Special Section: Body &

Responses to Loı¨c Waquant’s Homines in Extremis Society

2014, Vol. 20(2) 106–112
ª The Author(s) 2014
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Sociability and the DOI: 10.1177/1357034X14524454
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Limits of Reflexivity

Nick Crossley
University of Manchester

Abstract
This is a brief response to Loı̈c Wacquant’s article, ‘Homines in extremis’. The response
makes four contributions. First, I consider some of the reasons for the confusion
surrounding the habitus concept, arguing that this confusion may be lessened (without
any obvious loss) if we revert to ‘habit’ or ‘disposition’. Second, I argue that, irre-
spective of these terminological quibbles, it is vital that we do not conflate ‘habitus’ and
‘embodied actor’ as some accounts do. There is more to the embodied actor than her
habits and she can only have habits because this is so. Third, I begin to explore the point
of view offered by ‘carnal ethnography’ and call for further clarification of that point of
view. Finally, I note that Wacquant’s ethnography has the effect of rendering certain of
Bourdieu’s ideas in a more concrete manner and foregrounding sociability, which the
latter is sometimes inclined to ignore. This, I suggest, is a positive development.

Keywords
Bourdieu, carnal ethnography, habit, habitus

Loı̈c Wacquant has written a very interesting article which usefully

dispels a number of myths about the concept of habitus as it is used
in Bourdieusian sociology. He also draws our attention to a number
of important studies, including his own, which both exemplify his
arguments and provide a template for others contemplating work in
this area. I agree with much of what he argues. In the spirit of aca-
demic jousting to which he alludes, however, I will attempt here to
reflect upon a few problems that his article throws up.

Corresponding author:
Nick Crossley. Email: nick.crossley@manchester.ac.uk
Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
Crossley 107

Habitus and the Embodied Actor

One of the striking things in the article is the number of levels on
which the habitus concept operates. It has cognitive, conative and
affective elements. It exists in primary, secondary and tertiary forms.
It exists in relation to fields (such as those of the fighting arts) and
also classes, gender, nations and other forms of social division. It can
be approached from a synchronic and inductive angle, a diachronic
and deductive angle and an experimental angle. Each of these strands
is important and it is perhaps important to have a concept which uni-
fies them. However, it is easy to see why the concept has become
confusing and confused, given this internal complexity and range
of application (particularly in the absence of a definitive statement
on the concept).
For the English speaker the Latin form, ‘habitus’, causes addi-
tional confusion. Is it plural? Singular? Is the definite article appro-
priate? This confusion extends to the ontology of the concept which
the term represents (what kind of thing is/are habitus?) and has
allowed it to become fetishised – not by Wacquant but more gener-
ally. It is common in contemporary sociological discourse, for exam-
ple, to hear of ‘the habitus’ doing this or that, as if it were an actor in
its own right rather than a bundle of acquired dispositions. This
obscures the point which Wacquant, following Bourdieu, is seeking
to make – namely, that social actors shape the world around them in
accordance with the ways in which they have been shaped by it.
I wonder whether ‘actor’ and ‘disposition’ (or ‘habit’) might not
work better, if only because these terms are less likely to be misun-
derstood and abused? Indeed, the recent special issue of Body &
Society (vol. 19, issue 2–3), devoted to ‘habit’, demonstrates in many
respects how this more mundane concept might do the work some-
times assigned to ‘habitus’ without risking the mystification and/or
fetishisation that use of the latter sometimes invites.
Furthermore, it is important to distinguish between embodied
actors and their dispositions, much as we distinguish between habitus
and field, because there is more to embodied agency than is captured
by ‘habitus’. If we are to analyse the ways in which habits are
acquired, whether in the family during an infant’s first days of life or
in the dojo, then we must identify an actor who is capable of both acting
in ways that are not yet habitual and of rendering those structures of
108 Body & Society 20(2)

activity (including perceptual gestalts) habitual – an actor endowed with

what Merleau-Ponty (1962) calls ‘the power of conservation’. Of course
later learning builds upon earlier learning and all forms of structured
activity by all but the most recently born are shaped and supported by
habit to some extent, including the acquisition of new habits, but it is not
habits or habitus who acquire new habits (or habitus). It is embodied
actors who have the power to turn useful forms of action into habitual
schemata – though, as I note below, this is not a reflective or conscious
activity.
Similarly, the birth and evolution of the structures that actors
acquire is rendered mysterious if we do not conceive of an embodied
actor who, while always drawing upon their habits to some extent, is
not reducible to them and is capable of innovation and creativity. The
various locks, throws, kicks and hand strikes of Jiu-Jitsu, forged on
the battlefields of Japan, for example, are testament to an inventive-
ness which must be set alongside ‘the power of conservation’ in our
conception of embodied agency. Bourdieu does not deny such inven-
tiveness, of course, and in his later work in particular is more attuned
to the constant revision and evolution of habitus in everyday life.
Habitus do not revise themselves, however, and cannot be regarded
as a source of creativity. They are merely patterns of action that the
embodied actor qua organic system has stabilised. It is the actor who
revises them.
This is not only a matter of actors devising new strategies for playing
established games. Whatever the truth of the claim that rugby came into
being when, in 1823, William Webb Ellis picked up the ball during a
game of football and ran with it, the story is sufficiently plausible to illus-
trate the incontestable truth that human beings do not just learn games but
also invent them, albeit if only by ‘coherently deforming’ others that pre-
exist them, to borrow another phrase from Merleau-Ponty (1962). This
power of coherent deformation, like the power of conservation, is both
a precondition of what Bourdieu calls habitus and irreducible to it, such
that we must ground our understanding of habitus (or dispositions) in a
broader conception of embodied agency which accommodates it.

Carnal Ethnography
Having dabbled in ‘carnal ethnography’ myself (Crossley, 2004, 2006,
2008) and spent much time pondering the acquisition of dispositions
Crossley 109

and skills (there is a further differentiation here which ‘habitus’

blurs, between what we are inclined and what merely able to do)
I was drawn to Wacquant’s call for sociologists to immerse them-
selves in the streams of practical activity of interest to them, learn-
ing by doing. I agree with him that this creates a vantage point not
otherwise available to the sociologist, which may be important.
However, there is a danger that we must be alert to of falling back
into a residual Cartesianism.
The separation of mind and body is only one of the deeply proble-
matic aspects of Descartes’ philosophy. Another is his claim that the
mind knows itself in a different and superior way to the way it knows
other objects, a claim that might easily resurface in an embodied con-
ception of agency and subjectivity – and which would be no less pro-
blematic in that context. Wacquant makes no such claim but it would
be easy to fall into this way of thinking when arguing for the vantage
point that self-involvement affords. Two observations must suffice to
elaborate this claim.
Both Husserl (1973) and Merleau-Ponty (1962) arrive at the impor-
tance of ‘habit’ (Husserl uses ‘habitus’) in the context of a phenomen-
ology of embodied experience. However, both stress the impersonal
nature of habits and habituation. Husserl, for example, claims that
habituation is something that happens independently of his conscious
awareness and volition. He can cultivate habitus by repeatedly running
through forms of action that he deems desirable but the actual process
whereby those actions become habits is inaccessible to his conscious
reflection. It just happens. Initially he can’t or doesn’t do something.
Later he does it without thinking. Something clearly happens in
between, but whatever it is does not involve consciousness. This obser-
vation forces us to ask what we hope to observe by way of participa-
tion that we could not observe ‘from the outside’?
Merleau-Ponty builds upon this, stressing, like Gilbert Ryle (1949),
that much of so-called mental life is similarly elusive and questioning
the Cartesian understanding of introspection. There is no inner theatre
of the mind, to which each is exclusively privy in her own case, he
argues, and consciousness is an opening onto being rather than an
inner realm. To inspect the contents of my consciousness right now
is to inspect my kitchen because that is what I am conscious of. I can
only know myself, for the most part, as I know others: through obser-
vation of conduct and contexts. Even sensations, to which I am
110 Body & Society 20(2)

sometimes exclusively privy, only take the form of intelligible feelings

in relation to wider (external) contexts and actions which occasion and
give meaning to them.
Of course we all acquire the capacity for self-control and self-
presentation, generating a realm of privacy around ourselves, and our
access to this realm affords us knowledge of ourselves which is inac-
cessible to others. However, in other respects we can be our own
blind spot, proving peculiarly bad at gauging our own abilities,
understanding and feelings, when they are clear to others. While our
own involvement creates a vantage point for sociological observa-
tion, therefore, this vantage point, like any other, has limits as well
as strengths.
This applies equally when we are observing the wider (e.g.
class) ‘conditionings’ of particular practices and dispositions. How
do I know which of my dispositions reflect my class of origin,
which my move into academic life (an originally alien environment
which I am now entirely at home in), and which my gender, ethni-
city, age, generation, specific biographical experiences and biologi-
cal constitution? It is possible to disentangle these factors to some
extent but not by looking at myself. It requires comparison of mul-
tiple cases: a survey.
Wacquant draws a tantalising distinction in this respect between
what he calls the subjectivism of auto-ethnography and the objectiv-
ity of carnal ethnography. He doesn’t spell out how the latter
achieves its objectivity, however, and that, to my mind, is the key
question.
To reiterate, I am not arguing against ‘carnal ethnography’ and
‘observant participation’ (as Wacquant elsewhere refers to it), nor
am I denying that it affords a unique vantage point upon practice.
I am calling for further specification of both its advantages and its
weaknesses and blind spots. In my view its strength lies less in the
answers that it might offer to our various questions, more in the
questions that it prompts and the analytic foci that it might suggest
for further data gathering and analysis.

Sociable Bodies, Their Ties and Concrete Contexts

It does suggest answers too, however, and ethnography more generally
plays a crucial role in tackling the tendency towards over-abstraction
Crossley 111

which is so common in sociology, including, on occasion, the work of

Bourdieu. I have long been an admirer of Wacquant’s work on
boxing. There are many reasons for this but one is his very con-
crete focus. Habitus are not generated in mysterious ‘fields of
forces’ in Wacquant’s ethnography, as they sometimes are in
Bourdieu, but rather through an apprenticeship involving specifi-
able practices (skipping, bag work, sparring, etc.), in a specifiable
place, alongside specified others with whom he clearly formed
strong ties of mutual affection. Where Bourdieu, particularly when
distinguishing his approach from symbolic interactionism and
Weber, prioritises what he calls ‘real relations’ (i.e. juxtapositions
in social space) over ‘empirical relations’ (i.e. ties to specific oth-
ers), downplaying the significance of the latter, Wacquant discusses
localised networks of named actors, highlighting their importance in
their members’ acquisition and maintenance of both the skills of
their art and their commitment to it. He argues in the piece to which
I am responding that ‘the incarnate social agent is a suffering and
desiring animal’. His own ethnography suggests that this animal is
also profoundly social and sociable, inextricably bound to particular
others, and that this deceptively simple fact is the key to understand-
ing the somewhat grander claim that actors make society or history
in accordance with the way in which they have been made by it.
Wacquant’s work is important because he is an heir to both the
Chicago School and Bourdieu, and brings something of the pragma-
tism and concrete thinking of the former to the latter. ‘Homines in
extremis’ underlines this fact, in my view, and that is one reason why,
to return to my opening comments, I enjoyed and found myself in
agreement with so much of it.

References
Crossley N (2004) The circuit trainer’s habitus: reflexive body tech-
niques and the sociality of the workout, Body & Society 10(1): 37–69.
Crossley N (2006) In the gym: motives, meanings and moral careers.
Body & Society 12(3): 23–50.
Crossley N (2008) (Net)working out: social capital in a private health
club. British Journal of Sociology 59(3): 475–500.
Husserl E (1973) Experience and Judgement. Evanston, IL: North-
western University Press.
112 Body & Society 20(2)

Merleau-Ponty M (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception. London:

Routledge.
Ryle G (1949) The Concept of Mind. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Nick Crossley is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester

(UK). His most recent book is Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion:
The Punk and Post-Punk Worlds of Liverpool, London, Manchester and
Sheffield, 1975–1980 (Manchester University Press, forthcoming in
2014). He has also recently co-edited a book (with Siobhan McAndrew and
Paul Widdop): Social Networks and Music Worlds (Routledge, forthcom-
ing in 2014).

This article is part of a special section, ‘Responses to Loı̈c Waquant’s

Homines in Extremis’ (Body & Society, 20(2), June 2014), featuring
articles by Hélène Mialet, Elise Paradis, Nick Crossley, Greg Downey
and Loı̈c Wacquant.