The Habitus and Directionality

In his Outline of a Theory of Practice Pierre Bourdieu approaches questions of objectivity, acculturation, and societal reproduction in a different way than the past authors and philosophers we have studied. Though Bourdieu rejects the primacy of agency of the individual, referring to single humans more as organisms, he does not fully embrace the structuralist and deterministic ideal. From the beginning Bourdieu accepts and expounds upon man's inability to achieve an objective point of view and also identifies some of the inherent limitations in reaching for Objectivism. One such objection to this practices which Bourdieu offers is the potentially huge gap in understanding and meaning between native participants and trained secondary speakers of a language. Bourdieu also identifies the propensity of observers to naturally and unknowingly project their own socially constructing meanings and assessments of behaviors onto the observed. Conversely, though, Bourdieu asserts that individual humans both acculturate to and through language contain limitless potential to rationalize their own behavior and personal understanding. In this way Bourdieu recognizes the weaknesses of applying subjectivity and objectivity to the overarching recreation and perpetuation of human society.

Rather than seeking to wholly prove or disprove either side of the historical dialectic regarding individual agency and structuralism, Bourdieu uses the concept of habitus. Habitus, for Bourdieu, is a range of "systems of durable, transposable dispositions"(72). Or, in reference to the remaking of social reality, habitus is the adaptations to goals based on objective circumstance without the prior skills to obtain those goals and without the totalizing control of a third party or structure (72). Unlike objectivist in the past, Bourdieu argues that though there are objective forces acting upon and acculturating individual humans, the habitus is a historically specific with changing features due to constant chronological reconstruction and rebirth. In this machination, humans are acculturated mostly through imitation and literal experience in the habitus which they were born or socialized. By shirking the emphasis on overarching and deterministic structures, the habitus provides a more full and organic view of societal perpetuation. Bourdieu only refers to habitus in reference to non-totalitarian systems because of the dual importance of habitus in recreating society from the bottom up as well as the top down. I found Bourdieu's comparison of habitus to organizations and societies like the military, which emphasis deconstructive de-culturation combined with teaching and re-culturation, to be especially striking. Most interestingly, these organizations imitate some of the outward influential capacities of the habitus in the "most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners" (94). Bourdieu impresses upon the reader the importance of the arbitrary nature and irrational enforcement of these facets of appearance in mimicking the rationale enforcement of the habitus.

Overall, I found Bourdieu's assertions regarding objectivity and subjectivity to be very convincing. Though he leans towards some to the tenets of objectivity in his pronouncements, the author does not follow them to an undue length and hit the same obstructions as other philosophers. Rather, Bourdieu is able to show how individual agency is a factor in the change of culture by demonstrating the ceaseless chronological reformulation of culture and society which is constantly occurring. Objective forces may act upon and influence individuals but the perpetual reassessment of those forces by individuals in the habitus provides a directionality and a means of sociocultural change.