Structure and agency
The concept of routineGiven that institutional life involves the routinisation of social practices towards the fulfilment of predefined goals, that is, processes of rationalisation, it is difficult to understand why sociologists have traditionally elided routine with the idea of agency in the common use of a structure- agency dichotomy (see Archer and Lockwood in Parker, 2000) as examples of this). Alternatively, Garfinkel has stressed the importance of routine as the means to construction of social order that is continuous with the nature of social order.
Giddens (1984, xxiii ff) takes up the idea present in both Garfinkel and Goffman of the operation of invisible rules (see Craib, 1992, pp113-4) as something virtual but existing through repeated performance (recursiveness) as a way of developing his alternative to structure –agency dichotomies. Giddens’ (loc.cit.) ‘duality of structure’ emphasises that there is only one social substance which is social practice. This has aspects of both agency and structure. The socially basic idea of routine can be used to exemplify this point. Routines are instantiated and performed by agents, but can also be seen as structuring agents’ activities. Hence routine has
the characteristics of both agency and structure. Further, if we are to read routine as the basic unifying element of agency and structure then the latter can consequently be seen as having characteristics of the former. It follows that agency- and- structure dualism may be an unsuitable formulation of the ontological basis of social life, that is, obfuscating the way these two aspects overlap and prove to be ontologically continuous.
Giddens’ critics (Lockwood, Archer et al.) argue, perhaps justifiably that Giddens ignores the emergent properties of agency in terms of the generation of institutional life which render structure more substantial than Giddens’ account of practices as routines. However, the step they actually take here, dualism, is one that renders the link between agency and structure unintelligible. Structure becomes a transcendental reality, both practically and cognitively beyond reach of agents. Structure as the status quo is here to stay because we can’t conceive of bridging mechanism. Maybe this is a reflection of the paralysing grip of Weberian
neo-Kantianism on traditional sociological theorising with it separation of subject and object, means and ends such that social structure appears as 'out-there', external to human agents, the iron cage of capitalist bureaucracy, which has lately been seen in Fukuyama’s ( ) ’end of history’ thesis that no qualitative change in social structure will now occur in the West as neo-liberalism marks the final stage in human history.
As Swingewood ( 2000, p.207) has noted, the key problem facing dualists is their failure to theorise collective action , the praxis dimension of social being. Under dualism agents remain conscious reflexive individuals ( as they do, paradoxically in Giddens’ dual aspect approach) . What’s missing from dualism is any sense of social practice as a culturally self-constituting affair. By contrast, for Merleau-Ponty agents act within an environment that they carry with them, into which they are thrown regardless of their consciousness of it. Individuals may be agents on this account but they are also bearers of a situated generic cultural practice which mediates their conscious deliberations to them.
Hence routine is not the insubstantial, interpersonal micro contextual process suggested by Lockwood, Archer et al.. Giddens (1984) noted that processes stretched out over space and time and that face to face interactions are integrated with more systemic features and formal institutional frameworks in this way. At the same time because of lack of situatedness however, Giddens fails to show how the ontological overlap materialises because of the way he characterises the reflexivity of agents as self-monitoring (see below). Thus he fails to capture them as historically embodied beings with a biographical trajectory which escapes them. This manifests itself in his (op.cit.) discussion of structure as rules and resources where the knowledgeability of agents enables them to employ structure in an empowering way so that we don’t get a picture of structure as something which also constrains in the sense of obstructs, shapes, obfuscates. Giddens (1984, p.180) does discuss reification as the misperception of social processes but then does not proceed to employ the concept in his account of agency- it is as if only social theorists might perceive social relations as things!
The following of socially embodied rule structures in Giddens’ account of routine is conflated with conscious agency and in this respect Giddens’position is no different from that of the dualists. However, for Garfinkel, and Merleau-Ponty it is clear that unwritten taken for granted rules are more than virtual realities in the sense of a disembodied conception of linguistic structures; neither are they something to be reflexively gained through individual knowledgeability. These rules are performative and it is in an essential reflexivity of knowing -as-doing, that is, as socially constituted practices that agency is situated as an intersubjectivity. This is a shared culture which is ontologically distinct from conscious, reflexive agency. Hence we can say of intersubjectivity as taken for granted rule structures, that it is collective and potentially realisable although the way any particular agent performs is governed by the potentialities of the situated, individual circumstances within which they perform. This then satisfies the dualists ontological requirement of structure in that intersubjectivity has emergent properties in relation to individual conscious agency. That is, the properties of intersubjectivity are non-derivable from a consideration of abstract individual subjects.
In other ways this is unlikely to satisfy the demands of dualists because neither is intersubjectivity separate from individual agency: the conscious actions made by individuals are always intersubjectively mediated by aspects of the culture within which they live and which they perform in making conscious decisions. For example, the use of language and its functions of equivelancing, difference, metaphor, grammar and so on.
The dualist insistence on separation, ontologically speaking, has the effect of rendering the link between structure and agency unintelligible theoretically and in this respect dualism fares no better than Giddens tendency towards homogenising intersubjective rule following with individual subjectivity :some element of continuity as well as difference is required if the link is not to be arbitrary. As noted already, Giddens’ strategy is to see agency and structure as features of social practice.
The Figure- Ground GestaltThis can be understood more clearly perhaps if, as with Merleau-Ponty we think of one aspect as grounding the other: if we foreground agency then structure is the implicit framework for doing so, and vice versa for structure, both are conditions of thinking the other. This Gestalt formulation can be illustrated if we think of routines as action governed by a framework of social practices, or alternatively, of practices as providing an empowering context for action (which in Giddens demonstrates the collapse of structure into agency!).
If we are to situate the dualist challenge to Giddens’structuration then it seems to mirror the concern with individuals performing according to goals determined by system requirements -a kind of neo-Weberian separation of means and ends and possibly the acceptance of an implicit consequence of this which is that the system effects of actions are contingent and untheorisable. Therefore sociological theorising (see Lockwood, cited in Parker, op.cit., pp.9, 23) is of limited scope and necessarily ad hoc in a world which renders agency –structure links as arbitrary and theoretically unintelligible. The confusion of analytical rigour in sociology with rigor mortis might easily be made now, as in the !960’s.
Routine and Everyday LifeWhy is it that routine goes unrecognised as structure when it serves as a building block of formal institutional life? As noted routines are extended over space and time and are ontologically continuous with institutional life. One possibility is that dualism actually demarcates a distinction between the formally sanctioned institutions of state and economy and those activities which are thereby marginalised.within modern capitalism. Those are the activities through which agents produce free spaces –leisure, private life, the public sphere. However, as Schutz (1970), Strauss (1967) and Garfinkel (1967) have noted all formal institutional life is accompanied by unwritten rules and practices through which agents render codes and conventions operable in the here and now of their own situations. The everyday intrudes here as negotiated or accountable practices, or again, with Schutz (op.cit., p.109) the subscript to all objectified rules.
A further twist to this discussion is given by Lefebvre (2002, p26) who whilst recognising the world of leisure- time out from formal relationships, argues that social relations are janus-faced such that even free time does not escape objectification. For Lefebvre, everyday life is seen as patterned by state and commercial influences such that the latter structure everyday life and its needs, desires. Conversely this domination is challenged by a recuperative moment in which we make these things our own.
Opacity in Everyday LifeWhilst Giddens (1984, p.180) discusses the Marxist concept reification as a problem of perception there is no sense that Giddens sees this as a real obstacle to knowledgeability and empowered agency. More generally, the issue of whether opacity of social relations is a problem about agents’ perceptions, knowledgeability or something emergent from social practice itself is decided in favour of theoretical knowledgeability. Merleau-Ponty (SNS, pp. 128, 132) by contrast stresses the ‘objectivity’ of opacity. Whilst for him all institutional practices are grounded in the lifeworld of situated unwritten (sedimented) rules this gives their outcomes a certain contingency with respect to codified or formalised predictive models; social practice is governed by a ’wild logos’ which means that a good deal of interpretive work has to be done if we are to grasp just how theory and practice interconnect. The links cannot be read off from the literal or codified reading of responses in the street or elsewhere.
To return to the opacity itself: it is clear that Merleau-Ponty sees this as a property of intersubjective relations, an objective characteristic of social life, which is exemplified by Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism (ibid., p.128). However, for a more elaborated critique of opacity in terms of the everyday of capitalism we must turn to Lefebvre. His work on the everyday casts some light on the chiasmic relationship between theory, hypothesis and social practice in modern capitalism. In this he points out that everyday life and formal institutional life operate not as ontologically distinct, separate social entities but rather as part of one contradictory logic- the everyday as the face of capitalist modernity and capitalist modernity as the face of the everyday.
Everyday life and modernity, the one crowning and concealing the other, revealing and veiling it…The quotidian is what is humble and solid, what is taken for granted and that of which all the
parts follow each other in such a regular, unvarying succession that those concerned have no call to question their sequence; …though it occupies and preoccupies it is practically untellable…(Lefebvre, 2002, p.24)
By contrast the modern is the ‘novel, brilliant’, technical, ‘daring and transitory’, which ‘proclaims its initiative and is acclaimed for it’
The quotidian and the modern mark and mask, legitimate and counterbalance each other (ibid., p. 25)
In the one capitalism commodifies our relationships, in the other we utilise, cannibalise the storehouse of the object world of commodities, and thirdly, the two moments exist in tension, continually being read in each other’s terms, commingled and confused. It is perhaps possible from this perspective to fill out the sociological details of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘wild logos’. It is also possible to grasp something of the unique character of objectification in contemporary societies: that is, the peculiarly abstract, bureaucratic nature of social relations where creative activity is alienated systematically from human agency. As rationalisation, the state regards it citizens as without qualities- the citizen as abstract individual. Hence the categories of contract, state and commodity production literally take on a life of their own , as Marx suggested. The objectified face of the everyday and of course, the way capitalism crowns that moment of social reality is the peculiar reality of the abstraction. This will be treated in greater detail elsewhere but suffice it to say that a grasp of this side of the everyday reveals something of the strangeness of even our informal taken for granted routine structures- patterns of housing, consumption, personal savings accounts, possessions and so on which seem to have the autonomy of an ideal lifeworld, only to be regulated by the abstract forces of the market and law.
The gist of Lefebvre’s Marxist argument is that revolutionary practice is contingent on this fluid relationship, a relationship through which capitalist-bureaucratic relations are reproduced via everyday practices and also undermined, appropriated in everyday life. The key point is that at no juncture are modern capitalist relations separate existents from everyday practice. On the contrary, there is a contradictory symbiosis between the two; a symbiosis which may advantage one or the other, depending on the specificities of historical situation. Hence no necessary Giddensian transparency or knowledgeability exists stemming from the competence of actors in everyday life which would lead to to empowerment of agents. Rather, in appropriating the products of administered capitalism for their use in our own concrete circumstances, our personalisations and customisations, there is the sense that we may in turn be empowering capitalism both via the lingering aura of mystique which suggests that products are part of complex systems which defy our comprehension (for example, computer programmes, audio-visual technologies) and more concretely, via the way capitalism tends to reappropriate usages as a part of its own reproduction as fashion and music clearly show.
Routine and reflexivityGiddens (2001, pp.60-64) following Garfinkel (1967), emphasises the role of routine as basic to social practices in the construction of social order. However, Giddens also addresses the role of adaptive practice in what he sees as a rapidly evolving stage of modernity. Hence he sees the need for reflexive behaviour as a means of adjusting to changing circumstances. Reflexivity is therefore modelled on something similar to a study skills programme where students asked themselves at different stages in their work :’what have I achieved, where do I need to go now and how do I get there’. In this sense we can see Giddens’ idea of social structure as rules and resources coming into play- we are (rather problematically,as discussed above) constrained and empowered by these, but in a manner which seems to be already decided by systems requirements, for example, unintended consequences are always regulated and channelled in ways which enhance social reproduction. Reflexivity then seems to involve following procedures which maximise agents’ (and systems) outcomes, a kind of utilitarianism. Giddens (op. cit., xxvi) explicitly rejects the traditional split in mainstream sociology between the’micro’ and the ‘macro’. His desire to tie individuals actions into system reproduction is part of the structuration argument that individuals and structure are indivisible, just different aspects of social practice where the reproduction of routines is necessary for the-going character of social life. No distinction is made between reproduction of contextualised or situated events and system reproduction, that is,whilst the first is clearly necessary, its wider scale ramifications surely cannot guarantee social reproduction as whole. In other words, Giddens has run together his ontological claims about agency and structure which can be seen as linked through the idea of routine, with the more empirical, contingent realities of the impact of specific social practices on the future of specific societal arrangements.
The problem with his account is that it doesn’t explain what is involved in following rules and procedures. In a way That is tosay his approach seems to rely too much on routine to do the work of reflexivity because it ignores the crucial question of how routines themselves are arrived at.
Whilst Giddens (op.cit., xxiii) is aware of the recursivity –the repetitiveness and self-reproducing nature- of social practices, He doesn’t see as Garfinkel does that this involves something beyond routine itself. Agents have to be inducted into, to discover the nature of routines and this entails working with others. Moving from one set of routines to another demands an ‘essential reflexivity’ where the agent knows what to do because there is documentary evidence connecting their past practice with the intended route. However, the clue or trace this offers to where to go next can only be followed by engaging in what the agent believes to be appropriate behaviour. Hence reflexivity is not internal to the individual’s consciousness but depends on the outcome of shared practices. The success of agents’ plans depends on whether they are skilled enough as group members (cf. Goffman, 1982, pp. 83-5) to pick out what is going on in the social context addressed. This in other words depends on the way the context resonates with the individual in their incarnation as group member- and conversely how the rule-governed behaviour of the group interrupts and transgresses the agent’s own intentions.
Garfinkel refers to the way that the taken for granted, invisible routine activities of individuals precede all consciousness of them indeed that the invisible nature of them is a prerequisite for the success of an action, a point echoed by Lefebvre (2003, p51).
Communication is possible only to the extent that the speaking ‘subject,’ the everyday speaker, remains blind with regard to that which determines and structures his discourse: the language system with its sardigms and syntactic structures…the system conceals itself from our awareness, yet clarifies it more or less…
This layer of social existence,
prejuge du monde (following Merleau –Ponty) prompts the agent. Hence Garfinkel’s experiments in ’breaching’, which investigate what happens when these underlying practices are ignored or transgressed in some way. The revelation that this causes disorientation, anxiety etc. is hardly a revelation to common sense understanding. Merleau-Ponty refers to our search for the logic of the everyday, ‘the document’, as proceeding via such disorientation or ‘intentional transgression’ (Signs, pp.94-5). He stresses that grasping the meaning of new situations is open-ended and requires a break with an existing line of thought, project –allowing them to open onto the other, the unfamiliar. Speech, for example, is always conditioned by its dialogical nature, the other is automatically incorporated and in this way the sense carried by speech itself breaks with our preconception of the other etc.
It happens that my gaze stumbles against certain sights…and is thwarted by them. I am invested by them just when I thought I was investing them. …the scene invites me to become its adequate viewer, as if a different mind than my own came to dwell in my body, or rather as if my mind were drawn out there and emigrated to the scene it was in the process of setting for itself. I am snapped up by a second self outside me ; I perceive another
Now speech is evidently an eminent case of these…[“conduites”] which reverses my ordinary relationships to objects and give certain ones the value of subjects (ibid., p94)
Giddens (op.cit., pp.60-64) recognises these consequences of the breakdown of routine in his Bettelheim concentration camp study but he does not make the connection with the agent’s social, generic existence as underlying their individual existence and consciousness. The failure of agents to project goals successfully in this context is seen as matter of individual failure rather than prompted by the structure of events around them. In fact Giddens (op.cit., p.49) resorts to the idea of memory as an explanation of successful rule –following. Here reflexivity seems to be no more than recollection of one’s circumstances, a process of self-monitoring and ‘moving on’ i.e. adjustment to changed conditions. Whilst this has been criticised for its functionalist implications there are other issues which seem to present the Giddensian view with a paradox. Reflexivity is commonly identified as a learning process indeed Giddens’account suggests something along these lines. However, if we are to draw on conscious individual subjectivity to do this then there is no learning process as we are thereby merely rehearsing and implementing what we already know, what already exists in our consciousness -which clearly as an argument makes no sense. Otherwise, in practical consciousness we are drawing on memory of unwritten rules, but again as a learning process that makes no sense either as unwritten rules are not the sort of thing that could be recollected in isolation from social practices so that if they are remembered that means they must be consciously held, but in that case the first criticism applies. Hence it would seem that reflexivity regarding routines cannot be sourced to individual consciousness (or practical consciousness), rather, arguably reflexivity has to do with the process of shaping, structuring consciousness. See Claxton (2003) for a similar criticism of readings of Schon’s (1987) idea of the reflective practitioner which equate reflexivity with ‘deliberative consciousness’
What is missing from this (Giddens’) account is the discovery of the contingent, genuinely novel aspect of learning and creating/responding, the thing that suddenly occurs to us, dawns upon us, takes us by surprise. Arguably it is the lifeworld with its unpredictability, wild logos that provides this factor. As Heidegger ( Osborne, 1995, pp.194-5) noted in an otherwise dismissive comment, everyday life provides diversion, a reaction to the dull routine side of the everyday.
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the chiasmic relationship between the ordered, logocentric thinking of the subject and the wild logos in the processes of the world, suggests that is the contingent, practical application of our ideas, in reflexivity which is simply not then the reproduction of the one in the other. The law -like, classificatory nature of the concept is not parallel, homologous to the world but rather overlaps or interweaves, to use Merleau-Ponty’ metaphor. As Garfinkel (op.cit., pp.3-4) has also noted an action has an ‘essential reflexivity’ as its performance demonstrates what an idea actually means, that is when the idea is incarnated, becomes real through the action: the action is an account, a reflexion on the idea which demonstrates to fellow agents what it means in reality, in context which is different from its conventional meaning.
Hence the meaning of the action or account is not that indicated by the ideal, abstract codification of action/accounts but rather the meaning is given by the way codification conventional classification intersects with actual circumstancs, specificities of the meaning context in which they occur. It is concrete performance that identifies agents’ accounts, that is, picks them out through the situatedness of the performance. Hence the way in turn that accounts reflect or pick out action has a level of contingency about it which suggests its meaning can’t be read off in advance by reference to ideal type models of action. Rather subjects approach referencing of action etc., Garfinkel argues, via a hermeneutics of the context. This ’documentary method’ bears a resemblance to Merleau-Ponty’s ‘intentional transgression’ (see above) where the world enters into one’s actions and takes the project in a direction previously unthought of. The lived experience of the subject connects with and is directed by some piece of information, utterance as Merleau-Ponty says: the mind emigrates to the scene it is setting and a reversal takes place; the object becomes itself the subject, the directing centre of events.
An interesting self-conscious use of this as a technique for conferring objectivity of events occurs in a washroom scene from the film Aviators. Here someone asks the millionaire aviation enthusiast Howard Hughes- who is increasingly neurotic about cleanliness- to pass them a towel. The director, Scorsese, gets inside Hughes, so to speak , sees his reaction objectively by angling the shot from the point of view of the towel, rather than concentrating on an identification with Hughes’ perception of the towel. Hughes’ perspective is displaced by the viewer’s such that Hughes is reacting to the ‘viewer’ position. In this way thobject becomes Merleau-Ponty’s subject. We are experiencing the response Hughes makes and it is the absence of Hughes’ perspective that lends the shot its authenticity. We are experiencing the Hughes character’s reaction rather than observing the experience entailed in the response. As Merleau –Ponty says elsewhere objectivity is given by remembering the constituting moment of experience as we confront its product ‘This subject which experiences itself as constituted just at the moment it functions as constituting…’, ‘I am invested by [‘ certain sights’] just when I thought I was investing them…Everything happens as if the functions of intentionality and the intentional object were paradoxically interchanged’ (Signs, p.94). What is reacted to is seen an aspect of the reaction. We see Hughes’ experience in the making. This reflexivity enables us to avoid an objectification of the character and situation by interpreting the experience cinematically via empathetic practical participation in it.
This approach proceeds by looking at the impact, the imprinted ground which actions leave or depend on. This is in effect the grounds, the documentary evidence from which intepretation must originate. The difference or variation offered by such traces from conventional codification of action allows a trail to emerge from which get a sense of whether we are ‘hot’ or ‘cold’. The imprint of practice on the world leads us to a sense of difference with codified accounts of its meaning. The detective story is paradigmatic here: there is usually a clear suspect at the outset, then the obvious perpetrator’s situation is equivalenced /compared with the clues and variation in accounts then suggests a sense of direction, proceeding on the basis of elimination of possibilities. In other words we start from the ways the chief suspect doesn’t match up to the evidence, so the perpetrator emerges from the shadows left by their actions…we can only see who is not the perpetrator via the clues left behind. We get a sense of the situation from what is not said, or the ways in which it could have been said but wasn’t. A grasp of situation is conveyed by thinking the alternative formulations that did not make it into concrete speech. Why did a certain construction work and to what extent was this ‘the only possible one if the signification was to come into the world’ (Signs, p.46). The ‘background of silence which does not cease to surround it and without which it would say nothing’ (loc.cit) is key here. The Sherlock Holmes episode of the dog in the night about which the remarkable thing was that it did not bark is a well-known illustration of this moment in reflexion. We are building up an outline which is gradually filled in. Merleau-Ponty argues that the production of knowledge works in this manner: there is always a constituted object or figure but we need to see how it was arrived at and the variations produced between the conventional fall-guy and situational experience, practice. The variations fill in the picture as the negative or difference from the codified image. The emerging picture is transgressive with respect to the received image and points to the idea that reflection transcends the circle of the subject’s consciousness. The figure that emerges from our signifying practices as we attempt to represent our ideas on paper etc. is a figure which emerges from a ground, a semantic network or field. It is not something that we know immediately, but rather an entity that we come to recognise in a contingent and situational way. If we think of Gestalt figures then we know that some people see wine glasses and others two faces; some people ducks and others rabbits; from one perspective the back of a cube seems like its front, and so on..
The final figure must always be mediated by the conditions of its production and for this reason we cannot think of reflexivity, the production of knowledge as being something that is produced entirely from within the subject’s knowledge itself in the manner of the Giddensian perspective of self-monitoring and social reproduction.
Structure
What has come out of the discussion so far to suggest that phenomenology contains an idea of structure? The key element here is Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the product/producing or constituted/constituting tension in social praxis. This moment is seen to underlie the objectivity of reflection, the exteriority of the subject is encompassed in its production as social being, that which, as Kosik (1976) notes, Marx characterises as the subject of capital etc. (See Kosik, Dialectics, p.52), a subject against the agent’s subjectivity, intentionality, so to speak. In other words, the structuring element is to be found not in an environment of naturalistic objects and structures but in the objectifying tendency of social practice itself: it appears both as naturalistic and at the same time as a production, the problem lies in the separation of production (with its ambiguities of object, agent, process) from the agent –achieved by taking the agent in a purely subjective sense, rather than also as a functionary of the process.
The tendency of theorists to working terms of isolated objects of analysis, abstractions, idealisations follows on from the nature of social praxis. The problem is not the idealisation etc. but the forgetting that it is not an isolated event, fact, but one moment in the life of social practice, the constituted seen separately from its constitution. The medium of praxis is absent from the overly abstract theorist -as commentators have characterised Giddens. Giddens identifies self-constitution with social reproduction and thereby misses out the intervening role of constituting activity as something which shapes and situates the agent. Reflexivity was important as Garfinkel and Merleau- Ponty in their different ways suggested because it breached the circle of the subject’s way of thinking, logos- rendered their thought processes non-circular. Reflection could be a process of transgression in which thought and experience are presented to us in the open horizon of their constitution.
In the sense of self-constitution discussed here structure is practice. This was rehearsed above in the account of Giddens’ foregrounding of routine and how routines as practices presented a Gestalt figure where they could be seen as agential initiation of projects or alternatively, characterised as framing action via providing rules and resources for agents. The notion of structure seemed to break down here not because Giddens’ notion of the instantiation of structure was likened to the existence of language through speech or recursive use of language which, following Garfinkel, accompanies all action. Rather, it collapses because there is nothing generic about agency, it has no social quality which transgresses agents intentions. It is certainly the case that in Giddens that agents’actions do have unintended consequences but they do not seem able to learn from these. Instead of a reflexive/transgressive experience, agents make the best of unintended outcomes, a kind of methodological individualism where agent’s can only appeal to their own experience, that is their individual situation to (as Giddens’ utilitarianism would have it) maximise benefits. The other pole of this radical agent is radical social social reproduction. Agents’ seemingly chaotic or dysfunctional activities are regularised as social reproduction but social reproduction is not itself shaped by agential intervention; there is no collective sense of agency – as- social practice through which the idea of reproduction can be filled out, concretised.
As Urry (cited in support by Craib, 1992, p.121) Giddens’ world is underpopulated by concrete institutions which might demonstrate the efficacy (or otherwise) of his theory of structuration. The tensions that exist in state, economy, family, leisure and education media and representation might prove problematic to straightforward reproduction and also indicate the importance of middle range factors often featured as doing and making in social accounts, society’s self-reflection (news, debates, novels)
Pierre BourdieuThe work of Bourdieu provides a more richly detailed account of the idea of structure, an account which contains a more concrete institutional elaboration. As with Giddens, the emphasis in Bourdieu is on social reproduction and as with Giddens and Merleau-Ponty there is a routine structure to behaviour. In this case the concept of the habitus enables us to understand people’s skilled and spontaneous handling of everyday situations. Whilst Giddens appeals to tacit knowledge and the individual’s memory to explain these skills, Bourdieu (1984) uses the more traditional idea of internalisation to explain how we obtain the skills or dispositions of the habitus.
The habitus enables agents to reproduce, maximise or hybridise social positions across different social fields. Education is seen as particularly important in producing the skills needed to diversify across different social fields (Outline, p.87).
The notion of practice , again as with Giddens and Merleau-Ponty seems to be central and structure is emergent from practice. In contrast to Giddens, structure is not a malleable container of rules and resources, but rather seems to take on a life of its own- objectified fields have their own logics which the habitus has to negotiate via its skills, dispositions.
Social reproduction of structure via the habitus takes on board the self-constitution of the subject which occurs via the logic of practice available in a given field of activity. This notion of self-constitution differs significantly from that found in the discussion of Merleau-Ponty, but interestingly enough, seems to chime with the links Giddens makes between agential reproduction and structure, that is it tends to elicit a sense of circularity. This comes over succinctly from Distinction where Bourdieu discusses the reproduction of social position through appropriation of cultural capital. The habitus works by decoding the taken-for-granted in everyday structures in any field, it represents a cultural competence in that sphere of practice.
A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded…taste classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective positions is expressed or betrayed. (Bourdieu, 1992, p.6).
The subject is thus inevitably caught up in the distinctions or cultural classifications they make. Hence the routine structure of everyday life is internalised but paradoxically also appears as external to the agent. Unlike Merleau-Ponty’s version of self-constitution, the structure is a not a carrier of the agent in the sense of expressing their culturally generic existence or background, but rather product, an objectified, external result. This view is confirmd in the methodologically explicit Outline where Bourdieu describes the habitus as
The product of the work of inculcation and appropriation necessary in order for those product of collective history, the objective structures (e.g. of language, economy, etc.) to succeed in reproducing themselves more or less completely, in the form of durable dispositions, in the organisms …lastingly subjected to the same conditionings…sociology treats as identical all the biological individuals who, being the products of the same objective conditions, are the supports of the same habitus (op.cit., p.85)
What’s missing here is any sense of process, that is, the fact that subjects experience appropriation not just as a result, the constituted, but live the process of its making. They are confronted with constitution as activity not just external end. Hence Marx, for example, comments that the specificity of being human qua social being is that we see ourselves as the object of the process (Merleau-Ponty, 1978, pp.128-9). For Bourdieu reproduction confronts us as an externality, not a part our own being. By contrast, for Marx, the nature of constitution is that we experience our own self-making , as part of the process of capitalist reproduction. The individual is first of all the alienated subject of capitalism and later the fetishised carrier of social reproduction (Merleau-Ponty, 1978, p.128, Karel Kosik, 1976, p.52).
Furthermore, the habitus itself is presented purely as the constituted, that is, as separated from its constituting moment and so also from its opening to the world in which as ‘document’ it becomes intentionally transgressive. In other words, as with Garfinkel’s performative accounts, a topic is picked out which cannot be foretold from the conventional or constituted meanings which surround actions, routines.
It follows from this that Bourdieu’s attempt to give the habitus an objective status is doomed to failure as it separates dispositions from the ‘wild logos’ of the everyday in which its actuality is expressed. The context in which dispositions are activated is according Garfinkel’s view of performative accounts both contingent and inseparable from the habitus seen as reflexive skill. The habitus, following Garfinkel’s methodology cannot have any concrete meaning outside the context of its use. By suggesting that it does, Bourdieu loses any sense of the habitus as part of a specific, individual’s agency and hence interiority –for instance, for Merleau-Ponty, ‘the one who acts’ .
The logic of practice seems to remove self-constitution from the experiential in the subject, and, as Swingewood (2000, p.217) observes, subjects in Bourdieu seem to have no interiority, -there is no account of identity -subjects are idealisations, statistical averages of the group, which is itself a statistical aggregate. The personal
is never more than a deviation in relation to style of a period or class’ and again ‘each individual system of dispositions may be seen as structural variations of all the other group or class habituses, expressing the difference between trajectories inside or outside the class (op.cit., p.86).
This is effectively an homogenisation of members of a group and therefore does not allow for the diversity of experience of the members of, for example, a social class. It is difficult to see how contradiction within social constituencies could be theorised from this statistical base, or the open ended or contingent nature of meanings, the coincidence of situation which can have a qualitative effect on outcomes. Contra this approach, as noted earlier both Merleau-Ponty and Lefebvre argue that the routine everyday world is trangressive in the face of the logocentric approach of positivistic science, in short it is not amenable to statistical regularities, except as a point of departure, a document for interpretation.
The habitus is seen as a structural feature of cultural reproduction, but the success of constitution must surely rely on its ability to combine a sense of interiority with the objectivity of that cultural experience as its structuring moment. Dispositions must always be conditioned by the circumstances and horizons of their production if they are to be more than formal constructs. Here Giddens seems to be superior in providing through routine a sense of the moment of self-constitution as it is experienced, for example as ontological insecurity, but this is not theorised in his main discussion of structuration.
The comparative richness of Bourdieu, on the other hand, lies perhaps more in the direction of the structural content of reproduction, for example the discussion of the role of cultural intermediaries in constructing what is in effect hegemonic formations via the appropriation of cultural codes of subaltern groups in the process of new elaborations of hegemonic (commodified) culture e.g. the appropriation of punk as new wave, street art as high culture and the whole field of what Jameson has styled the retro;. the rehabilitation of critical aspects of popular culture (which feature the rejection of bourgeois values) via trends within cultural studies and most significantly, its commodification as ‘nostalgia’.
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