Outline of a Theory of Practice

Author: Pierre Bourdieu
Year: 1977 (English trans. by Richard Nice of Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique, 1972)
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/bourdieu-1977-outline-of-a-theory-of-practice.md

Summary

Bourdieu argues that both phenomenology (subjectivism) and structuralism (objectivism) grasp practice falsely, and that an adequate theory of practice must supersede that "either/or." Objectivism treats practice as the execution of a model, rule, or code (Saussurian langue), while subjectivism makes every action a free, unprecedented project. Against both, Bourdieu posits the habitus — durable, transposable dispositions inculcated in the body — as the generative principle of "regulated improvisation." He grounds the argument ethnographically in Kabylia: honour, parallel-cousin marriage, the house, the agrarian calendar, and ritual all show that practice follows a "practical logic" rather than explicit rules, and that strategies of officialization and symbolic capital reproduce social order. Chapter 4 extends this into a theory of symbolic power: domination in pre-capitalist societies is exercised through misrecognized, euphemized symbolic violence rather than objective mechanisms.

Key Claims

• Habitus as "structured structure": dispositions are "structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively 'regulated' and 'regular' without in any way being the product of obedience to rules" (Ch. 2).
• Critique of objectivism: practice must not be treated as the execution of a code or repertoire of rules; the analyst must "reintroduce time into the theoretical representation of a practice which, being temporally structured, is intrinsically defined by its tempo" (Ch. 1).
• Strategy vs. rule: "To substitute strategy for the rule is to reintroduce time, with its rhythm, its orientation, its irreversibility. Science has a time which is not that of practice" (Ch. 1).
• The "fallacy of the rule": to treat regularity as a consciously respected ruling "is to slip from the model of reality to the reality of the model" (Ch. 1).
• The sense of honour is a body-inscribed disposition, "inscribed in the body schema and in the schemes of thought," which engenders the practices of challenge and riposte (Ch. 1).
• Practical knowledge is "learned ignorance" (docta ignorantia): "a mode of practical knowledge not comprising knowledge of its own principles" (Ch. 1).
• Official vs. practical kin: "It is practical kin who make marriages; it is official kin who celebrate them" (Ch. 1).
• "Making a virtue of necessity": parallel-cousin marriage is often "a forced choice, which people sometimes try to pass off as a positive choice of the ideal" (Ch. 1).
• The body as geometer: "gymnastics or dancing are geometry so long as we do not mean to say that the gymnast and the dancer are geometers" (Ch. 3).
• Practical logic is economical/fuzzy — "a logic which is not that of logic," presupposing "a loss of rigour for the sake of greater simplicity and generality" (Ch. 3).
• Doxa as naturalized arbitrariness: "Every established order tends to produce... the naturalization of its own arbitrariness," the self-evidence of doxa as distinct from orthodoxy or heterodoxy (Ch. 4).
• Orthodoxy/heterodoxy: "Crisis is a necessary condition for a questioning of doxa but is not in itself a sufficient condition for the production of a critical discourse" (Ch. 4).
• Symbolic capital as misrecognized economic capital: "Symbolic capital, a transformed and thereby disguised form of physical 'economic' capital, produces its proper effect inasmuch... as it conceals the fact that it originates in 'material' forms of capital" (Ch. 4).
• Symbolic violence is "the gentle, hidden form which violence takes when overt violence is impossible" — censored, euphemized, socially recognized violence (Ch. 4).
• Gift exchange as misrecognition requires "misrecognition (méconnaissance) of the reality of the objective 'mechanism' of the exchange" and a deferred, different counter-gift (Ch. 1).

Connections

Concepts: Habitus · Symbolic Capital · Everyday Life · Embodiment · Ideology
Authors: Pierre Bourdieu · Dell Upton · Harold Garfinkel · John Fiske
Debates: Theories of the Everyday — the practice-turn position
Related source notes: Architecture in Everyday Life (Upton 2002) · The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu 1990) · Bourdieu for Architects (Webster 2011) · Culturally 'Doped' or Not? (Conroy)

Direct Quotes

"It is practical kin who make marriages; it is official kin who celebrate them." (Ch. 1)

"One thus has to acknowledge that practice has a logic which is not that of logic." (Ch. 3)

"The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects which is itself but an endless circle of mutually reflecting metaphors." (Ch. 3)

"Symbolic capital... is perhaps the most valuable form of accumulation in a society in which... the limited technical resources... demand collective labour." (Ch. 4)

"symbolic violence is the gentle, hidden form which violence takes when overt violence is impossible." (Ch. 4)

Open Questions

• Does the concept of habitus, oriented toward reproduction ("virtue made of necessity"), leave room for the creative or resistant practice that the everyday-life theorists (de Certeau, Lefebvre) affirm, or does Bourdieu's account of the practical logic of domination foreclose the utopian reserve?