Bourdieu - Habitus, Freedom and Reflexivity

Theory & Psychology
http://tap.sagepub.com Habitus, Freedom, and Reflexivity

Mathieu Hilgers Theory Psychology 2009; 19; 728 DOI: 10.1177/0959354309345892 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tap.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/19/6/728
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Habitus, Freedom, and Reflexivity

Mathieu Hilgers
FREE UNIVERSITY OF BRUSSELS
ABSTRACT. The question of freedom is recurrent in the theory of habitus. In this paper I propose that the notion of freedom is an essential and necessary component for the coherence of the analyses which mobilize habitus both in terms of their theoretical articulation and in terms of their grounding in empirical reality. This argument can seem surprising considering that the theory of habitus has often been accused of being deterministic. Yet I show that, from an epistemological point of view, habitus theory is not deterministic. Bourdieus treatment of this concept implies at least three principles that exclude determinism: (1) the production of an infinite number of behaviors from a limited number of principles, (2) permanent mutation, and (3) the intensive and extensive limits of sociological understanding. After identifying and describing these principles, I show the reason for their incompatibility with a deterministic perspective and consider their implications for the corresponding model of action. I illustrate this analysis by a discussion of Loc Wacquants carnal sociology of the pugilistic universe which reveals why it is essential to understand and explain the relation between habitus and freedom. KEY WORDS: Bourdieu, determinism, freedom, habitus
May I congratulate Pierre Bourdieu, whose life and work constitute a living refutation of the basic view of sociology according to which the individual is determined by social relations? He has never done that to which his origin and training predestined him, rather always doing whatever put him in open opposition to the power of groups and institutions internalized in usthe very thing that, under the names of habitus and social field, he made key to his analyses. (Beck, 1997)
Importing classic concepts into a system of thought often involves a series of theoretical problems related to them. Sometimes these prove central for completely understanding the stakes and the fruitfulness of an analytical model. Classic theories of habituality have often seen their authors reflect on the notion of freedom (for a review of these theories, see Camic, 1982/2000;
THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY VOL. 19 (6): 728755 The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0959354309345892 http://tap.sagepub.com
HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY
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Hran, 1987; Rist, 1984).1 The notion of habitus always evokes a disposition that is difficult to transform, a finality without consciousness, perceptible and comprehensible only by its manifestation as phenomenon, that is, by action in the world; often, the challenge has been to establish the real consequence of habitus in our behavior, to understand better its determinations in order better to inflect them, to grasp the importance and the effect that consciousness of constraints has on those constraints.2 What is the status of will, the consequence of reflexivity, of being conscious of the process of habituality on judgment? Can this consciousness modify the structure of representation of the world, or the logic of action? Finally, can one be free with a habitus? As one will see, the unexpected experience of Loc Wacquant in the pugilistic universe and his attempt to grasp it through the notion of habitus provide some interesting perspectives and empirical situations through which to investigate these questions (Wacquant, 1998, 2004, 2005, 2009). Although it has rarely been discussed, I will propose the hypothesis that the notion of freedom is an essential and necessary component for the analyses which mobilize habitus both in terms of their theoretical articulation and in terms of their grounding in empirical reality. This argument can seem surprising for a perspective which has often been accused of being deterministic. Nevertheless I believe that from an epistemological point of view habitus theory, and more specifically Bourdieus treatment of habitus, a concept that he has refined and made useful for social sciences, excludes determinism. This study aims to identify the theoretical developments linked to this exclusion. I will thus consider the role of freedom by approaching habitus theory from a constructivist point of view. By restricting myself to the notion of habitus, I do not intend to exhaust the question. This paper can function as a first step in thinking through the connection between empirical experience and the imperatives related to the will to forge a theoretical model, to reconstruct the progressive and indefinite adjustment of a series of explicative hypotheses to an indefinite series of singular experiences, but also in general to consider the importance of freedom in Bourdieu (Bouveresse & Roche, 2004; Quiniou, 1996; Sapiro, 2004) and in sociology (De Coster, 1996). To highlight the relation between habitus and freedom I will mobilize the work of Wacquant devoted to the boxing world, more precisely his book Body and Soul (2004), as a vivid illustration of the question that I am focusing on here. Indeed the concept of habitus as operant philosophy of action and methodological guide organizes the entirety of this book (Wacquant, 2005, p. 470). The theoretical agenda of Body and Soul is to engage, exemplify, and test empirically the notion of habitus by disclosing in considerable detail how a particular type of habitus is concretely fabricated (Wacquant, 2005, p. 453). This is why it is not surprising that one finds again, at least implicitly, the relation between habitus and freedom at the heart of Wacquants descriptions of the pugilistic universe. His position in the field shows perfectly some decisive aspects of this relation and the importance of clarifying them.
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Why Is Bourdieu Not a Determinist? By the importation of the notion of habitus into the social sciences, Pierre Bourdieu attempts to overcome a series of oppositions: subjectivism vs. objectivism, micro vs. macro, strategy vs. non-strategy, freedom vs. determinism, and so on. Among others, his work takes a stand in the debate between Sartrian free will and Lvi-Straussian determinism. In proposing a praxeological perspective (Bourdieu, 1972/2000a, 1972/1977), Bourdieus ambition is to overcome these oppositions while keeping their contributions to the sociological treatment of action. The praxeological mode of knowledge is the product of a double theoretical translation (Bourdieu, 1972/2000a, p. 235).3 Bourdieus project is to appropriate the objectivist approach, while questioning the conditions of possibility of primary experience, and to surpass it by emphasizing the weakness of the objectivist foundationwhich refuses any kind of self-interpretation or reflexive consideration of its own conditions of possibility. By showing that this kind of knowledge is constituted in opposition to primary experience, Bourdieu stresses the impossibility of integrating a theory of practical knowledge of the social world into a strictly objectivist perspective. Praxeological knowledge is useful because it effects a synthesis between the givens of objectivist knowledge (which it preserves and surpasses all while incorporating its assumptions that allow a theory of action) and those of practical knowledge of the social world. Habitus is at the heart of the theory that Bourdieu develops through this method and that Wacquant mobilizes and discusses in order to grasp the pugilistic world. Bourdieus treatment of this notion implies at least three principles that exclude determinism: (1) the production of an infinite number of behaviors from a limited number of principles, (2) permanent mutation, and (3) the intensive and extensive limits of sociological understanding. After identifying and describing these principles, I will show the reason for their incompatibility with a deterministic perspective and will attempt to demonstrate what they imply for his theoretical model and more broadly for the analyses which mobilize the notion of habitus.
The Production of an Infinite Number of Behaviors from a Limited Number of Principles Habitus generates an infinite number of behaviors from a limited number of principles. It is a generative system composed of limited, transposable principles. The agent incorporates rules throughout his or her socialization and social trajectory; these rules are few in number but determine a representational matrix as well as a matrix of action. The formal rules at the heart of these matrices functioning are limited but transposable to a plurality of contexts, and their content can vary infinitely. Habitus resembles a generative
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grammar (Bourdieu, 1967) because it allows the combination of elements more or less similar in form but whose content differs with each agent.4 The agents mode of social functioning is simultaneously constrained and enabled by a structure that is both structuring and structured, composed of a restricted number of principles that allow the production of an infinite number of behaviors. I discuss later what this implies.
Permanent Mutation Habitus is a dynamic notion composed of schemes that produce practices as well as schemes of classification that allow the perception and appreciation of practices. The agent perceives, understands, evaluates, adapts, and acts in a situation according to his or her habitus. The actions produced and their results can have a varyingly important influence on the individuals perception of things and, in consequence, on his or her dispositions (toward action and perception). Because of its evolutionary dimension, habitus determines practice but is also determined by it. Habitus is thus in a state of permanent mutation, all the more so because it is exposed to heterogeneous contexts and situations. This mutation can reinforce or weaken already acquired dispositions. Because of these successive modifications, one can only grasp this dynamic notion at a precise moment in the history of an agent through the recomposition of this history up to the present. In addition to the difficulty of analytically reconstituting a single habitus, at a collective level all forms of generalizing a given behavior between individuals who share a similar habitus, for examplemust remain fundamentally approximate. In fact, it is impossible for two agents of identical condition and origin to live exactly the same situations or experiences in a similar order. Even so, if we do manage to identify some practices shared by the members of a group, they still wont be substitutable or impersonal. It is in a relation of homology, of diversity within homogeneity reflecting the diversity within homogeneity characteristic of their social conditions of production, that the singular habitus of the different members of the same class are united (Bourdieu, 1972/1977, p. 86). If there exists a structural affinity between individuals who share a common belonging, we must still admit that each ones relationship to contexts will be different. As a result of such variation and permanent mutation, the effects of habitus are partially indeterminate.5 This indeterminacy does not make possible an analysis of the social world characterized by radical determinism.
The Limits of Sociological Understanding The last principle considered here follows logically from the second and is specific to the analysis of the social sciences. One can grasp only approximately
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the different elements that have formed and continue to form habitus. It is impossible to apprehend them all or even to understand perfectly the influence of a single one of them. This is why, for example, in his book on Heidegger (Bourdieu, 1991b), Bourdieu reminds us that it would be necessary, in order to describe the ethos or generic habitus animating individuals in the field of German philosophy, to conduct a rereading of German philosophy and intellectual tradition from a praxeological perspective. Incapable of bringing such a vast project to fruition, he resorts to formulating hypotheses in the form of conditional totalizationsthat is, by generalizing a theoretical opinion which, for lack of an ability to develop the empirical grounding that it needs, remains limited to the formulation of hypotheses. These three elements intrinsic to the model allow us to think through the unpredictability of practice. The production of an infinite number of behaviors from a restricted number of principles implies the infinite variety of practices possible for an individual; permanent mutation points to the relative malleability of habitus throughout the trajectory of an agent and therefore to the limits of any fixed analysis; and the intensive and extensive limits of sociological understanding account for the impossibility of grasping the real in its totality as well as the poor predictive ability of sociology. However, does the unpredictability that sociological science faces mean that practices are truly free or indeterminate? To answer this question, or at least to illuminate its significance for Bourdieu and the authors who mobilize the notion of habitus, we must understand the role of these principles within a theory, which aims to identify and conceptualize a system that generates practices. Consistent with the limits that I have set for this study, I will pursue this analysis while remaining at the internal level of the model. Rather than focusing on the limits specific to social science, I will concentrate on the production of behaviors from a limited number of principles and on permanent mutation.
The Analogy of Experience The system that generates practices is made up of certain components that are applicable to multiple situations in everyday life. According to Bourdieu, the similarity between different practices and reactions of a single agent originates in an analogical principle: a transfer of schemes that the habitus performs on the basis of acquired equivalences, facilitating the substitutability of one reaction for another and enabling the agent to master all problems of a similar form that may arise in new situations (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 94). This analogical principle allows, by practical substitutability, a small number of generative schemes to manage cognitive and evaluative structures and, thereby, the perception and organization of action.6 The transposition outside the ring of the system of schemata of perception, appreciation, and action characteristic of their craft by the boxers whom Wacquant (2004) studied
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illustrates this principle well. Even if numerous boxers violate the commandments of the pugilistic catechism (such as regulated practices of abstinence that compose the trinity of the pugilistic cult: food, social life, and sexual commerce; Wacquant, 2005, p. 461), the more they are engaged in the Manly Art, the more they perceive the world and act in function of an ethos related to their pugilistic practices. Habitus is a system of durable and transposable dispositions. The analogy of experience7 facilitates at the same time recourse to identical schemes for different situations and agents capacity for improvisation, as well as adaptation, improvised or not, to new contexts. This practical substitutability and the postulate of the worlds being apprehended as (and composed of) homological structures permit and assist the extension of the analytical model to all behaviors. But this abstract model, even if it only draws meaning, form, and substance from practical manifestationsand even though a disposition remains irreducible to any finite or infinite series of actualizations, that is, to any actual fact or group of facts (E. Bourdieu, 1998, p. 39)can be nothing other than a theoretical artifact.8 From that moment,
the description through construction that is made possible by mastery of the generative formula of practices has to remain within the limits that are set on practical logic by the very fact that it derives not from this formula but from its practical equivalenta system of schemes capable of orienting practice without entering consciousness except in an intermittent and partial way. (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, pp. 269270)
In a certain sense, the theoretical model is thus distinct from the mastery of agents in practice; it only gives an idea, both very close and very distant, of the real. Theory must always be readjusted for the sake of this real, for the social world remains irreducible to the architectures we give it. Practical logic recalls the plurality of interrelated aspects of the real. This complexity explains how it works with a certain freedom compared to logical logic. Practical logic is the application of a
partially integrated system of generative schemes which, being partially mobilized [italics added] in relation to each particular situation, produces, in each case ... a practical definition of the situation and the functions of the action ... which, with the aid of a simple yet inexhaustible combinatory, generates the actions best suited to fulfill these functions within the limits of the available means. (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 267)
The piecemeal nature of schematic mobilization anticipates the critiques that a monothetic, monolithic, and unilateral principle would like to make of habitus, and suggests agents ability to adapt to a variety of contexts, as shown perfectly by the fact that a young white European graduate student at one of the most prestigious universitys in the world can become a boxer in the black ghetto of Chicago. It allows us better to understand the regulated freedom that characterizes the unpredictability of practice but also the plural dimension of the process of socialization.9
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Habitus works through an analogical transfer of schemes that allows us to apprehend the real through a relatively fixed system of perception. Past experiences structure transposable dispositions, give meaning to new experiences and situations, and contribute to the more or less congruent adjustment of practice to objective rules and structures. From this analogical schema the creative perception of a sense whose newness depends on the situation is put to work. This sense is produced by the immanent law of habitus that makes the agent adjust, un-adjust, and readjust his or her practices to be compatible with objective reality as it appears subjectively. The nonequivalence of objective context and subjective appreciation gives rise to phenomena of hysteresis of variable importance. These phenomena appear when the individuals most fixed dispositions, which are almost naturalized and relatively unchangeable, are faced with a situation where they have become obsolete. Such gaps explain, for example, the difficulty that some agents have in grasping the meaning of historic upheavals, their inability to process objective events. Because of fixed dispositions, an individual can remain closed off to the evolution of a context, to the modification of its objective rules, of its function, and therefore of his or her own position within that context. The lasting effect of the most essential structures thus stands out in situations of hysteresis. The evolution and makeup of habitus always remain dependent on practice. Habitus unites objective reality and subjective representation. From Bourdieus perspective, this union is the principle that allows action by the subject in the world.10 The more it is mastered, the more it contributes to freedom. The principle of analogy, since it allows us to envisage a multitude of practices from a restricted number of principles, facilitates the development of a synoptic schema that authorizes the simultaneous, monothetic apprehension of meanings that are produced and used polythetically by agents (Bourdieu, 1972/1977, p. 107; 1980/1990b, pp. 834). The analyst has the opportunity to exercise a power of generalization by examining as arrested phases the possible scenarios that the agent can see only in temporal succession.11 If the analyst does not go beyond this generalization, he or she will not be able to account for the unpredictability of practice because it is characteristic
of a polythetic relationship to experience. This is a type of relationship to the world which allows one to distribute in succession attitudes that would be judged contradictory, but which when referred to contextual occurrences create an approximate rhythm of variations in behavior. (Maesschalck, 1997, p. 13)
The intersection of the principle of an infinite number of behaviors from a limited number of rules with a specific situation indicates the general space of an agents possibilities of action. As this space can never be totally reconstructed, the action remains partly unpredictable. Does this unpredictability signify freedom, or could it at least be a sign of it?
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An agents freedom can only be expressed through the regulated mechanisms of the system that generates practices. The challenge of Bourdieu is thus to convert necessity into choice without falling into the traps of determinism or total freedom. Habitus is a unifying principle that associates subjective desire with the evolution of objective finality. Bourdieus schematism, according to Maesschalck (1997), goes beyond the Kantian perspective
of a mechanism of subsumption into categories because it attempts to resolve, in a practical formula, the dialectics most radical demand: the transformation of necessity into free choice. ... The coupling of practical schemes and classificatory schemes makes it possible, in fact, to unite the internal coherence of practices and their external coherence as self-identity and difference from the non-self. (p. 20)
This schematism allows us to pose an objective principle of orientation and a subjective principle of appreciation but also to grasp diversity through a synthetic union of the two. Bourdieus model must for its internal coherence effect a synthesis between necessity and freedom. Moreover, the discrepancies between empirical reality and the theoretical articulation of the social world, between actual behaviors and behaviors that conform to the models rationale, the gaps between opus operatum and modus operandi, between act and power, between dispositions and positions, between objective structures and cognitive structures, become significant thanks to this relatively free unpredictability of behaviors that the model theorizes, in particular, through a dynamic conception of habitus.12
Habitus as a Dynamic Notion How does what I have called the principle of permanent mutation play out in the formation of habitus? Bourdieu does not say much on this question. Even so, using his work we can conceive of habitus as the superposition of different layers of socialization. Among these, one must distinguish a primary layer and a secondary layer. Both are made up of the singular appropriation of collective reference points that is realized through the particular experiences of agents (see Berger & Luckmann, 1966).13 Progressively and involuntarily, agents specialize themselves through their durable exposition to particular contexts. They also do it voluntarily, for example through the acquisition of special aptitudes such as these of the Manly Art in the case of Wacquant. The primary layer develops from archetypal and collective representations articulated through a system of binary oppositions that differentiates the sexes (man/woman, brother/sister, etc.), time (day/night, morning/evening, short/long, etc.), size (large/small, wide/thin, etc.), place (inside/outside, open/closed, etc.). The primary layer is the fruit of sedimentation by generations of socialization. The relationship of domination between the sexes is, for example,
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characteristic of this layer. Always present in spite of manifest attempts to overcome it, it proves the difficulty of reversing this sedimentation.14 Changes in the primary layer of habitus happen slowly and laboriously, as shown for example by Wacquants attempts to acquire an art that nothing, neither his origin nor his trajectory, predestined him to practice, least of all in a context that was a priori strange to him and within which he was a statistical anomaly (Wacquant, 2004). Produced in the reproduction of domestic practices, in daily activities that internalize the roles and functions of the family unit, the primary layer is particularized during early childhood. The family transmits models of representation that organize agents perceptions and display the behaviors that will structure their practices. This layer of socialization is administered essentially through family and school. The process of acquisition implies a relationship of identification that is in no way a conscious imitation of an objectivated model. It is a process of reproduction. Agents internalize objective reality and help reproduce the categories they have perceived, because they situate their own acts in relation to this perception of the world. In a certain sense, through practice, agents make what they perceive exist. They externalize their internalization. This process of acquisition participates in the construction of what one is, what one becomes, develops a proclivity for the development of a possible self, of a finality which is never totally definitive or completely determined. What is learned by body is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 73). The agent grows up and the secondary level of his or her habitus develops throughout the agents relative autonomization. This is made up of a particularized collective dimension. Wacquants descriptions of the pugilistic universe provide a vivid illustration of this phenomenon when they underline the intromission of the individual and the collective in the transmission process of the Manly Art (Wacquant, 2004, pp. 99126). Even if an individual has a lifestyle or a habitus typical of a group or class, he or she nonetheless remains a single individual.15 This delineation that I suggest allows us to grasp through a synchronic view of the state of a habituss makeup the proportion and therefore the significance of different moments of socialization in the history of an individual; in other words, their strength of determination. It highlights the importance of the trajectory and the evolving nature of habitus. Daily life and its events reinforce or weaken a partially moving habitual nature. The experiences that sediment habitus make of it the materialization of ... memory (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 291, n. 3), which it perpetuates through practice. The earliest experiences are the most determinative, leaving the strongest and most lasting imprint. It is they that form schemes of perception, thought, and action.
The very logic of its genesis makes habitus a chronologically ordered series of structures, where one structure of a given level specifies the structures at lower
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levels (which are thus genetically anterior) and structures the higher-level structures through the structuring action that it exercises on the structured experiences that generate these structures. (Bourdieu, 1972/2000a, p. 284, tr. J.R.)
Habitus appears thus as a relatively and relationally malleable entity. It is modified through the experiences that constitute it, through encounters and contacts in a real that is always already relational. The earliest experiences mark, more than others, the perception of the world and the practices that result from them. Throughout life, the individual must face new situations and draw on resources from past experiences to adapt to them. The importance of early experiences also results from the tendency of habitus to protect its own constancy and defend itself against change and questioning. The individual evolves in a universe tailored to reinforce his or her own dispositions and to receive them favorably. By limiting exposure to unknown environments, without necessarily being conscious of doing so, the individual avoids contact with information likely to challenge the accumulated information that fashions his or her representation of the world. This is why many anthropologists produce reflection about their own society when they come back from the field (e.g., Bourdieu, 1962). Everyday life in the field affects the ways in which they think, perceive the world, and act.16 Modifications are made relatively irreversibly. Throughout ones evolution, or trajectory, or aging, mental and other structures progressively close off to the principle of practice. Habitus is the fruit of history and generates, by itself, (practices and therefore) 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. (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 54)
In other words, the product of history is what makes history (both individual and collective). A fundamental question is to establish how an individual can voluntarily affect his habitus, that is, modify his own dispositions, and through them his perceptions and practices. In my view, Body and Soul describes this phenomenon from two points of view. The first is the standpoint of the athletes, including Wacquant himself, who construct their bodies and improve their performance by following a rigorous and demanding training regimen. The second is the standpoint of the researcher who is immersed in a new reality and who uses the analytical resources of his discipline to transform his own dispositions. The paradox in Wacquants attempt is that he was developing an epistemic reflexivity, both for his analyses and for his integration in the field, in order to acquire a non-reflexive practice. Indeed, boxing consists of a series of strategic exchanges in which one pays for hermeneutical mistakes immediately : action and its evaluation are fused and reflexive returns is by definition excluded from the activity (Wacquant, 2004, p. 59). Even if the
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resources it provides are insufficient by themselvesinsofar as they have to be coupled with a real practical learningsociological reflexivity constitutes a powerful tool to adapt dispositions and to ease the conversion into a strange universe. Here epistemic reflexivity is deployed, not at the end of the project, ex post, when it comes to drafting the final research report, but durante, at every stage in the investigation (Wacquant, 2009, p. 147). An agents freedom in the face of determination of self by self, of future history by past history, of what is by what has been, resides in the ability to objectivize his or her own condition. This is exactly what Wacquant describes when he relates his experience in the pugilistic universe and demonstrates practically, through a particular experiment in apprenticeship, Bourdieus idea according to which agents fully become Subjects when, through the mediation of a reflexive effort, they identify and begin the work of gaining (relative) control over their own disposition. This reflexivity allows one, depending on the context, to give free rein, to temper, to inhibit, or even to oppose dispositions to each other. It enables us to monitor, up to a certain point, some of the determinisms that operate through the relation of immediate complicity between position and dispositions (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 136). Thus in a given situation, the malleability of a habitus, its potential for transformation, its ability to adapt, are proportional to its degree of sedimentation, in other words to the layer involved in action. The potential transformation of habitus can be done depending on the layer involved and on the intensity, newness, and repetition of a given experience. Wacquants descriptions of the repetitive, denuded, and ascetic character of boxers training are an excellent illustration of this phenomenon (Wacquant, 2004, pp. 60, 66, 104). If the entirety of habitus is present in an action, some of its traits can be inhibited, reinforced, or emphasized. The experience will not have the same effects on each component of habitus.17 Its malleability is precisely what enables it to adapt to a plurality of social universes. This also shows how habitus depends on the practical universe with which it is associated. Body and Soul descriptions show clearly that this first step in analyzing freedom in habitus shouldnt limit us to understanding freedom in the abstract. It should allow us to illuminate, from a theoretical point of view, why habitus is not a destiny (Bourdieu, 1997/2000b, p. 180). Agents can objectivate the influence that they exert on the social space that determines them. The practices they produce by means of categories of perception, thought, and action that they have internalized through contact with objective structures participate in the modification of these structures and thus, eventually, in the modification of internalized categories. This is why social agents are determined only insofar as they determine themselves; but the categories of perception and appreciation which provide the principle of this (self-)determination are themselves largely determined by the social and economic conditions of their constitution (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 136). An agent with the means to determine him- or herself through knowledge of objective
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mechanisms can use them precisely to step back and gain distance from dispositions (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 136). The emancipation this knowledge aims for requires knowledge of the principles at the heart of the action. From that moment, as Bouveresse (2004) remarks against accusations of determinism, it is not sociology but the desocialization and the depoliticization of the problem of freedom that constitute a threat for true freedom (p. 13). In the same line of thought, we can distinguish two types of freedom in Bourdieu: unconscious freedom and conscious freedom, or, more precisely, a freedom prior to sociological revelation and a freedom after it. Similarly, these two levels of freedom are found concretely in the work of Wacquant devoted to the production of the pugilistic habitus.
Freedom Prior to Sociological Consciousness Habitus is an ordering principle of regulated improvisation (principium importans ordinem ad actum; Bourdieu, 1972/2000a, p. 262; 1990a, pp. 7879; 1980/1990b, p. 10), it generates practices that tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation (Bourdieu, 1972/1977, p. 78). The social space and its constraints form a place at the center of which, by the acquired systems of generative schemes and within the framework of its limits, the agent can freely exercise his or her practice. The objective structure of which habitus is the product governs, through it, practice by means of constraints and limits originally assigned to the agents inventions. Creation always happens in a context that constitutes the agent and that the agent appropriates actively; it can thus only be realized within the limits of this space and within the limits of the system of practice. The generative system is composed of a restricted number of principles that make it possible to generate an infinity of relatively unpredictable practices, but these are limited in their diversity. It is in this sense that theory of habituality can move beyond the debate between freedom and determinism. Habitus is the system of unchosen principles of choice that allows improvisation, creation, and innovation. It is a system that generates regulated improvisation and that subjectively activates and reactivates the objective meaning of context. Socialization bestows creative capabilities on agents that allow them to invent freely within the limits of the conditions of their existence, their dispositions and context, and their adaptations to situations. The generative system is conceived as a reproductive system. It is founded on the internalization of an exteriority whose sense is given, throughout socialization, from originary experiences and from the individual trajectory that particularizes and composes the (di)visions, hierarchizations, classifications, and appreciations of representations of the social world. The practical relationship with the future
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determines present practice. Habitus is constituted and determined according to a probable future that it helps actualize through anticipation. The embodied objectivity of the social world generates objective regularities that surpass agents, but which agents actualize by their daily practice because they are formed by the context that they themselves form. These embodied representations generate the perception of a subjective world and form the basis for the particular anticipation of this perceived world, so much so that, starting from a regulated freedom, practices tend by their consequences to reproduce in the real (i.e., to make exist) this subjective perception (e.g., relationships perceived as corrupt can generate corrupting behaviors that participate in the existence of corruption). The future is virtually inscribed in the present and is, in a certain way, perceived as already being there by practical schemes that impose order on action. Habitus operationalizes the structural social explanation by granting to the Subject its active character (Alexander, 1995).18 The understanding of the world is always elaborated in relation to and starting from a background inscribed in practice. Agents understand this without necessarily requiring a reflexive gesture. By actively and unknowingly appropriating this background, agents generate representations. These representations are sometimes formulated as engagements, as finalities, as ambitions, and so on, but most of the time they remain unformulated, even unformulatable, and structure intelligent action in the world. This intelligence, without being formulated, flows from a comprehension that is for the most part not made explicit yet always present (Taylor, 2000). Often, practice evolves according to the principle of an intelligence without consciousness, anticipating without always knowing that it is the product of and that it produces anticipations. The freedom that habitus leaves room for has an involuntary aspect. This aspect typical of practical logic allows a form of unconscious, or scarcely conscious, freedom. The amnesia of the genesis of this freedom (which in certain aspects is illusory) makes it possible to forget that at the source of a belief or choice is socialization. It is as such that, in a mode very reminiscent of Pascal, Bourdieu considers that if the decision to believe ... is to be carried out successfully, it must also obliterate itself from the memory of the believer (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 49).19 In this way he finds a solution to the antinomy of decision-based belief that Pascal had left unresolved (one cannot simultaneously believe x and believe that x is the fruit of ones will to believe x). The agent believes his or her vision of the world to be natural, having forgotten its genesis. Most of the people who train in the gym where Wacquant undertook his pugilistic eduction believe that Youre born a boxer (or not). Here the apprenticeship of the ethnographer clearly underlines the paradox that
the belief in the innate character of the boxers ability can peacefully coexist with an unrelenting and rigid ethic of work and striving. The native myth of the gift of the boxer is an illusion founded in reality what fighters take for a natural capacity (Youve got to have it in you) is in effect this
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peculiar nature resulting from the protracted process of inculcation of the pugilistic habitus, a process that often begins in early childhood, either within the gym itself or in the antechamber to the gym that is the ghetto street. (Wacquant, 2004, p. 99)
The pugilistic habitus is this cultivated nature whose social genesis has become literally invisible to those who perceive it through the mental categories that are its product (Wacquant, 2004, p. 99). Freedom of action is actualized through the product of a socialization that implies an involuntary aspect of practice; thus paradoxically this type of freedom can hold back a liberation from social conditionswhich in any case is always limited. It seems to permit agents to believe that they are free.20 It allows belief and choice to be experienced simultaneously as logically necessary and sociologically unconditioned (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 50). However, this freedom is nevertheless not totally illusory. The system of dispositions makes it possible to freely generate thoughts, perceptions, and actions within the limits of historical and social conditions that circumscribe and fashion its production (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 55). These conditionings allow the agent relative autonomy when he or she faces present situations. Not all agents have the same degree of autonomy. Nothing is simultaneously freer and more constrained than the action of the good player (Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 63). The degree of freedom varies, in fact, with the social position of the individual and the degree of officialization, institutionalization, and ritualization of the context. The possibilities of habitus are realized all the more freely when they have a conducive space in which to become manifest. If agents can master the objective rules that structure a field, then they are at ease playing with them while remaining in line with their requirements, transgressing them in a regular way and thereby distinguishing themselves through excellence, rather than being stuck in a conformity limited to pure and simple execution. Conversely, the less congruity there is between objective structures and the structures of habitus, the less agents can fall into line with rules that are made against them (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 298, n. 12). The interaction between dispositions and situations causes agents to some extent [to] fall into the practice that is theirs rather than freely choosing it or being impelled into it by mechanical constraints (Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 90). This spontaneity is indeterminate because it functions within the urgency of the situation. An individual constrained by the instantaneity of the present makes choices instinctively based on his or her embodied dispositions, without logical or rational calculations. In fact, practical logic can only function by taking all sorts of liberties with the most elementary principles of logical logic; it develops from schemes that are partially mobilized in relation to each particular situation (Bourdieu, 1980/1990b, p. 267). The individual will be all the more at ease since there is an important correspondence between what he or she is and should be in the situation. This ease can lead to the blossoming of a creative freedom. Habitus adjusted in advance to
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the individuals position and made for it (by the mechanisms determining vocation and co-optation) contributes to making the position, especially since it has a large margin of freedom and since there is a significant distance between the social conditions of ... production and the social demands and constraints inscribed in the position (Bourdieu, 1980/1993, p. 141). It is necessary to distinguish objective necessity from experienced necessity. Sociology exposes objective necessities while postulating that everything must have a social reason for existing. The degree of determination of the world as it appears subjectively depends on the knowledge we have of it. In a perspective very reminiscent of Spinoza, Bourdieu (1980/1993) declares:
Whereas misrecognition of necessity contains a form of recognition of necessity, and probably the most absolute, the most total form, since it is unaware of itself as such, knowledge of necessity does not at all imply the necessity of that recognition. (p. 25)
Individuals are as free as they are conscious and knowledgeable of the constraints placed on them. Sociology is a powerful tool for allowing this growing awareness to take place.
Freedom After Sociological Consciousness In Body and Soul, Wacquant (2004) offers a paradigmatic demonstration of how sociological consciousness can be deployed as a tool to modify habitus. The book focus[es] on the generic properties of pugilistic embodiment to spotlight the manner whereby [boxers] acquire and activate the system of schemata of perception, appreciation, and action of their craft (Wacquant, 2005, p. 454). In addition, it shows how Wacquant modified his own habitus to become a(n apprentice) boxer and to be accepted by his gym mates and integrated in his field site. From this point of view, Body and Soul is not only an empirical observation but an empirical experimentation which highlights concretely the difficulties inherent in the project of shaping ones habitus and the contribution of sociological objectivation to the process of mastering and building oneself. During his apprenticeship of boxing in a context far removed from his original social milieu, Wacquant (2004) became so deeply immersed in the pugilistic world that he thought for a while of aborting [his] academic career to turn pro (p. 4). But, even in such moments of sensual and moral epiphany, Busy Louie, as his gym mates called him, remained a highly educated Frenchman who was leading a sort of Dr. Jekyll-and-Mister Hyde existence, boxing by day and writing social theory by night (Wacquant, 2009, p. 145). He was thoroughly embedded in the social scene of the gym but, as he makes clear in the books closing pages, he was still different
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from the other athletes training there (even if they could not imagine what a sociologist is and does).21 This difference, rooted in his social condition and trajectory, facilitates keeping the relative distance from within the social game studied that the ethnographer needs, even the fight itself and the routine of training presuppose precisely that one suspend reflexivity. Indeed, Wacquants book shows that adopting the Manly Art in the ghetto cannot be reduced to the moments spent in the ring or in the gym training. Becoming a fighter is to acquire an ethos and an ethic of life transposable outside the ring. During the period of inactivity caused by getting his nose broken, Wacquant had an opportunity to reflect and the sociologist could assess more accurately his difference within the field (Wacquant, 2004, p. 7). Thus even as he often forgets why he is there (originally to find a platform for observation in the ghetto, a place to meet potential informants; Wacquant, 2009, p. 141), even if for a moment he considers dropping out of university and becoming a professional prizefighter, Wacquants investment in the game and the amnesia of the genesis of his presence in the field remain always provisional. These are precisely particular moments in the process of inquiry. Every good ethnographer engaged in long-term immersion forgets during some moments the object that he is observing, because he is discovering new facets of it; he becomes overwhelmed by the site and washed over by the endless flow of social life. But he never forgets for too long his origin and the springs of his trajectory, especially as he retains a broader freedom of choice compared to the people with whom he shares the site. As coach DeeDee reminded Wacquant in the last sentence of the book, the sociologist dont need to get into the dring as a professional (Wacquant, 2004, p. 255); he has a life and a future outside of it. In this book, epistemic reflexivity constitutes a tool, not only to understand the process of habitus construction, but also to describe the potential effects of sociological knowledge on this process. As Wacquant (2009) aptly reminds us, habitus is a set of acquired dispositions:
No one is born a boxer (least of all, me!): the training of fighters consists precisely in physical drills, ascetic rules of life , and social games geared toward instilling in them new abilities, categories, and desires, those specific to the pugilistic cosmos. (Wacquant, 2009, p. 142; see also 1998)
To acquire the boxers dispositions and to change his own habitus, Wacquant trained as a boxer amidst amateurs and professionals for three years. The change of habitus is effected only when it is embodiedin other words, when the modifications have been learned in and by corporal practices, because
practical mastery operates beneath the level of consciousness and discourse, and this matches perfectly with a commanding feature of the experience of pugilistic learning, in which mental understanding is of little help (and can even be a serious hindrance in the ring) so long as one has not grasped boxing technique with ones body. (Wacquant, 2009, pp. 142143)
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Moreover, his own trajectory enabled Wacquant to grasp analytically the way in which he could work to modify his own habitus. While his gym mates learn the body techniques through an invisible and implicit pedagogy, because of his social science knowledge and ability to objectivize the social world, Wacquant was in a position to both undergo and analyze the practices of pugilistic inculcation and the pedagogical work effected at the Woodlawn Boys Club. This demonstrates that individuals with different life experiences, who have thus gained varied ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, can use different dispositions to reach the same goal through different routes. It shows also that the dispositions mobilized to acquire the techniques produce their own goal. Contrary to most of his gym mates, Wacquants aim was analytical and was not to be a great prizefighter. Body and Soul differs from other accounts of habitus because Wacquant deployed the concept as a methodological device. He placed himself
in the local vortex of action in order to acquire through practice, in real time, the dispositions of the boxer with the aim of elucidating the magnetism proper to the pugilistic cosmos [and to] push the logic of participant observation to the point where it becomes inverted and turns into observant participation. (Wacquant, 2009, p. 145)
Through this work of carnal sociology, Wacquant shows concretely how, through concrete practices aided by sociological consciousness, one can willfully change ones habitus. The fact that his boxing career was short and his only official fight was a defeat suggests two other points. First, the malleability of habitus remains considerable if we compare Wacquants trajectory with the normal and probable trajectory of similarly situated academics. Second, although habitus can be changed, it takes an immense work to modify ones primary dispositions and the results are often below the skill level of specialists born and bred with the social game in questionin this case boxers who have trained since pre-adolescence (it is too late for Wacquant to become a highly proficient boxer, let alone a champion). This also implies that a degree of sociological consciousness is indispensable to assist in the process of habitus modification, but that it does not suffice to durably transform dispositions. The extension of freedom by sociological consciousness allows a normative choice that consists in accepting necessity or not. The agent or the political world can introduce modifying elements that may suffice to transform the result of mechanisms in the direction of our desires (Bourdieu, 1982, p. 20). The mere fact of knowing which mechanisms owe their efficiency to misrecognition, for example cases of symbolic violence, helps modify their effects. Sociological science, therefore, in revealing the real, has liberating virtues. It allows one to introduce a freedom relative to the original adhesion and to become, partially, master and possessor of social nature (Bourdieu, 1982, p. 33), to control the effects of the determinisms that operate on the social world (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 67). But by conceiving of freedom
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as revelation, does Bourdieu not return to Pascals antinomy? If consciousness makes it possible to act on the principles of socialization, if habitus is malleable, does that not imply that will and consciousness can, for the best sociologists among us, form the basis of the dispositions that make us believe things? Following this reasoning to its end would suppose that one could acquire a disposition toward self-objectification in order to profit fully from ones own free will and exercise it in total consciousness. But is that not believing at the same time as one decides to believe? To these questions, Bourdieu would probably respond by distinguishing belief and scientific truth. Such a distinction highlights the ambiguity of this position that often wavers between constructivism and realism, but it can still be discussed here. Beyond regulated freedom, practical freedom appears to Bourdieu as the consciousness of structures and determinations, which, in a certain way, signifies that practical freedom is the possibility of a conscious and voluntary transformation of objective structures. Here we are not far from Spinozian freedom: real freedom is the knowledge of constraints.22 Individuals who are not conscious of their determinations can believe they are free, mistake necessity for virtue, and then select as the best choice the one toward which their habitus leans. The freest individuals are those who, aware of their determinations, end up either choosing them or transforming them. We find ourselves faced with two levels of freedom. The first, without sociological awareness, seems almost illusory. The internalization of structures allows us to think we are free without being conscious of our own determinations. The second, fruit of analytical thought about ourselves through the exposition of structures that a reflexive distance makes possiblean awareness of our own habitus enables a kind of self-control. Sociology frees us by freeing us from the illusion of freedom ... from the misplaced belief in illusory freedoms. Freedom is not something given: it is something you conquercollectively (Bourdieu, 1990a, pp. 1516). We can never dispose freely of these dispositions, but we can better control them by having knowledge of them. As for Spinoza (1928, part V), this conquered freedom implies virtue. Thus, in the realm of science, for example, the double objectification implies an ethic that incites to scientific virtue, that is, to raising the conditions of scientific rigor (Hilgers, 2006). First of all
because it is a science, [then because] if it is true that it is through knowledge of determinations that only science can uncover that a form of freedom which is the condition and correlate of an ethic is possible, then it is also true that a reflexive science of society implies, or comprises, an ethic. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 198)
Throughout this growing awareness the agent enjoys greater freedom with the rules. If the individual always tends toward the realization of his or her social being, if the individual is moved by a conatus,23 then freedom without sociological consciousness (or with only, through the power of spontaneous
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sociology, a weak sociological consciousness) is the ability to anticipate a strong probability and to make ones own what must probably happen (in the statistical sense). This is why agents conscious of their potential exclusion from a social space often end up excluding themselves from it. In this way, for example, awareness of discrepancies between the norms of the school and their modes of representation, requirements, and relationship to knowledge can lead the most disadvantaged segments of society to exclude themselves from the school system on their own. In this case, when their subjective hope is even weaker than their objective chance, the agents transform a probable determination of their future into a chosen freedom. They contribute through their self-determination to their own disqualification. For Bourdieu, sociological thought can give access to an understanding of the mechanisms which, beyond spontaneous reflections (and reflexivities), make it possible for agents to identify the best strategies for attaining their goals, and for the collectivity or politics to effect transformations of objective structures. Sociological analysis can allow us to minimize social determinations and help universalize the conditions of access to the universal. This freedom that knowledge enables has ethico-moral ramifications. Awareness of the structures of socialization, of the mechanisms that structure social relationships in a given field, can be used in the service of expanding access to the universal. The degree of freedom is variable. In general, it grows as economic and educational capital increase. It implies an effort to master the future that requires a knowledge of the possible equivalence between objective potentialities and subjective hopes. The importance of this equivalence underpins all Bourdieus work. From his earliest writings, he writes that it allows a life plan, as a rational and reasonable expectation founded on futures that are successively accessible given a certain effort (Bourdieu, Darbel, Rivet, & Seibel, 1963, p. 366). As early as his analyses of Algerian society, Bourdieu shows that the most privileged classes have access to a greater degree of freedom. This reading must not omit the social constraints endured by higher classes. It is sufficient to recall, for example, the analyses of Norbert Elias on Louis XIV and the weight of social codification (Elias, 1933/1983), or the analyses of Bourdieu on matrimonial strategies (Bourdieu, 1962, 2002/2007) in order to keep their importance in mind. When Bourdieu passes from a formal to a substantial reflection on freedom, he also passes from a scientific discourse on practice to a moral, politically engaged one. The goal is no longer to study the relationship between socialization and freedom but to study that between freedom and emancipation. This approach attempts, among other things, to help free the dominated from their domination (but not only them, as everyone can benefit from sociological knowledge), since the capacity for choice and the degree of freedom vary depending on income, degree of qualification and instruction, and socioprofessional categories. The conformity of subjective hopes with objective possibilities allows a higher degree of self-fulfillment and attainment of ones ambitions.
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It is not merely a question of giving to the dominated the possibility of reaching the same level of freedom through consciousness that the dominant may enjoy through their habitus. Rather it is a question of a true self-liberation through knowledge, and in this sense this liberation is aimed, without distinction, at all social agents. Only acquiring consciousness and distance from the objective structures to which agents adapt allows them to exercise true free will. Material freedom is not freedom of consciousness, even if it is a necessary condition for it. This conception of freedom leads to an axiological approach that is developed more specifically in Bourdieus last works. The freedom of choice enabled by the unveiling of practical logic requires one to choose a stance toward the Ideal. The individual must make a normative choice according to a subjective moral value, and can try to open up to something other than his or her own habitus. Until this moment behavioral unity was determined by habitus; then habitus was introduced into the awareness of practical logics functioning such that the Subject could make acts that, for him- or herself, modify the concrete objective structure of the axiological universe, and could become, within certain limits, autonomous from social determinations. Bourdieus last works seem to display a tension between his analytic refocusing on the role of the field in the determination of practices and the importance of subjective determination in the emergence of necessities induced by the field. From a normative point of view, it seems that the capacity for change that each agent contains must be reinforced by an increased awareness of the functioning of the social world in order to remedy the inequalities produced by objective structures.24
Conclusion We have little or no ability to choose our socialization, and adaptation to a field happens naturally, even instinctively; however, there is no coercion that imposes our actions on us. Free choice often appears as an obligatory freedom whereas it should be a conscious freedom (Bourdieu, 1991a, p. 95). And even if freedom remains under constraints and is exercised in a space of objective potentialities defined by the encounter between embodied dispositions and the rules and relations that manage the social structure, the choices that result from it are not identical in tenor and orientation if it is a conscious freedom (Bourdieu, 1996, pp. 339340). It becomes thus important to expand access to rational means and to use fully the margin of maneuver left to liberty (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 629); in other words, its not a question of locking agents into an original social being treated as a destiny, a nature, but of offering them the possibility of taking on their habitus without guilt or suffering (Bourdieu, 1980/1993, pp. 2324). Agents can progressively emancipate themselves from their determinisms. Throughout its progression, this emancipation becomes a duty since freedom
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of consciousness implies a great responsibility: a knowledge of the objective necessity of the field [offers] the possibility of freedom with respect to that necessity, and therefore of a practical ethics aimed at increasing that freedom (Bourdieu, 1997/2000b, p. 117). This freedom requires conditions of possibility (a certain quality of life and level of education in order to understand oneself reflexively in a sociological way) to be met in order to be attained; independently of these, for Bourdieu, even the promotion of freedom since it would point back to those conditions of possibilityallows us to widen access to the universal. Like all theories that employ the notion of habitus, Bourdieus model attributes a specific status to freedom, even though it is not often discussed. At the level of theory, this notion, or perhaps more precisely the notion of indeterminateness, allows us through at least three principles (the production of an infinite number of behaviors from a limited number of principles, permanent mutation, and the intensive and extensive limits of sociological understanding) to account for the gaps between the theoretical model and the practice of agents while providing elements for a sociology of freedom. Freedom is conceived as the knowledge of constraints (self-objectification through sociological analysis), as the capacity for self-determination toward a chosen finality, and as relatively free action despite the obligations that stem from a given position in the social space. It supposes the dispositional capacity of the agent but also the configurational (i.e., relative to the field) and situational (i.e., relative to the concrete interactions that actualize the structure of the game for the actor) capacity to adopt a free behavior that is probably more difficult to foresee for his or her partners. At the moral level, freedom becomes an instrument of struggle against social inequalities, although Bourdieu is not especially explicit on this subject. In a certain way, liberated consciousness implies a responsibility before the state of the world. In affirming that the distinctiveness of symbolic domination resides precisely in the fact that it assumes, of those who submit to it, an attitude which challenges the usual dichotomy of freedom and constraint and that the choices of habitus ... are accomplished without consciousness or constraint, by virtue of the dispositions which, although they are unquestionably the product of social determinisms, are also constituted outside the spheres of consciousness and constraint, Bourdieu significantly stresses the importance of the distinction between freedom before and after sociological consciousness (Bourdieu, 1991a, p. 51).25 It is, for him, the latter that is fundamental for change and emancipation from social suffering. Wacquants carnal sociology of boxing can be read through a similar prism. His experimental study highlights the dynamic relation between habitus and freedom in a concrete case. It shows with particular clarity the stakes involved in this nexus, the distinction between freedom before and after sociological consciousness, and the conditions of possibility of this consciousness and their implications for emancipation. These questions are not at the heart of the
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analytical agenda pursued by Body and Soul. Nevertheless, as explained at the beginning of this paper, they are entailed among theoretical issues raised by the use of the concept of habitus. It is not surprising then that these questions appear implicitly in Wacquants account of the forging of the pugilist. Although it does not explicitly engage the debates that these questions involve (e.g., is sociological revelation a sufficient condition for emancipation and the conquest of freedom?), Body and Soul contains the elements of an answer to them and a stimulating description of the tension between freedom and habitus at multiple levels. This work experiments with habitus in the twofold sense of putting the notion to the test empirically and methodologically (Wacquant, 2005, p. 468). It deploys the concept to analyze the pugilistic universe and, by the same token, it describes concretely how an individual can shape his dispositionsand how difficult such work of self-making is.
Notes 1. Let me specify, to avoid confusion, that my intention here is not to follow certain authors who argue that Bourdieu merely reproduced these theories. The rigorous use of concepts often requires a treatment of the theoretical problems they involve. 2. Amid an abundant literature on the notion of habitus one could, for example, refer to the work of Arnou, who shows the central role played by freedom in Thomas Aquinass theory of habitus (Arnou, 1970, 1971). 3. Translators note: The 1977 English version of this work (Outline of a Theory of Practice) differs significantly from the 1972 French original (Esquisse dune thorie de la pratique). Where possible, references to this work are noted using the English pagination, but occasionally it is necessary to refer to the pagination of the French original. In the latter case, I indicate parenthetically that the translation given in this article is my own (J.R.). 4. For Bourdieu these elements are position, disposition, trajectory, and capital (symbolic, cultural, economic, social, relational, linguistic, scholarly, etc.). For reasons that cannot be explained here, Bourdieu progressively abandons the term generative grammar which he had freely borrowed from Chomsky (see E. Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 171172). 5. All the more so in modern societies, where the agent is exposed to a greater variety of contexts. 6. For a critique of these principles, see Lahire (1999). 7. This expression is borrowed from Kantian schematism. 8. An artifact which itself is the reflection of a scientific practice. 9. Regarding this last point see Lahire (1998). 10. Unlike what certain cursory readings, or readers, suggest, Bourdieu never seeks to evacuate the subject. He merely does not mean subject in the usual sense (a pure, transcendental subject with universal categories, etc.) but rather
a subject whose categories of perception and thought, whose structures and schemes that will be used to construct the world, are to a certain extent the structures
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of the world in which he or she is. ... Only on the condition of knowing where I am in this space, which owes something to the fact that I am a point in this space, can I have some chance of truly being a subject. (Bourdieu, 2002, pp. 256)
11. But, by doing this, the analyst exposes him- or herself to the risk of investing elements into the understanding of practice which, by their virtual character, may prove inconclusive for the clarification of behaviors. In the same way, generalization from arrested phases can cause the analyst to omit or neglect the orientation that temporal structuring imposes on behaviors, making the latter seem reversible even though they seem irreversible to the agents. The synoptic schemas capacity for synchronization and generalization makes it possible to explain the coherence of practices but without taking into account their unpredictability and their rhythm. 12. In the face of these discrepancies, different theoretical options are possible. Although Bourdieu observes them in his early works on Algeria (Bourdieu & Sayad, 1964), he notes their greater importance in modern societies, and studies them especially through the notion of hysteresis and in the theory of fields. After submitting the model to criticism, Lahire (1998) attempts to refine it by developing questions that very often are only sketched out: the initiation of embodied schemes of action, the heterogeneity of processes of socialization, the process of analogical transfer, and so on. He empirically analyzes these many discrepancies, dissonances, or paradoxes by (re)centering the line of questioning on the individual (Lahire, 2004). Martuccelli (1999), for his part, considers that the increase in these multiple discrepancies proves the models inability to grasp modernity. Rather than a refinement or increased complexity of the model, these studies plead in favor of displacing the line of questioning, that is, in Kuhnian terms, for a paradigm shift (see, e.g., Martuccelli, 2005). 13. We can also displace this question of primary and secondary dispositions at the level of the relation between individual and community:
Individuals internalize the norms of representation and the fundamental beliefs that constitute the principles of the world view of the communities in which they are engaged. But, once it becomes disposition, that is, once it is contracted in the form of an individual law of behavior, this world view acquires, within the individual, a second incarnation, relatively autonomous compared to the first and therefore not necessarily following its evolution because of its autonomy and its specific inertia, this second incarnation of the instituted rule contributes to the existence and survival of the first, such that a relation of mutual dependence is established. (E. Bourdieu, 1998, p. 222)
14. Bourdieu (2001) draws on Kabyle tradition for his archaeological explanation of gender relations. I will not get into a debate here with the highly questionable approach according to which the ethnographic description of Kabyle society, a living reservoir of the Mediterranean cultural tradition, provides a potent instrument for disclosing the symbolic structures of the androcentric unconscious which survives in the men and women of our own societies (see back cover, Bourdieu, 2001). 15. Once again the pugilistic habitus described by Wacquant is a fruitful example: Boxing is an individual sport, no doubt among the most individual of all athletic contests in that it physically puts in play and in danger the body of the solitary fighter, whose adequate apprenticeship is quintessentially collective (Wacquant, 2004, p. 16)
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16. In the same line of thought, it is highly likely that his experience at the Woodlawn Boys Club affected the ways whereby Wacquant perceives and acts in academe today. 17. Lahire (1998) has best studied the heterogeneity of socializing experiences and notably what Bourdieu (1997/2000b) calls cleft, tormented habitus bearing in the form of tensions and contradictions the mark of the contradictory conditions of formation of which they are the product (p. 64). 18. For a critical reading of Alexanders incisive work (1995), see Wacquant (2001). 19. On the relation between belief and dispositionalism see E. Bourdieu (1998, pp. 195254). 20. According to Lahire (1998), the plural dimension of the actor plays an essential role in this impression of freedom:
One could say that we are too multisocialized and too multidetermined to be able to be fully aware of our determinisms. If there were only one force of powerful determinations, which exerted itself on us, then maybe we would have an intuition, even a vague one, of determinism. (p. 235)
21. His social integration in the gym was not a foregone conclusion. Wacquant (2005) recounts:
During the first few months of my initiation, Ashante, a hard-nosed welterweight who later became my regular sparring partner, used to ask the gyms old coach at what time the Frenchie was coming so that he could arrange to train early, shower, jump back into his clothes, and then sit in the backroom to laugh at Mister Magoo for an hour. (p. 448)
22. We find this distinction between two levels of freedom in Spinoza. He writes in his famous Letter to Schuller (Letter LVIII, October 1674):
I say that that thing is free which exists and acts solely from the necessity of its own nature; but that that thing is under compulsion which is determined by something else to exist, and to act in a definite and determined manner. ... For instance, a stone receives from an external cause, which impels it, a certain quantity of motion, with which it will afterwards necessarily continue to move when the impact of the external cause has ceased. This continuance of the stone in its motion is compelled, not because it is necessary, but because it must be defined by the impact of an external cause. What is here said of the stone must be understood of each individual thing, however composite and however adapted to various ends it may be thought to be: that is, that each thing is necessarily determined by an external cause to exist and to act in a definite and determinate manner. Next, conceive ... that the stone ... thinks, and knows that it is striving as much as possible to continue in motion. Surely this stone, inasmuch as it is conscious only of its own effort, and is far from indifferent, will believe that it is completely free, and that it continues in motion for no other reason than because it wants to. And such is the human freedom which all men boast that they possess, and which consists solely in this, that men are conscious of their desire, and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined. So the infant believes that it freely wants milk; the boy when he is angry that he freely wants revenge. ... Then too the drunkard believes that, by the free decision of his mind, he says those things which afterwards when sober he would prefer to have left unsaid. ... Since this preconception is innate in all men, they are not so easily freed from it ... yet they believe themselves to be free. (Spinoza, 1928, pp. 294296; see also The Ethics, III.2 and V [Spinoza, 1677/1981])
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23. For Bourdieu, the agent is moved by a conatus, a tendency to persevere in ones being, which inclines him or her to make choices. The agent permanently actualizes, through practice, a being that fluctuates throughout action and experience and toward which he or she tends. 24. The later Bourdieus growing attachment to elaborating of a theory of the field can also be understood as a way to respond better to situations of discrepancy between the model and reality. The analysis of situation and context makes it possible to understand the divergences within habitus that Bourdieu emphasizes more often in his later works, even though the inertia of habitus always assures it a certain autonomy relative to context (see, e.g., E. Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 143148). 25. This last clause follows the previous version of the sentences end, before September 5, 2006: Bourdieu significantly stresses the importance of the distinction between freedom prior to and following sociological consciousness.
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Lahire, B. (1998). Lhomme pluriel: les ressorts de laction [The plural actor]. Paris: Nathan. Lahire, B. (1999). De la thorie de lhabitus la sociologie psychologique [From the habitus theory to the psychological sociology]. In Le travail sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu: dettes et critiques [Bourdieus sociological work: Debts and critiques] (pp. 121152). Paris: La Dcouverte. Lahire, B. (2004). La culture des individus: Dissonances culturelles et distinction de soi [The culture of individuals: Cultural dissonances and distinction of the self]. Paris: La Dcouverte. Maesschalck, M. (1997). Normes et contextes: Sociologie de lhabitus [Norms and contexts: Sociology of habitus]. Les carnets du Centre de Philosophie du Droit, 34, 135. Martuccelli, D. (1999). Sociologies de la modernit [Sociologies of modernity]. Paris: Gallimard. Martuccelli, D. (2005). La consistance du social [The consistency of the social]. Rennes, France: Presse Universitaire de Rennes. Quiniou, Y. (1996). Dterminisme, matrialisme et mancipation chez P. Bourdieu [Determinism, materialism, and emancipation of P. Bourdieu]. Actuel Marx, 20, 117134. Rist, G. (1984). La notion mdivale d habitus dans la sociologie de Pierre Bourdieu [The medieval notion of habitus in Pierre Bourdieus sociology]. Revue europenne des sciences sociales, 22(67), 201212. Sapiro, G. (2004). Une libert contrainte: La formation de la thorie de lhabitus [A constrained liberty: The formation of the theory of habitus]. In L. Pinto, S. Gisle, & P. Champagne (Eds.), Pierre Bourdieu (pp. 4992). Paris: Fayard. Spinoza, B. (1928). Letter XVIII: To the very learned and expert Mr. G.H. Schuller. In A. Wolf (Trans.), The correspondence of Spinoza (pp. 294298). New York: Lincoln MacVeagh. Spinoza, B. (1981). The ethics (S.P.R. Charter, Ed.). New York: Joseph Simon. (Original work published 1677) Taylor, C. (2000). To follow a rule. In D. Robbins (Ed.), Pierre Bourdieu (Vol. 2., pp. 330343) London: Sage. (Original work published 1995) Wacquant, L. (1998). A fleshpeddler at work: Power, pain, and profit in the prizefighting economy. Theory & Society, 27, 142. Wacquant, L. (2001). Further notes on Bourdieus Marxism. International Journal of Contemporary Sociology, 38, 103109. Wacquant, L. (2004). Body and soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. New York: Oxford University Press. Wacquant, L. (2005). Carnal connections: On embodiment, apprenticeship, and membership. Qualitative Sociology, 28, 445474. Wacquant, L. (2009). Habitus as topic and tool: Reflections on becoming a prizefighter. In A.J. Puddephatt, W. Shaffir, & S.W. Kleinknecht (Eds.), Ethnographies revisited: Constructing theory in the field (pp. 137151). London: Routledge.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. The author would like to thank Jonathon Repinecz for his translation of this article. MATHIEU HILGERS is Professor of Anthropology at the Free University of Brussels. His research interests and publications include social sciences (anthropology, sociology, social psychology, political sciences) and philosophy. He has recently published Une ethnographie lchelle de la ville (Karthala, 2009, English version forthcoming), numerous articles in international journals, and coordinated journals issues and books, notably a book on Bourdieus fields theory (in press). At a time where most part of urban research is devoted to the metropolis and global cities his work seeks to design an anthropology of secondary cities which focuses on the effects of neoliberalism on popular perceptions of politics, on identity, and on belonging. His main fieldwork is in Africa but he also does research in Europe. ADDRESS: ULB-Institut de Sociologie, Avenue Jeanne, 44 - CP124, B-1050 Bruxelles, Bureau: S12-206, Belgium. [email: mhilgers@ulb.ac.be]

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http://tap.sagepub.com Habitus, Freedom, and Reflexivity

Habitus, Freedom, and Reflexivity

HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY

& PSYCHOLOGY 19(6)

HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY

& PSYCHOLOGY 19(6)

HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY

& PSYCHOLOGY 19(6)

HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY

& PSYCHOLOGY 19(6)

HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY

& PSYCHOLOGY 19(6)

HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY

& PSYCHOLOGY 19(6)

HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY

& PSYCHOLOGY 19(6)

HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY

& PSYCHOLOGY 19(6)

HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY

& PSYCHOLOGY 19(6)

HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY

& PSYCHOLOGY 19(6)

HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY

& PSYCHOLOGY 19(6)

HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY

& PSYCHOLOGY 19(6)

HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY

& PSYCHOLOGY 19(6)

HILGERS: HABITUS, FREEDOM, AND REFLEXIVITY

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