypotheses based on past experience, give disproportionate weight to early experiences. 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 specifically 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 the perception and appreciation of all subsequent experiences.

The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices— more history—in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the 'correctness' of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms.⁵ This system of dispositions—a present past that tends to perpetuate itself into the future by reactivation in similarly structured practices, an internal law through which the law of external necessities, irreducible to immediate constraints, is constantly exerted—is the principle of the continuity and regularity which objectivism sees in social practices without being able to account for it; and also of the regulated transformations that cannot be explained either by the extrinsic, instantaneous determinisms of mechanistic sociologism or by the purely internal but equally instantaneous determination of spontaneist subjectivism. Overriding the spurious opposition between the forces inscribed in an earlier state of the system, outside the body, and the internal forces arising instantaneously as motivations springing from free will, the internal dispositions—the internalization of externality—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. As an acquired system of generative schemes, the habitus makes possible the free production of all the thoughts, perceptions and actions inherent in the particular conditions of its production—and only those. Through the habitus, the structure of which it is the product governs practice, not along the paths of a mechanical determinism, but within the constraints and limits initially set on its inventions. This infinite yet strictly limited generative capacity is difficult to understand only so long as one remains locked in the usual antinomies—which the concept of the habitus aims to transcend—of determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity, consciousness and the unconscious, or the individual and society. Because the habitus is an infinite capacity for generating products—thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions—whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditioning.

Nothing is more misleading than the illusion created by hindsight in which all the traces of a life, such as the works of an artist or the events at a biography, appear as the realization of an essence that seems to preexist them. Just as a mature artistic style is not contained, like a seed, in an original inspiration but is continuously defined and redefined in the dialectic between the objectifying intention and the already objectified intention, so too the unity of meaning which, after the event, may seem to have preceded the acts and works announcing the final significance, retrospectively transforming the various stages of the temporal series into mere preparatory sketches, is constituted through the confrontation between questions that only exist in and for a mind armed with a particular type of schemes and the solutions obtained through application of these same schemes. The genesis of a system of works or practices generated by the same habitus (or homologous habitus, such as those that underlie the unity of the life-style of a group or a class) cannot be described either as the autonomous development of a unique and always self-identical essence, or as a continuous creation of novelty, because it arises from the necessary yet unpredictable confrontation between the habitus and an event that can exercise a pertinent incitement on the habitus only if the latter snatches it from the contingency of the accidental and constitutes it as a problem by applying to it the very principles of its solution; and also because the habitus, like every 'art of inventing', is what makes it possible to produce an infinite number of practices that are relatively unpredictable (like the corresponding situations) but also limited in their diversity. In short, being the product of a particular class of objective regularities, the habitus tends to generate all the 'reasonable', 'common-sense',⁶ behaviours (and only these) which are possible within the limits of these regularities, and which are likely to be positively ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• A Note on the Editing
• Credits
• Introduction
• Part One Cultured Bodies
• Part Two Matters and Ideas
• Part Three Acts and Reasons
• Part Four Economies and Societies
• About the Book and Editor
• Index