The Logic of Practice

Author: Pierre Bourdieu
Year: 1990 (English trans. by Richard Nice; the partial selection covers the opening of Ch. 3 "Structures, Habitus, Practices" and most of Ch. 4 "Belief and the Body")
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/bourdieu-1990-logic-of-practice.md

Summary

The Logic of Practice restates and systematizes Bourdieu's theory of practice. The "Structures, Habitus, Practices" opening critiques objectivism, which constitutes the social world as a spectacle viewed from a sovereign, "high" point of view and reduces practice to the acting-out of plans, scores, or roles. Against both objectivism (hypostatized structure) and subjectivism (free choice), Bourdieu insists the principle of construction of social reality is the habitus — a system of structured, structuring dispositions constituted in and oriented toward practice, generating "regulated improvisations" adapted to their conditions without conscious calculation, "orchestrated without a conductor." The "Belief and the Body" section extends this into practical faith and doxa: belief is not a state of mind but a state of the body, a quasi-bodily involvement in a field governed by the "feel for the game," illusio, and investment in symbolic capital.

Key Claims

• Habitus as "structured, structuring dispositions": "the principle of this construction is the system of structured, structuring dispositions, the habitus, which is constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical functions."
• Practice is not obedience to rules — "conductorless orchestration": practices are "objectively 'regulated' and 'regular' without being in any way the product of obedience to rules... collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor."
• Practice is opposed to spectacle/representation: the "practical relation to the world" imposes "its urgencies, its things to be done and said... which directly govern words and deeds without ever unfolding as a spectacle."
• "Virtue made of necessity": the habitus "inclines agents to make a virtue of necessity, that is, to refuse what is anyway denied and to will the inevitable."
• Habitus as embodied history, "second nature": "The habitus — embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history — is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product."
• Habitus as "spontaneity without consciousness or will," functioning "as accumulated capital, produces history on the basis of history and so ensures the permanence in change that makes the individual agent a world within the world."
• "Feel for the game," illusio and doxa: the game gives "a subjective sense — a meaning and a raison d'être... for those who take part and therefore acknowledge what is at stake (this illusio in the sense of investment in the game and the outcome, interest in the game, commitment to the presuppositions — doxa — of the game)."
• Practical faith / doxa as a state of the body: "Practical belief is not a 'state of mind'... but rather a state of the body. Doxa is the relationship of immediate adherence that is established in practice between a habitus and the field to which it is attuned."
• Symbolic capital and collective misrecognition: "the countless acts of recognition... in which collective misrecognition is ceaselessly generated, are both the precondition and the product of the functioning of the field... investments in the collective enterprise of creating symbolic capital."
• Hysteresis of habitus: dispositions can be "ill-adjusted to the objective chances because of a hysteresis effect... negatively sanctioned because the environment they actually encounter is too different from the one to which they are objectively adjusted."
• Class habitus as homology — "diversity within homogeneity": "the singular habitus of members of the same class are united in a relationship of homology, that is, of diversity within homogeneity."
• The body enacts rather than represents: "The body believes in what it plays at: it weeps if it mimes grief. It does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past, it enacts it back to life."

Connections

Concepts: Habitus · Symbolic Capital · Everyday Life · Embodiment
Authors: Pierre Bourdieu · Dell Upton · Harold Garfinkel · John Fiske
Debates: Theories of the Everyday
Related source notes: Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977) · Bourdieu for Architects (Webster 2011) · Architecture in Everyday Life (Upton 2002)

Direct Quotes

"It is because agents never know completely what they are doing that what they do has more sense than they know."

"connaître, c'est naître avec" — "to know is to be born with" (Claudel, cited by Bourdieu).

"one cannot enter this magic circle by an instantaneous decision of the will, but only by birth or by a slow process of co-option and initiation which is equivalent to a second birth."

"Adapting a phrase of Proust's, one might say that arms and legs are full of numb imperatives."

Open Questions

• Bourdieu's account of practical faith as a "state of the body" raises the question of how far the habitual, doxic body — central to both the everyday-life and embodiment threads — can also be a site of critical or resistant transformation, or whether it remains bound to social reproduction.