Are we free to determine our own destinies or are we just products of our own environment?

Traditional approaches in sociology often rely on a linear one-dimensional understanding of society and the self, treating the individual as either determined by social structures or as self-directed autonomous agent. This binary and deterministic understanding of society and the subject divided the social sciences in the 20th century, creating an objectivist-subjectivist impasse (Mahar, Harker and Wilkes, 1992:15). In Bourdieu’s view, it was a division that weakened the claims and methods that his colleagues were using to explain sociological phenomena (Webb, Schirato and Danaher, 2002:34-5). For Bourdieu, society and the self were not neat categories that could be placed onto a single plane of cause-and-effect; rather, they were relational and deeply intertwined concepts. His ‘theory of practice’, in a sense, was an attempt to create an ontological language that would bridge both the objectivist understandings of society and the subjectivist appreciation of agency observed in individuals in everyday life (Bourdieu, 1977:4). The intended effect of this is a theoretical framework that was built to focus on the empirical and to devote much of the sociological analysis on the social world – as it is happening. For Bourdieu, this meant redefining the philosophical grounds of the social world and developing tools that not only allow for investigating empirical reality, but also produce insights that aligned more accurately with the social world and all its inconsistencies. In Bourdieu’s words, his intellectual goal was to 'make explicit the truth of primary experience of the social world’ (Bourdieu, 1977:3), rather than alienate analysis from empirical reality.

This essay argues that Bourdieu understands the interplay between society and the self as a dynamic, relational process, where individuals are both a product and producer of the social structures around them. He highlights this through habitus, field, and capital. His theory’s strength lies in bridging the objectivist-subjectivist divide and offering a more reflexive sociology, but it also tends to reproduce deterministic tendencies, limiting its ability to fully escape structuralist thinking.

2.1 Habitus, Field and Capital

Fundamental to Bourdieu’s theory of practice are three deeply intertwined concepts: habitus, field, and capital. For Bourdieu, the subject can be thought of as having habitus. Habitus has two properties. The first is a partly unconscious, but relatively stable aspect of the self (outline, 78). It is a set of dispositions and values gained over the course of one’s social life; it is their ‘predisposition’, representing all that the subject has come to know and all that they have been. The second, perhaps more important facet is its generative or productive aspect, or the ‘structuring structure’ of habitus (Bourdieu, 1984:170). While habitus has a ‘generative principle’ or certain disposition (Bourdieu, 1977:78), habitus itself is not static and conceptually relational to its locality within the social world. He calls this arena, the field (Mahar, Harker and Wilkes, 1992:8). Field can be thought of as the space agents occupy on which social action unfolds. It has its own rules, ‘stakes’, rewards, and ‘things to be done’ which agents recognise, intuit, and act accordingly (Bourdieu, 1977:143; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992:98). Much like how habitus and field demarcate the social space – the meaning, value and activity of the social world depend on the resources that fill the space in which the subject has come to occupy. This is capital (Mahar, Harker and Wilkes, 1992:13). For Bourdieu, capital retains much of the value-exchange sense of the economic term Bourdieu borrows from (Bourdieu, 1986:15). Capital adds a third dimension to the social world imbuing the space with meaning and value, establishing social relations and activity – or practice. In a crude sense, Bourdieu’s view of society is the instantaneous and ongoing contact between these three elements, out of which social life springs. Bourdieu’s theory accommodates for the strengths of structuralist approaches, while recognising their limitations by emphasising a social world that is fundamentally dynamic, ‘instantaneous’ evolving, and present-oriented (Bourdieu, 1977:78). Bourdieu’s conception of the ‘self’ incorporates a conscious agent, whose habitus makes aware of the social world and his own identity and agency. In addition to this, it also recognises an unconscious aspect of the self, whose agency and behaviours are to some extent – predictable and non-random, guided to some extent by a process of intuition and recognition.

2.2 Producing and Reproducing Practice and Inequities

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Bourdieu’s view of society is its explanatory power for describing how social practices tend to reproduce themselves. Central to this is his idea of habitus and how the subject necessarily embodies the field’s rules and values, positioning the subject in a field of ‘struggle’ that forces them to reckon with their own social histories, their capital and whether or not it is recognised and valuable within the field itself (Bourdieu, 1984:244). One pertinent example is his work on French schools – which, instead of being a site of transforming social relations (‘meritocratic’, ‘equal opportunity’) – the education system reinforces existing social relations and inequalities. In his research, he shows how the parent’s ‘linguistic capital’ can indicate accurately how well a student may perform at school and future success (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990:73). He identifies particular capital which is valued by other fields that influence and shape the field of education such as their parent’s proximity to the knowledge class represented by their university degree, their socio- economic class represented in their income and financial asset, for example (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990:74-6). Students equipped with advantageous capital, such as embodied capital (e.g. curriculum knowledge, taking language classes, school ‘readiness’) that is recognised in the field of education tended to have successes which reflected their own existing social background (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990:80). For Bourdieu this reproductive or ‘homogenous programm[ing]’ quality of habitus is what allows for the persistence of ‘objective’ social structures, or social trends to exist empirically across generations, historical moments, and other related fields, such as field of knowledge, for example (‘fields of fields’) (Bourdieu, 1967:340; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992:105-6).

2.3 Too Deterministic?

In literature, often critiques of his theory of practice focus on how his own sociological thinking betrays the very reason which his theory was meant to transcend: determinism. In many ways, there is truth to this, particularly because the aims which he orients his analysis is biased towards a particular structuralist-thinking. This is most prevalent in discussions of what he calls for sociologists to identify within the social field, the ‘rules’ that are taken for granted, or what feels most ‘natural’ to the agent, or the practices which tend to reproduce themselves. While habitus, field and capital ontologically protect against falling into the objectivist-subjectivist split, his particular emphasis on the unconscious pre-determined ‘structured structure’ of habitus has not gone unnoticed (Bourdieu, 1984:170). As Jenkins somewhat crudely summarises:

‘His scheme remains essentially deterministic and circular – objective structures produce culture, which determines practice, which reproduces those objective structures’. (Jenkins. 1982:270)

If we take for example Bourdieu’s insights drawn from his analysis of tribal heads or affluent families of Kabylia in Algeria, the unconscious habitus plays a distractingly large role in giving meaning to his analysis. He starts with the empirical observation of how tribal heads would buy a superfluous number of oxen during the summer months – at the height of social festivities and gatherings (Bourdieu, 1990:229). He explains that tribal heads would explain it in terms of economic value (‘the harvest was good’) (Bourdieu, 1990:229). However, in reality, the second pair of oxen has no economic value; its value is symbolic of the position which the owner has over his community members (Bourdieu, 1990:220). It is a symbolic capital in so far as his community members bestow ‘authority’ and ‘legitimacy’ to this form of capital (Bourdieu, 1986:18). According to Jenkins, this is as much a deterministic model as the simple Marxian ‘base-superstructure’ theory, where objective structure (tribal head/economic relations) is mediated through the ‘habitus’ (the number of oxen the tribal head have/culture) ‘generat[ing] practice’ (Jenkins, 1982:272). Practice, in this sense, can either mean the reproduction of this behaviour, in other figures of authority, such as other elder males, or the economic relation itself in the form of ‘symbolic violence’. Although Bourdieu does attempt to distance his theory from determinism, the example shows how his insights can be simplified into existing Marxian structuralist terms. This focus on relations between concepts while also wanting to explain general trends can be seen in several of his concepts. These are: doxa (the implicit rules, beliefs and norms of a field), illusio (the process by which agents imbue and ‘normalise’ meaning and value onto the field), and even habitus (the set of disposition and values one comes to have). As Jenkins argues, their use in analysis simply functions as a placeholder for ‘culture’ (Jenkins, 1982:272). Even the concept of misrecognition, the process by which dominant cultural norms are imposed onto individuals without their conscious knowing (Mahar, Harker and Wilkes, 1990:25; Jenkins, 1982:272), has familiar tones of base-superstructure or simply ‘culture-practice’. Despite creating the theory of practice to avoid making sweeping generalisations, its orientation to describe structural phenomena with terms such as habitus or doxa, leans into determinism, where the empirical inevitably becomes a structuralist analysis – albeit in a Bourdieusian way.

3.0 Conclusion

Bourdieu’s theory of practice attempts to transcend the objectivist-subjectivist debate, producing a language to think more accurately about the dynamic nature of the social world. He offers up a way to understand the self not as an autonomous entity, but as a largely interconnected social species, a relational object and subject in the social world. For Bourdieu, the individual ‘feels at home in the world because the world is also in him.’ (Bourdieu, 200:143).

Despite the fact that Bourdieu’s own theory arguably has deterministic qualities, his theory in many ways forces sociologists to think more critically and reflexively on knowledge (Peters, 2014:130), as a cultural, ‘embodied’ product of the social world in and of itself. As Bourdieu demonstrates quite aptly in his work, knowledge itself plays an influential role even in sociological thinking: ‘the preconstructed is everywhere’, he warns (Bourdieu, 1992:232). Though his analyses did not seem to escape the very problem which he had devoted his life work to, Bourdieu is nevertheless acutely aware of the conundrum, he writes:

The sociologist is thus saddled with the task of knowing an object – the social world – of which he is the product, in a way such that problems that he raises about it and the concepts he uses have every chance of being the product of this object itself’. (Bourdieu, 1992:232).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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