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2009 19: 728 Theory Psychology
Mathieu Hilgers
Habitus, Freedom, and Reflexivity

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DOI: 10.1177/0959354309345892 http://tap.sagepub.com
SPECIAL SECTION
Habitus, Freedom, and Reflexivity
Mathieu Hilgers
FREE UNIVERSITY OF BRUSSELS
ABSTRACT. The question of freedomis recurrent in the theory of habitus. In this
paper I propose that the notion of freedom is an essential and necessary com-
ponent 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 habi-
tus 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 deter-
minism: (1) the production of an infinite number of behaviors from a limited
number of principles, (2) permanent mutation, and (3) the intensive and exten-
sive limits of sociological understanding. After identifying and describing
these principles, I show the reason for their incompatibility with a determin-
istic 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 under-
stand 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 deter-
mined by social relations? He has never done that to which his origin and training pre-
destined 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 com-
pletely 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;
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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 conse-
quence of reflexivity, of being conscious of the process of habituality on judg-
ment? 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 the-
ory, 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 descrip-
tions 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. deter-
minism, 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 sur-
pass 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 consti-
tuted 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 princi-
ples. The agent incorporates rules throughout his or her socialization and
social trajectory; these rules are few in number but determine a representa-
tional 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 con-
texts, 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 percep-
tion 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 disposi-
tions. 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 habi-
tus, 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 situa-
tions or experiences in a similar order. Even so, if we do manage to iden-
tify 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 charac-
teristic 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 intel-
lectual 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 unpre-
dictability that sociological science faces mean that practices are truly free or
indeterminate? To answer this question, or at least to illuminate its signifi-
cance 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 command-
ments 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 experience
7
facilitates at the same time recourse to identical schemes for
different situations and agents capacity for improvisation, as well as adapta-
tion, improvised or not, to new contexts. This practical substitutability and
the postulate of the worlds being apprehended as (and composed of) homo-
logical 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, gen-
erates 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 unpre-
dictability 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 experi-
ences 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 natu-
ralized 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 prac-
tices 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 recon-
structed, 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 mecha-
nisms of the system that generates practices. The challenge of Bourdieu is
thus to convert necessity into choice without falling into the traps of deter-
minism or total freedom. Habitus is a unifying principle that associates subjec-
tive 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 unpre-
dictability 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 collec-
tive 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 social-
ization. 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 par-
ticularized during early childhood. The family transmits models of represen-
tation 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 inter-
nalization. This process of acquisition participates in the construction of what
one is, what one becomes, develops a proclivity for the development of a pos-
sible self, of a finality which is never totally definitive or completely deter-
mined. 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 sig-
nificance 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 rein-
force or weaken a partially moving habitual nature. The experiences that sedi-
ment 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 expe-
riences 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 indi-
vidual evolves in a universe tailored to reinforce his or her own dispositions
and to receive them favorably. By limiting exposure to unknown environ-
ments, 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 anthropol-
ogists 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 evolu-
tion, 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 phe-
nomenon 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 sedi-
mentation, in other words to the layer involved in action. The potential trans-
formation of habitus can be done depending on the layer involved and on the
intensity, newness, and repetition of a given experience. Wacquants descrip-
tions 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, eventu-
ally, 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-)deter-
mination are themselves largely determined by the social and economic condi-
tions 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 depoliti-
cization 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 pre-
cisely, 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 impor-
tans ordinem ad actum; Bourdieu, 1972/2000a, p. 262; 1990a, pp. 7879;
1980/1990b, p. 10), it generates practices that tend to reproduce the regulari-
ties 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 con-
straints form a place at the center of which, by the acquired systems of gener-
ative 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 origi-
nally 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 sys-
tem of practice. The generative system is composed of a restricted number of
principles that make it possible to generate an infinity of relatively unpre-
dictable 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 deter-
minism. 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 dispo-
sitions 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 repre-
sentations 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 represen-
tations 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 back-
ground, 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 intel-
ligent 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 simulta-
neously 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 free-
dom 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 simultane-
ously 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, institution-
alization, 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 distin-
guishing 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 dispo-
sitions, without logical or rational calculations. In fact, practical logic can
only function by taking all sorts of liberties with the most elementary princi-
ples 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 correspon-
dence 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 determi-
nation 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 rou-
tine 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 discov-
ering 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 spe-
cific 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 tech-
nique 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 ana-
lytical 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 obser-
vation 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 will-
fully 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 malleabil-
ity 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 mis-
recognition, 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 dis-
position 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 high-
lights the ambiguity of this position that often wavers between construc-
tivism 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 trans-
formation 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 illu-
sion 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 disposi-
tions, 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 knowl-
edge 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 allowus 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 struc-
tures 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 poten-
tialities 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 suc-
cessively 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 socializa-
tion 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 socioprofes-
sional categories. The conformity of subjective hopes with objective possibili-
ties 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 distinc-
tion, 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 neces-
sary 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 uni-
verse, and could become, within certain limits, autonomous from social deter-
minations. 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 aware-
ness 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 offer-
ing 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 under-
stand 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, perma-
nent mutation, and the intensive and extensive limits of sociological under-
standing) 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 situa-
tional (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 dis-
positions which, although they are unquestionably the product of social deter-
minisms, 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 con-
sciousness, 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 habi-
tus 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 uni-
verse 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 trans-
lation 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 tem-
poral 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 develop-
ing 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 individ-
ual (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 dis-
closing 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 deter-
minations, 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 com-
posite 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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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 phi-
losophy. 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 poli-
tics, 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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