This is the second of my blogs on Bourdieu and aims to try and make sense of the concept of habitus. There has been an incredible amount written about habitus, and the general view is that it can pretty much mean whatever you want it to mean in any specific context. That is probably unfair, but the range of meanings and uses offered in the literature does tend to suggest that it is not too far from the truth.
My own thinking has been reignited by reading In Other Words, a series of previously published interviews and essays brought together in 1987. This is not one of Bourdieu’s better-known texts. However, it does set out a clearer sense of what Bourdieu is trying to get at in relation to habitus than most of the other writing that I have looked at, probably because the interviewers are consistently asking him for clarity, or asking him to compare the concept with other, better known, ideas.
What this led me to reflect on, however, is the relationship between Bourdieu’s use of habitus and field in relation to Foucault’s ideas of discourse and discipline. I am not a hundred per cent sure of the dialogue between Foucault and Bourdieu, it is not explicit in many of the texts, and I assume there was some level of suspicion between them. However, the ideas, while working in different registers, look to be very similar, at least in practice, and that similarity works for my own purposes (which is the main point!).
I have probably simplified Foucault, but my understanding, from The Archaeology of Knowledge, is that discourse is the body of language within a specific discipline, not just words but more explicitly ways of talking, and therefore ways of thinking. The most important factor is that the discourse limits the kind of language, or thought, that is possible within that discipline. Foucault uses medicine as his example. There are ways of talking (jargon, concept, assumptions, structures) that are distinctive to modern scientific medicine and, more importantly, things that cannot be said. I always use the example of a doctor who, on being told that you have a headache, asks you to sacrifice a chicken and sprinkle the blood to the four corners of the room. This is not within the modern scientific discourse of medicine. Things do change over time, however, as the boundaries of the discourse are always being tested and pushed, and so the nature of the discourse is always historically contingent, but it still has its limits and its own rules, or, we might say, its specific grammar.
Foucault does recognise that other factors, beyond the use of words and sentences can be part of the discourse. Images, setting, clothes, attitudes etc. etc. can all form part of the discourse of modern scientific medicine and work in the same way as language, with limits set and then pushed against etc. However, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus appears, in some ways, to fill this space in a different way. He is talking about behaviours, and more specifically about the embodiment of behaviours in a way that is spontaneous, essentially unthought within the specific context. He talks about habitus in relation to field, however, in much the same way as Foucault talks about discourse in relation to discipline. Within a particular field a specific habitus – a way of behaving, or using the body, a mode of being – is expected and normalised. Again, there is some expectation of challenging boundaries, and Bourdieu’s concept of strategies does recognise that individuals have a choice, they are choosing to play the game, to maintain the habitus of a specific field or to switch fields, or whatever.
One of the reasons this is important to me is that I have always unconsciously thought of habitus as ingrained and associated with ‘culture’ and therefore related to society. The great thing about Foucault’s discourses is that we can all work within a range of discourses dependent on the discipline we are engaged with, and there is reference here to Gerd Baumann’s dominant and demotic discourses and his concept of dual (or multi-) discursive competence. Relating habitus to discourse, and field to discipline, also allows for multiple contexts, and the need, or ability, to switch between habituses (is that the plural?) as we move between, or across, fields. This is important as I work from an assumption that all societies, even the simplest, are made up of multiple discourses, layers, fields or whatever you might want to call them. If we are constantly called to move between fields, to shift our habitus, as also our discourse, then this makes sense of the world I am trying to describe.
Finally, a footnote. At a recent event I was talking to somebody who mentioned the way different societies construct portraits, particularly comparing the Western perspective focusing on the individual and native Australian perspectives focusing on the community. We do see things differently, or perhaps more accurately, our assumptions and preconceptions mean that we do express our ‘seeing’ in different ways. What this suggests to me, therefore, if discourse is to discipline (in terms of language) as habitus is to field (in terms of bodily behaviours), is that there must also be an equivalent in terms of visualisation, what is acceptable in a specific visual field/discourse? And if that is the case, then could we also say the same for other modes of behaviour/being? Where might this end? It may, however, only be necessary to go back to Foucault, for whom, in my presentation, ‘discourse’ covers the visual, images, behaviours, settings etc. etc. There is far more to think through here.
Martin Stringer Quartet 