Bourdieu: Ideology, Habitus, and Symbolic Capital

French cultural anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu has provided a fruitful approach to the problem of social subjectivity, one that incorporates the structural determination of the process of interpellation within a dynamic, open-ended framework of social practice. In his Outline of a Theory of Practice (French edition, 1972; English translation, 1977), Bourdieu sublates the antagonism between phenomenological methodologies, which focus on primary experiences, and objectivist methods, which focus on the objective relations that structure primary experience, by means of a dialectical "theory of practical knowledge" focusing on the relations between objective structures and the structured "dispositions" within which those structures are actualized and which tend to reproduce them. Individuals, interpellated as subjects, Bourdieu maintains, are not imprinted with a fixed set of rules and procedures as much as they are endowed with a social sense or "cultivated disposition, inscribed in the body schema and the schemas of thought, which

enables each agent to engender all the practices consistent with the logic of challenge and riposte, and only such practices, by means of countless inventions, which the stereotyped unfolding of ritual would in no way demand" (Bourdieu 1977, 15). The structured social-symbolic field of ideological significations, which Bourdieu refers to as habitus , enables agents to generate an infinity of practices adapting to endlessly changing situations without ever being constituted as a monolithic set of rules, rituals, or principles.

For Bourdieu, the structures constitutive of a particular social formation produce a habitus wherein the agent's interests are defined and with them the objective functions and subjective motivations of their practices. Habitus is a system of "durable, transposable dispositions , structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is as principles of 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" (Bourdieu 1977, 72). Habitus is the condition of existence of all practice, the source of a series of moves objectively organized as strategies, which cannot be reduced to either a mechanical reaction or creative free will.

The habitus . . . produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation, as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus. It follows that these practices cannot be directly deduced either from the objective conditions, defined as the instantaneous sum of the stimuli which may appear to have directly triggered them, or from the conditions which produced the durable principle of their production. These practices can be accounted for only by relating the objective structure defining the social conditions of the production of the habitus which engendered them to the conditions in which this habitus is operating, that is, to the conjuncture which, short of radical transformation, represents a particular state of this structure. In practice, it is the habitus, history turned into nature, i.e., denied as such, which accomplishes practically the relating of these to two systems of relations in and through the production of practice. The "unconscious" is never anything other than the forgetting of history which history itself produces by incorporating the objective structures it produces in the second natures of habitus. (Bourdieu 1977, 78)

Bourdieu's is a materialist theory of social action. The nature of habitus as the ideological unconscious of practice creates a "common-

sense" world endowed with the objectivity secured by a consensus on the meaning of practices and the world that exists among subjects who do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing, but who are aware of the possible sequences and consequences of their actions. Subjects are aware of their social position and its trajectory—all the properties of which they are bearers—and hence of "the social distance between objective positions, that is between social persons conjuncturally brought together (in physical space, which is not the same thing as social space) and correlatively . . . of this distance and of the conduct required in order to 'keep one's distance' or to manipulate it strategically, whether symbolically or actually" (Bourdieu 1977, 82). The habitus has an endless capacity to engender practices whose limits are set by the historically determinate conditions of its production. Thus "the conditioned and conditional freedom it secures is as remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from a simple mechanical reproduction of the initial conditionings" (Bourdieu 1977, 95).

As a system of symbolic identifications with social positions, habitus provides coherence as well as contradiction. Because symbolic objects can enter, without contradiction, into successive relationships set up from different points of view, they are subject to what Bourdieu describes as "overdetermination through indetermination"—"the application to the same objects or practices of different schemes . . . which . . . are all practically equivalent, is the source of the polysemy characterizing the fundamental relationships in the symbolic system, which are always determined in several respects at once" (Bourdieu 1977, 110). Thus from the point of view of practice, Bourdieu insists that there are only approximate or partial logics. This is the case because practices are the product of a small number of generative schemes that are practically interchangeable, that is, capable of producing equivalent results from the point of view of the "logical" demands of practice. Their "quasi-universality" is always bound to practical interests that impose on the generative schemes a necessity that is not that of a logic but of a doxa .

For Bourdieu, every established order produces, to different degrees and with different means, the naturalization of its own arbitrariness. Of all the mechanisms tending to produce this effect, the most important and the best concealed is the dialectic of the objective chances and the agent's aspirations out of which arises the "sense of limits" commonly called the "sense of reality." The sense of reality, always the perception of a subject, is the correspondence between objective classes

and internalized classes, social structure and mental structures, which is the basis of the most ineradicable adherence to the established order.

In the extreme case, that is to say, when there is a quasi-perfect correspondence between the objective order and the subjective principles of organization . . . the natural and the social world appears as self-evident. This experience we shall call doxa , so as to distinguish it from an orthodox or heterodox belief implying the awareness and recognition of the possibility of different or antagonistic beliefs. Schemes of thought and perception can produce the objectivity that they do produce only by producing misrecognition of the limits of cognition that they make possible, thereby founding immediate adherence, in the doxic mode, to the world of tradition experienced as a "natural world" and taken for granted. (Bourdieu 1977, 164)

The principles of the construction of reality, in particular of social reality, are a central dimension of political power. While Bourdieu opposes the notion of an ahistorical and abstract application of a single economic rationality to societies that "think" differently about economic interest, he insists on the economic nature of all symbolic systems. Even those that appear economically irrational to us, he maintains, never cease to conform to economic calculations, even if they give every appearance of disinterestedness by departing from the logic of interested calculation (in the narrow sense) and playing for stakes that are of non-material nature and not easily quantified. The theory of economic practice, in other words, is simply a particular case of a general theory of the economics of practice. "The only way to escape from the ethnocentric naiveties of economism, without falling into populist exaltation of the generous naivete of earlier forms of society, is to carry out in full what economism does only partially, and extend economic calculations to all the goods, material and symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after . . . 'fair words' or smiles, handshakes or shrugs, compliments or attention, challenges or insults, honour or honours, powers or pleasures, gossip or scientific information, distinction or distinctness, etc." (Bourdieu 1977, 177).

Symbolic capital, a transformed and thereby disguised form of physical "economic" capital, produces its proper effect insofar, and only insofar, as it conceals the fact that it originates in "material" forms of capital that are also, in the last instance, the source of its effects. Only a reduced and reductive materialism can fail to see that strategies whose object is to conserve or increase the honor of the group (Bourdieu's example is based on his fieldwork in Algeria), in the forefront of which

stand blood vengeance and marriage, are dictated by interests no less vital than are inheritance or fertility strategies. "The interest leading an agent to defend his symbolic capital is inseparable from the tacit adherence, inculcated in the earliest years of life and reinforced by all subsequent experience, to the axiomatics objectively inscribed in the regularities of the (in the broad sense) economic order which constitutes a determinate type of symbolic capital as worthy of being pursued and preserved" (Bourdieu 1977, 182). Such objectification guarantees that domination need not be exercised in a direct, personal way because domination is entailed in the means (economic or symbolic capital) of appropriating the mechanisms of the field of production and the field of cultural production independently of any deliberate intervention by the agents.

However, just as economic wealth cannot function as capital until it is linked to an economic apparatus, so cultural competence in its various forms cannot be constituted as symbolic capital until it is inserted into the objective relations between the system of economic production and the system producing the producers. Habitus provides the dominant class with what Max Weber calls "a theodicy of its own privilege," a theodicy manifested, according to Bourdieu, in relations of symbolic protection and symbolic violence. The development of objective mechanisms of symbolic protection and violence permit an increasing degree of domination by indirect means. Whereas slavery is constituted by the direct appropriation of persons, client relations are characterized by gentle, hidden violence. Client relations entail "winning over" inferior classes by means of personal bonds of generosity and dignity that demonstrate that the "master" has the virtues corresponding to his status. "The system is such that the dominant agents have a vested interest in virtue; they can accumulate political power only by paying a personal price . . . they must have the 'virtues' of their power because the only basis of their power is 'virtue"' (Bourdieu 1977, 194). The gift, generosity, conspicuous distribution—the extreme case of which is the pot-latch—are operations of "social alchemy," according to Bourdieu, which may be observed whenever the direct application of overt physical or economic violence is negatively sanctioned, a gentle, hidden exploitation brought about by the transmutation of economic capital into symbolic capital.

In contemporary industrial societies, symbolic capital is no longer associated with personal relations between biological individuals but rather with impersonal relations between objective positions within the

social space. The objectification accomplished by academic degrees and diplomas and in a more general way by all forms of credentials is inseparable from the objectification that the law guarantees by defining permanent positions that are distinct from biological individuals. Once this state of affairs is established, relations of power and domination no longer exist directly between individuals; they are a function of pure objectivity. In such societies it is not by lavishing generosity, kindness, or politeness on their social inferiors but rather by choosing the best investment for their money or the best schools for their children that the possessors of economic or symbolic capital perpetuate the relationship of domination that objectively links them with their inferiors or even their descendants. "If it be true that symbolic violence is the gentle, hidden form which violence takes when overt violence is impossible," Bourdieu argues, "it is understandable why symbolic forms of domination, so prevalent in pre-capitalist societies, should have progressively withered away as objective mechanisms came to be constituted which, in rendering superfluous the work of euphemization, tended to produce the 'disenchanted' dispositions their development demanded" (Bourdieu 1977, 196).