sociology short answers

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Course: SOC 311

Instructor authorizing: Jepson

Extracted from (source citation): Contemporary Sociological Theory / edited by Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, et. al. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.

Source owned by: Instructor

20 Structures, Habitus, Practices

Pierre Bourdieu

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

The bringing to light o f the presuppositions inherent in objectivist construction has paradoxically been delayed by the efforts o f all those who, in linguistics as in anthro­ pology, have sought to ‘correct’ the structuralist model by appealing to ‘context’ or ‘situation’ to account for variations, exceptions and accidents (instead of making them simple variants, absorbed into the structure, as the structuralists do). They have thus

O riginally translated by R ich ard N ice.

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avoided a radical questioning o f the objectivist mode o f thought, when, that is, they have not simply fallen back on to the free choice o f a rootless, unattached, pure subject. Thus, the method known as ‘situational analysis’, which consists o f ‘observing people in a variety of social situations’ in order to determine ‘the way in which individuals are able to exercise choices within the limits o f a specified social structure’, 1 remains locked within the framework of the rule and the exception, which E d m u n d Leach (often invoked by the exponents of this method) spells out explicitly: ‘I postulate that struc­ tural systems in which all avenues of social action are narrowly institutionalized are impossible. In all viable systems, there must be an area where the individual is free to make choices so as to manipulate the system to his advantage’ .2

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

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

If a very close correlation is regularly observed between the scientifically con­ structed objective probabilities (for example, the chances of access to a particular good) and agents’ subjective aspirations (‘motivations’ and ‘needs’ ), this is not because agents consciously adjust their aspirations to an exact evaluation of their chances o f success, like a gambler organizing his stakes on the basis of perfect information about his chances of winning. In reality, the dispositions durably incul­ cated by the possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms and necessities, opportunities and prohibitions inscribed in the objective conditions (which science apprehends

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through statistical regularities such as the probabilities objectively attached to a group or class) generate dispositions objectively compatible with these conditions and in a sense pre-adapted to their demands. The most improbable practices are therefore excluded, as unthinkable, by a kind of immediate submission to order that inclines agents to make a virtue of necessity, that is, to refuse what is anyway denied and to will the inevitable. The very conditions of production of the habitus, a virtue made of necessity, mean that the anticipations it generates tend to ignore the restriction to which the validity of calculation of probabilities is subordinated, namely that the experimental conditions should not have been modified. Unlike scientific estimations, which are corrected after each experiment according to rigor­ ous rules of calculation, the anticipations of the habitus, practical hypotheses based on past experience, give disproportionate weight to early experiences. Through the economic and social necessity that they bring to bear on the relatively autonomous world of the domestic economy and family relations, or more precisely, through the specifically familial manifestations of this external necessity (forms of the division of labour between the sexes, household objects, modes of consumption, parent-child relations, etc.), the structures characterizing a determinate class of conditions of existence produce the structures of the habitus, which in their turn are the basis of the perception and appreciation of all subsequent experiences.

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

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perceptions, expressions and actions - whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation o f unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditioning.

Nothing is more misleading than the illusion created by hindsight in which all the traces of a life, such as the works of an artist or the events at a biography, appear as the realization of an essence that seems to pre-exist them. Just as a mature artistic style is not contained, like a seed, in an original inspiration but is continuously defined and redefined in the dialectic between the objectifying intention and the already objectified intention, so too the unity of meaning which, after the event, may seem to have preceded the acts and works announcing the final significance, retro­ spectively transforming the various stages of the temporal series into mere prepara­ tory sketches, is constituted through the confrontation between questions that only exist in and for a mind armed with a particular type o f schemes and the solutions obtained through application o f these same schemes. The genesis o f a system of works or practices generated by the same habitus (or homologous habitus, such as those that underlie the unity o f the life-style o f a group or a class) cannot be described either as the autonomous development o f a unique and always self­ identical essence, or as a continuous creation o f novelty, because it arises from the necessary yet unpredictable confrontation between the habitus and an event that can exercise a pertinent incitement on the habitus only if the latter snatches it from the contingency o f the accidental and constitutes it as a problem by applying to it the very principles of its solution; and also because the habitus, like every ‘art of inventing’, is what makes it possible to produce an infinite number o f practices that are relatively unpredictable (like the corresponding situations) but also limited in their diversity. In short, being the product o f a particular class o f objective regularities, the habitus tends to generate all the ‘reasonable’ , ‘common-sense’, behaviours (and only these) which are possible within the limits o f these regularities, and which are likely to be positively sanctioned because they are objectively adjusted to the logic characteristic o f a particular field, whose objective future they anticipate. At the same time, ‘without violence, art or argument’, it tends to exclude all ‘extravagances’ (‘not for the likes of us’ ), that is, all the behaviours that would be negatively sanctioned because they are incompatible with the object­ ive conditions.

Because they tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the conditions in which their generative principle was produced while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures that constitute the habitus, practices cannot be deduced either from the present conditions which may seem to have provoked them or from the past conditions which have produced the habitus, the durable principle of their production. They can therefore only be accounted for by relating the social conditions in which the habitus that generated them was constituted, to the social conditions in which it is implemented, that is, through the scientific work of performing the interrelationship of these two states o f the social world that the habitus performs, while concealing it, in and through practice. The ‘uncon­ scious’, which enables one to dispense with this interrelating, is never anything other than the forgetting of history which history itself produces by realizing the

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objective structures that it generates in the quasi-natures o f habitus. As Durkheim3 puts it:

In each one o f us, in differing degrees, is contained the person we were yesterday, and indeed, in the nature o f things it is even true that our past personae predominate in us, since the present is necessarily insignificant when com pared with the long period o f the past because o f which we have emerged in the form we have today. It is just that we don’t directly feel the influence o f these past selves precisely because they are so deeply rooted within us. They constitute the unconscious part o f ourselves. Consequently we have a strong tendency not to recognize their existence and to ignore their legitimate demands. By contrast, with the m ost recent acquisitions o f civilization we are vividly aware o f them just because they are recent and consequently have not had time to be assimilated into our collective unconscious.

The habitus - embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history - is the active presence o f the whole past o f which it is the product. As such, it is what gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present. This autonomy is that o f the past, enacted and acting, which, functioning as accumulated capital, produces history on the basis o f history and so ensures the permanence in change that makes the individual agent a world within the world. The habitus is a spontaneity without consciousness or will, opposed as much to the mechanical necessity o f things without history in mechanis­ tic theories as it is to the reflexive freedom of subjects ‘without inertia’ in rationalist theories.

Thus the dualistic vision that recognizes only the self-transparent act o f conscious­ ness or the externally determined thing has to give way to the real logic o f action, which brings together two objectifications of history, objectification in bodies and objectification in institutions or, which amounts to the same thing, two states of capital, objectified and incorporated, through which a distance is set up from necessity and its urgencies. This logic is seen in paradigm atic form in the dialectic o f expressive dispositions and instituted means o f expression (morphological, syn­ tactic and lexical instruments, literary genres, etc.) which is observed in the inten- tionless invention of regulated improvisation. Endlessly overtaken by his own words, with which he maintains a relation o f ‘carry and be carried’ , as Nicolai Hartmann put it, the virtuoso finds in his discourse the triggers for his discourse, which goes along like a train laying its own rails.4 In other words, being produced by a modus operandi which is not consciously mastered, the discourse contains an ‘objective intention’, as the Scholastics put it, which outruns the conscious intentions o f its apparent author and constantly offers new pertinent stimuli to the modus operandi of which it is the product and which functions as a kind o f ‘spiritual autom aton’. If witticisms strike as much by their unpredictability as by their retro­ spective necessity, the reason is that the trouvaille that brings to light long buried resources presupposes a habitus that so perfectly possesses the objectively available means of expression that it is possessed by them, so much so that it asserts its freedom from them by realizing the rarest o f the possibilities that they necessarily imply. The dialectic o f the meaning o f the language and the ‘sayings o f the tribe’ is a particular and particularly significant case o f the dialectic between habitus and institutions, that is, between two modes o f objectification o f past history, in which

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there is constantly created a history that inevitably appears, like witticisms, as both original and inevitable.

This durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations is a prac­ tical sense which reactivates the sense objectified in institutions. Produced by the work of inculcation and appropriation that is needed in order for objective struc­ tures, the products of collective history, to be reproduced in the form of the durable, adjusted dispositions that are the condition of their functioning, the habitus, which is constituted in the course of an individual history, imposing its particular logic on incorporation, and through which agents partake of the history objectified in insti­ tutions, is what makes it possible to inhabit institutions, to appropriate them practically, and so to keep them in activity, continuously pulling them from the state of dead letters, reviving the sense deposited in them, but at the same time imposing the revisions and transformations that reactivation entails. O r rather, the habitus is what enables the institution to attain full realization: it is through the capacity for incorporation, which exploits the body’s readiness to take seriously the performative magic of the social, that the king, the banker or the priest are heredi­ tary monarchy, financial capitalism or the Church made flesh. Property appropriates its owner, embodying itself in the form of a structure generating practices perfectly conforming with its logic and its demands. If one is justified in saying, with M arx, that ‘the lord of an entailed estate, the first-born son, belongs to the land’, that ‘it inherits him’, or that the ‘persons’ of capitalists are the ‘personification’ of capital, this is because the purely social and quasimagical process of socialization, which is inaugurated by the act of marking that institutes an individual as an eldest son, an heir, a successor, a Christian, or simply as a man (as opposed to a woman), with all the corresponding privileges and obligations, and which is prolonged, strengthened and confirmed by social treatments that tend to transform instituted difference into natural distinction, produces quite real effects, durably inscribed in the body and in belief. An institution, even an economy, is complete and fully viable only if it is durably objectified not only in things, that is, in the logic, transcending individual agents, of a particular field, but also in bodies, in durable dispositions to recognize and comply with the demands immanent in the field.

In so far - and only in so far - as habitus are the incorporation of the same history, or more concretely, of the same history objectified in habitus and structures, the practices they generate are mutually intelligible and immediately adjusted to the structures, and also objectively concerted and endowed with an objective meaning that is at once unitary and systematic, transcending subjective intentions and con­ scious projects, whether individual or collective. One of the fundamental effects of the harmony between practical sense and objectified meaning (sens) is the produc­ tion of a common-sense world, whose immediate self-evidence is accompanied by the objectivity provided by consensus on the meaning of practices and the world, in other words the harmonization of the agents’ experiences and the constant reinforce­ ment each of them receives from expression - individual or collective (in festivals, for example), improvised or programmed (commonplaces, sayings) - of similar or identical experiences.

The homogeneity of habitus that is observed within the limits of a class of conditions of existence and social conditionings is what causes practices and works to be immediately

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intelligible and foreseeable, and hence taken for granted. The habitus makes questions of intention superfluous, not only in the production but also in the deciphering of practices and works. Automatic and impersonal, significant without a signifying inten­ tion, ordinary practices lend themselves to an understanding that is no less automatic and impersonal. The picking up of the objective intention they express requires neither ‘reactivation’ o f the ‘lived’ intention o f their originator, nor the ‘intentional transfer into the Other’ cherished by the phenomenologists and all advocates o f a ‘participationist’ conception o f history or sociology, nor tacit or explicit inquiry (‘What do you m ean? ') as to other people’s intentions. ‘Communication of consciousnesses’ presupposes com ­ munity o f ‘unconsciouses’ (that is, o f linguistic and cultural competences). Deciphering the objective intention o f practices and works has nothing to do with ‘reproduction’ (Nachbildung, as the early Dilthey puts it) o f lived experiences and the unnecessary and uncertain reconstitution o f an ‘intention’ which is not their real origin.

The objective homogenizing of group or class habitus that results from homogen­ eity of conditions o f existence is what enables practices to be objectively harmonized without any calculation or conscious reference to a norm and mutually adjusted in the absence of any direct interaction or, a fortiori, explicit co-ordination. The interaction itself owes its form to the objective structures that have produced the dispositions of the interacting agents, which continue to assign them their relative positions in the interaction and elsewhere. ‘Imagine’, Leibniz suggests5, ‘two clocks or watches in perfect agreement as to the time. This may occur in one of three ways. The first consists in mutual influence; the second is to appoint a skilful workman to correct them and synchronize constantly; the third is to construct these two clocks with such art and precision that one can be assured o f their subsequent agreement.’ So long as one ignores the true principle of the conductorless orchestra­ tion which gives regularity, unity and systematicity to practices even in the absence of any spontaneous or imposed organization of individual projects, one is con­ demned to the naive artificialism that recognizes no other unifying principle than conscious co-ordination. The practices of the members of the same group or, in a differentiated society, the same class, are always more and better harmonized than the agents know or wish, because, as Leibniz again says, ‘following only (his) own law s’, each ‘nonetheless agrees with the other’ . The habitus is precisely this imma­ nent law, lex insita, inscribed in bodies by identical histories, which is the precondi­ tion not only for the co-ordination of practices but also for practices of co­ ordination. The corrections and adjustments the agents themselves consciously carry out presuppose mastery o f a common code; and undertakings of collective mobilization cannot succeed without a minimum o f concordance between the habitus of the mobilizing agents (prophet, leader, etc.) and the dispositions of those who recognize themselves in their practices or words, and, above all, without the inclination towards grouping that springs from the spontaneous orchestration of dispositions.

It is certain that every effort at mobilization aimed at organizing collective action has to reckon with the dialectic of dispositions and occasions that takes place in every agent, whether he mobilizes or is mobilized (the hysteresis o f habitus is doubtless one explan­ ation of the structural lag between opportunities and the dispositions to grasp them which is the cause o f missed opportunities and, in particular, of the frequently observed

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incapacity to think historical crises in categories o f perception and thought other than those o f the past, however revolutionary). It is also certain that it must take account of the objective orchestration established among dispositions that are objectively co­ ordinated because they are ordered by more or less identical objective necessities. It is, however, extremely dangerous to conceive collective action by analogy with individ­ ual action, ignoring all that the former owes to the relatively autonom ous logic of the institutions of mobilization (with their own history, their specific organization, etc.) and to the situations, institutionalized or not, in which it occurs.

Sociology treats as identical all biological individuals who, being the products of the same objective conditions, have the same habitus. A social class (in-itself) - a class of identical or similar conditions o f existence and conditionings - is at the same time a class of biological individuals having the same habitus, understood as a system of dispositions common to all products of the same conditionings. Though it is impossible for all (or even two) members of the same class to have had the same experiences, in the same order, it is certain that each member of the same class is more likely than any member of another class to have been confronted with the situations most frequent for members of that class. Through the always convergent experiences that give a social environment its physiognomy, with its ‘closed doors’, ‘dead ends’ and ‘limited prospects’, the objective structures that sociology appre­ hends in the form o f probabilities of access to goods, services and powers, inculcate the ‘art of assessing likelihoods’ , as Leibniz put it, of anticipating the objective future, in short, the ‘sense of reality’, or realities, which is perhaps the best-concealed principle of their efficacy.

To define the relationship between class habitus and individual habitus (which is inseparable from the organic individuality that is immediately given to immediate perception - intuitus personae - and socially designated and recognized - name, legal identity, etc.), class (or group) habitus, that is, the individual habitus in so far as it expresses or reflects the class (or group), could be regarded as a subjective but non­ individual system of internalized structures, common schemes o f perception, con­ ception and action, which are the precondition o f all objectification and appercep­ tion; and the objective co-ordination of practices and the sharing of a world-view could be founded on the perfect impersonality and interchangeability o f singular practices and views. But this would amount to regarding all the practices or repre­ sentations produced in accordance with identical schemes as impersonal and inter­ changeable, like individual intuitions of space which, according to Kant, reflect none of the particularities of the empirical ego. In fact, the singular habitus of members of the same class are united in a relationship of homology, that is, of diversity within homogeneity reflecting the diversity within homogeneity characteristic of their social conditions of production. Each individual system of dispositions is a structural variant of the others, expressing the singularity of its position within the class and its trajectory. ‘Personal’ style, the particular stamp marking all the products o f the same habitus, whether practices or works, is never more than a deviation in relation to the style of a period or class, so that it relates back to the common style not only by its conformity - like Phidias, who, for Hegel, had no ‘manner’ - but also by the difference that makes the ‘manner’ .

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The principle o f the differences between individual habitus lies in the singularity o f their social trajectories, to which there correspond series o f chronologically ordered determinations that are mutually irreducible to one another. The habitus which, at every moment, structures new experiences in accordance with the struc­ tures produced by past experiences, which are modified by the new experiences within the limits defined by their power o f selection, brings about a unique integra­ tion, dominated by the earliest experiences, o f the experiences statistically common to members o f the same class. Early experiences have particular weight because the habitus tends to ensure its own constancy and its defence against change through the selection it makes within new information by rejecting information capable of calling into question its accumulated information, if exposed to it accidentally or by force, and especially by avoiding exposure to such information. One only has to think, for example, o f homogamy, the paradigm o f all the ‘choices’ through which the habitus tends to favour experiences likely to reinforce it (or the empirically confirmed fact that people tend to talk about politics with those who have the same opinions). Through the systematic ‘choices’ it makes among the places, events and people that might be frequented, the habitus tends to protect itself from crises and critical challenges by providing itself with a milieu to which it is as pre-adapted as possible, that is, a relatively constant universe o f situations tending to reinforce its dispositions by offering the market most favourable to its products. And once again it is the most paradoxical property o f the habitus, the unchosen principle o f all ‘choices’, that yields the solution to the p arado x o f the information needed in order to avoid information. The schemes of perception and appreciation o f the habitus which are the basis of all the avoidance strategies are largely the product o f a non- conscious, unwilled avoidance, whether it results automatically from the conditions of existence (for example, spatial segregation) or has been produced by a strategic intention (such as avoidance o f ‘ bad com pany’ or ‘unsuitable books’) originating from adults themselves formed in the same conditions.

Even when they look like the realization o f explicit ends, the strategies produced by the habitus and enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and constantly changing situations are only apparently determined by the future. If they seem to be oriented by anticipation o f their own consequences, thereby encouraging the finalist illusion, this is because, always tending to reproduce the objective structures that produced them, they are determined by the past conditions o f production o f their principle of production, that is, by the already realized outcome o f identical or interchangeable past practices, which coincides with their own outcome only to the extent that the structures within which they function are identical to or homologous with the objective structures o f which they are the product. Thus, for example, in the interaction between two agents or groups o f agents endowed with the same habitus (say A and B), everything takes place as if the actions o f each of them (say a 1 for A) were organized by reference to the reactions which they call forth from any agent possessing the same habitus (say b 1 for B). They therefore objectively imply antici­ pation of the reaction which these reactions in turn call forth (a2, A’s reaction to b 1). But the teleological description, the only one appropriate to a ‘rational actor’ possessing perfect information as to the preferences and competences o f the other actors, in which each action has the purpose o f making possible the reaction to the reaction it induces (individual A performs an action a 1 a gift for example, in order

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to make individual B produce action b 1, so th at he can then perform action a 1, a stepped-up gift), is quite a s naive as the m echanistic description that presents the action and the riposte a s so m any steps in a sequence o f program m ed action s produced by a m echanical ap p a ra tu s.

To have an idea of the difficulties that would be encountered by a mechanistic theory of practice as mechanical reaction, directly determined by the antecedent conditions and entirely reducible to the mechanical functioning of pre-established devices - which would have to be assumed to exist in infinite number, like the chance configurations of stimuli capable of triggering them from outside - one only has to mention the grandiose, desperate undertaking of the anthropologist, fired with positivist ardour, who recorded 480 elementary units of behaviour in 20 minutes’ observation of his wife in the kitchen: ‘Here we confront the distressing fact that the sample episode chain under analysis is a fragment of a larger segment of behavior which in the complete record contains some 480 separate episodes. Moreover, it took only twenty minutes for these 480 behavior stream events to occur. If my wife’s rate of behavior is roughly representative of that of other actors, we must be prepared to deal with an inventory of episodes produced at the rate of some 20,000 per sixteen-hour day per acto r... In a population consisting of several hundred actor — types, the number of different episodes in the total repertory must amount to many millions in the course of an annual cycle’.6

The habitus contains the solution to the p arad o x es o f objective m eaning w ithout subjective intention. It is the source o f these strings o f ‘m oves’ which are objectively organized as strategies w ithout being the product o f a genuine strategic intention - which would presuppose at least that they be apprehended as one am ong other possible strategies. If each stage in the sequence o f ordered and oriented actions that constitute objective strategies can appear to be determined by anticipation o f the future, and in particular, o f its own consequences (which is w hat justifies the use o f the concept o f strategy), it is because the practices that are generated by the habitus and are governed by the past conditions o f production o f their generative principle are adapted in advance to the objective conditions whenever the conditions in which the habitus functions have remained identical, or similar, to the conditions in which it was constituted. Perfectly and immediately successful adjustm ent to the objective conditions provides the m ost complete illusion o f finality, or - which am ounts to the same thing - of self-regulating mechanism.

The presence of the past in this kind o f false anticipation o f the future performed by the habitus is, paradoxically, m ost clearly seen when the sense o f the probable future is belied and when dispositions ill-adjusted to the objective chances because o f a hysteresis effect (M arx’s favourite exam ple o f this w as D on Quixote) are nega­ tively sanctioned because the environment they actually encounter is too different from the one to which they are objectively adjusted. In fact the persistence o f the effects of primary conditioning, in the form o f the habitus, accounts equally well for cases in which dispositions function out of phase and practices are objectively ill- adapted to the present conditions because they are objectively adjusted to conditions that no longer obtain. The tendency of groups to persist in their ways, due inter alia to the fact that they are com posed o f individuals with durable dispositions that can outlive the economic and social conditions in which they were produced, can be the source of m isadaptation as well as adaptation, revolt as well as resignation.

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One only has to consider other possible forms of the relationship between dispos­ itions and conditions to see that the pre-adjustment of the habitus to the objective conditions is a ‘particular case of the possible’ and so avoid unconsciously univer­ salizing the model of the near-circular relationship of near-perfect reproduction, which is completely valid only when the conditions of production of the habitus and the conditions o f its functioning are identical or homothetic. In this particular case, the dispositions durably inculcated by the objective conditions and by a pedagogic action that is tendentially adjusted to these conditions, tend to generate practices objectively compatible with these conditions and expectations pre-adapted to their objective demands (am or fa ti)7 As a consequence, they tend, without any rational calculation or conscious estimation of the chances of success, to ensure immediate correspondence between the a priori or ex ante probability conferred on an event (whether or not accompanied by subjective experiences such as hopes, expectation, fears, etc.) and the a posteriori or ex post probability that can be established on the basis of past experience. They thus make it possible to understand why economic models based on the (tacit) premise of a ‘relationship of intelligible causality’, as M ax Weber8 calls it, between generic (‘typical’ ) chances ‘objectively existing as an average’ and ‘subjective expectations’, or, for example, between investment or the propensity to invest and the rate of return expected or really obtained in the past, fairly exactly account for practices which do not arise from knowledge of the objective chances.

By pointing out that rational action, ‘judiciously’ oriented according to what is ‘objectively valid’,9 is what ‘would have happened if the actors had had knowledge of all the circumstances and all the participants’ intentions’ 10, that is, o f what is ‘valid in the eyes o f the scientist’, who alone is able to calculate the system of objective chances to which perfectly informed action would have to be adjusted, Weber shows clearly that the pure model o f rational action cannot be regarded as an anthropological description o f practice. This is not only because real agents only very exceptionally possess the complete information, and the skill to appreciate it, that rational action would presuppose. Apart from rare cases which bring together the economic and cultural conditions for rational action oriented by knowledge of the profits that can be obtained in the different markets, practices depend not on the average chances o f profit, an abstract and unreal notion, but on the specific chances that a singular agent or class o f agents possesses by virtue o f its capital, this being understood, in this respect, as a means o f appropriation o f the chances theoretically available to all.

Economic theory which acknowledges only the rational ‘responses’ o f an indeterminate, interchangeable agent to ‘potential opportunities’, or more precisely to average chances (like the ‘average rates of profit’ offered by the different markets), converts the imma­ nent law of the economy into a universal norm of proper economic behaviour. In so doing, it conceals the fact that the ‘rational’ habitus which is the precondition for appropriate economic behaviour is the product o f particular economic condition, the one defined by possession o f the economic and cultural capital required in order to seize the ‘potential opportunities’ theoretically available to all; and also that the same dispositions, by adapting the economically most deprived to the specific condition of which they are the product and thereby helping to make their adaptation to the generic

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demands of the economic cosmos (as regards calculation, forecasting, etc.) lead them to accept the negative sanctions resulting from this lack of adaptation, that is, their deprivation. In short, the art of estimating and seizing chances, the capacity to antici­ pate the future by a kind of practical induction or even to take a calculated gamble on the possible against the probable, are dispositions that can only be acquired in certain social conditions, that is, certain social conditions. Like the entrepreneurial spirit or the propensity to invest, economic information is a function of one’s power over the economy. This is, on the one hand, because the propensity to acquire it depends on the chances of using it successfully, and the chances of acquiring it depend on the chances of successfully using it; and also because economic competence, like all compe­ tence (linguistic, political, etc.), far from being a simple technical capacity acquired in certain conditions, is a power tacitly conferred on those who have power over the economy or (as the very ambiguity of the word ‘competence’ indicates) an attribute of status.

Only in im aginary experience (in the folk tale, for exam ple), which neutralizes the sense o f social realities, does the social w orld take the form o f a universe o f possibles equally possible for any possible subject. Agents shape their aspirations according to concrete indices o f the accessible and the inaccessible, o f what is and is not ‘for u s’ , a division as fundam ental and as fundam entally recognized as that between the sacred and the profane. The pre-emptive rights on the future that are defined by law and by the m onopolistic right to certain possibles that it confers are merely the explicitly guaranteed form o f the whole set o f appropriated chances through which the pow er relations o f the present project themselves into the future, from where they govern present dispositions, especially those tow ards the future. In fact, a given agent’s practical relation to the future, which governs his present practice, is defined in the relationship between, on the one hand, his habitus with its temporal structures and dispositions tow ards the future, constituted in the course o f a particular relationship to a particular universe o f probabilities, and on the other hand a certain state of the chances objectively offered to him by the social world. The relation to what is possible is a relation to power; and the sense of the probable future is constituted in the prolonged relationship with a world structured according to the categories o f the possible (for us) and the impossible (for us), o f w hat is appropriated in advance by and for others and what one can reasonably expect for oneself. The habitus is the principle o f a selective perception of the indices tending to confirm and reinforce it rather than transform it, a m atrix generating responses adapted in advance to all objective conditions identical to or homologous with the (past) conditions o f its production; it adjusts itself to a probable future which it anticipates and helps to bring about because it reads it directly in the present o f the presumed world, the only one it can ever know. It is thus the basis o f what M a rx 11 calls ‘effective dem and’ (as opposed to ‘demand without effect’, based on need and desire), a realistic relation to what is possible, founded on and therefore limited by power. This disposition, always marked by its (social) conditions o f acquisition and realization, tends to adjust to the objective chances o f satisfying need or desire, inclining agents to ‘cut their coats according to their cloth’, and so to become the accomplices o f the processes that tend to make the probable a reality.

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Notes

1 Gluckman, M . 1961: Ethnographic D ata in British social anthropology. Sociological Review, 9: 5 -1 7 ; cf. also Van Velson, J. 1964: The Politics o f Kinship: A Study in Social M anipulation am ong the Lakeside Tonga. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

2 Leach, E. 1962: On certain unconsidered aspects of double descent systems. M an, 62: 133.

3 Durkheim, E. 1977: The Evolution o f Educational Thought. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, p .11.

4 Ruyer, R. 1966: Paradoxes de la conscience et limites de I’automatisme. Paris: Albin Michel.

5 Leibniz, G. W. 1866: Second eclaircissement du systeme de la communication des substances (first pub. 1696). In (Euvres philosophiques. Ed. P. Janet. Paris: Ladrange.

6 Harris, M . 1964. The Nature o f Cultural Things. New York: Random House. 7 For some psychologists’ attempts at direct verification o f this relationship, see Brunswik,

E. 1949: Systematic and representative design o f psychological experiments. In J. Ney- man (ed.), Proceedings o f the Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability. Berkeley, Calif: University o f California Press; Preston, M . G. and Baratta, P. 1948: An experimental study of the action-value of an uncertain income. American jo u rn a l o f Psychology, 61: 1 8 3-93; Attneave, F. 1953: Psychological probability as a function o f experienced frequency. Jou rn al o f Experimental Psychology, 46: 81-6.

8 Weber, M . 1922: Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tubingen: J. C. Mohr. 9 Weber, ibid.

10 Weber, M. 1968: Economy and Society, vol. I. N ew York: Bedminster, p. 6. 11 M arx, K. 1956: Economic an d Philosophic M anuscripts o f 1844. In K. M arx, Early

Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin.