Phenomenological Additions to the Bourdieusian Toolbox:
Two Problems for Bourdieu, Two Solutions from Schutz∗
WILL ATKINSON
University of Bristol
In constructing his renowned theory of practice, Pierre Bourdieu claimed to have
integrated the key insights from phenomenology and successfully melded them with
objectivist analysis. The contention here, however, is that while his vision of the social
world may indeed be generally laudable, he did not take enough from phenomenology.
More specifically, there are two concepts in Alfred Schutz’s body of work, which,
if properly defined, disentangled from phenomenology, and appropriated, allow two
frequently forwarded criticisms of Bourdieu’s perspective to be overcome: on the one
hand, a particular interpretation of the concept of lifeworld can remedy identified
weaknesses on the problem of individuation; while on the other hand, Schutz’s notion
of the stock of knowledge can rectify Bourdieu’s overly nonconscious depiction
of agency. Given my overall support for Bourdieu’s scheme and the fact that the
extant criticisms on these two grounds are often excessive and obfuscatory, both
the suggested elaborations will be prefaced by a clarificatory partial defense of his
position.
Throughout his long and illustrious career, the pioneering French social thinker
Pierre Bourdieu made frequent reference to and use of the insights of the luminaries
of the phenomenological tradition on topics central to his formulation of social
being and action—such as the body, habit, protention, and quotidian practice—but
mercilessly chided them for their general ignorance of objective social structures.
Indeed, shortly before he passed away, in response to a biting critique of his intellectual
relationship to phenomenology (Throop and Murphy 2002), Bourdieu (2002)
insisted that he had overcome the shortcomings of phenomenology by integrating
it as one “phase” of his theory of practice, complemented by the objectivist phase,
appropriated from structuralism, of uncovering the social structures underlying and
generating that which the phenomenologists set out merely to describe. The product
of this integration is, of course, one of the most influential perspectives in social
theory today, garnering vast amounts of appreciative discussion, application in empirical
research, and, inevitably, critical commentary. Given the numerous advantages
it bears over alternative models—such as structuration theory, which has been kept
alive since its originator, Anthony Giddens, effectively abandoned it only through incorporation
of many Bourdieusian themes (see Stones 2005)—such attention is well
deserved.
∗Address correspondence to: Will Atkinson, Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, 12 Woodland
Road, Bristol, BS8 1UQ, UK. Tel.: +44 117 928 7507; E-mail: w.atkinson@bristol.ac.uk. A version
of this article was presented at the 2008 British Sociological Association’s Annual Conference in March
2008 at the University of Warwick, and my thanks are to the audience for their comments. Thanks are
also due to the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom for funding the research
out of which this article arises, award number PTA-030–2005-00219, and the three anonymous referees
for Sociological Theory and Gregor McLennan, whose taxing yet constructive criticisms have significantly
sharpened and strengthened the arguments presented here.
Sociological Theory 28:1 March 2010
C 2010 American Sociological Association. 1430 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20005
2 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
The contention here, however, is that Bourdieu’s theory, while by and large laudable,
has not integrated enough from phenomenology. More specifically, appropriation
of two concepts from Schutz’s phenomenological sociology, I want to argue,
can respectively quash two problems that otherwise mar his conception of practice.1
First, an interpretation of Schutz’s conceptualization of the lifeworld can resolve
deficiencies concerning individuation; while second, reconceiving the habitus as more
akin to the stock of knowledge can surmount the overly nonconscious and corporeal
conceptualization of action it otherwise entails. In both cases, though, it will be
necessary to preface the suggested elaborations with a defense of Bourdieu against
extant criticisms on these fronts, for only when these are scrutinized and their superficialities
exposed through further elaboration of Bourdieu’s thought do the real
sources of trouble emerge.
This is, therefore, a sympathetic critique and so I do not take phenomenology to
be a sound body of work on its own or “better” than Bourdieu’s, as Throop and
Murphy (2002) or Endress (2005) evidently do. Rather, I recognize there are links and
convergences between the two systems of thought that can be usefully exploited to
overcome real sources of weakness in Bourdieu’s oeuvre (cf. Crossley 2001). It should
also be noted that though others have suggested parallels, mutual interests, and
points of reciprocal complementation between Bourdieu and phenomenology before
(e.g., Charlesworth 2000; Crossley 2001; Dreyfus and Rabinow 1993; Marcoulatos
2001; Ostrow 1981), in turning primarily to Schutz rather than Merleau-Ponty or
Heidegger, and then only to an interpretation of some of Schutz’s key concepts, I am
breaking with a prevailing trend. This is not because Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger,
or for that matter Husserl, are irrelevant—on the contrary, they have much of interest
to offer—but the ideas taken from Schutz integrate their chief insights (especially in
the case of Husserl, but for an approving discussion of Merleau-Ponty on the body,
for example, see Schutz 1970a). With all this said, let us set the scene with a basic
outline of Bourdieu’s theory of practice.
OUTLINE OF A THEORY OF PRACTICE
If Bourdieu’s perspective comprises an objectivist phase and a subjectivist phase, as
he claims, then the former consists of the quasi-structuralist idea that individuals
are positioned in social space—his substitute for conventional depictions of the class
structure—and in a multitude of fields. The first of these is conceived as a relational
space in which all agents are plotted according to three axes or dimensions (Bourdieu
1984:114): the overall amount of capital that the individual holds—including
economic capital (wealth and property), cultural capital (signifiers of cultural competencies
such as owned artworks or educational qualifications), and finally social
capital (resources based on personal networks and associations with certain names
or titles); the composition of their capital (i.e., whether it is predominantly economic
or cultural); and the individual’s trajectory through social space over time as his or
her volume and composition of capital evolves.
1The arguments presented here form part of a larger project of elaborating Bourdieu’s perspective using
phenomenology, the focus of the latter being more specifically the improvement of his theory in dialogue
with ongoing qualitative research on social class. I would hope, therefore, to dampen down charges of (1)
ignoring related issues—there is space here to put forward only the core suggestions—and (2) producing
a purely scholastic, theoreticist treatise divorced from actual social inquiry—the concepts developed here
have also been developed through and mobilized in research.
PHENOMENOLOGICAL ADDITIONS TO THE BOURDIEUSIAN TOOLBOX 3
The link to the subjectivist phase lies in the French thinker’s contention that those
in neighboring positions within social space share similar “conditions of existence”
and conditionings by virtue of their capital possession, which, in turn, produce
within them similar habitus, that is, a complex of durable dispositions, propensities,
and schemes of perception and appreciation that then guide practice. By “conditions
of existence” Bourdieu generally means the agent’s relative distance from material
necessity and the experiences this generates, with those in the upper regions of social
space, possessing plentiful stocks of capital, being subject to an overall distance
from necessity while those in the lower sections, holding less capital, being rather
closer to its demands and urgencies. Through the practical adaptation to frequently
experienced situations—making a “virtue of necessity,” as Bourdieu often likes to
say—the objective probabilities of “access to goods, services, and powers” inscribed
in these conditions are then transformed into the dispositions, schemes of perception,
and subjective aspirations of the habitus (Bourdieu 1990a:60, 2000a:136).
This adjustment takes the form of a subconscious bodily learning process in which
the limits and regularities of the world are inscribed into the habitus as a practical,
nonconscious evaluation of what goods, practices, and aspirations are accessible and
reasonable (the “feel for the game”). We “learn bodily,” says Bourdieu (2000a:141),
with much of this learning taking place in childhood. Here, “familial manifestations
of necessity”—“forms of the division of labor between the sexes,” “household
objects,” “modes of consumption,” “parent-child relations,” “domestic morality,”
and the like (Bourdieu 1977:78, 1990a:54)—feed into the habitus via “silent censures”
(2000a:167) and implicit and explicit pedagogy, often inculcating their effects
through the experience of corporeal suffering and visceral emotion (2000a:141), as
well as through subconscious forms of mimesis and “sheer familiarization, in which
the learner insensibly and unconsciously acquires the principles of an ‘art’ and an
art of living” (1990a:74). For example, in households rich in cultural capital, the
“bourgeois culture and the bourgeois relation to culture” are acquired
pre-verbally, by early immersion in a world of cultivated people, practices and
objects. When a child grows up in a household in which music is not only listened
to (on hi-fi or radio nowadays) but also performed (the “musical mother”
of bourgeois autobiography), and a fortiori when the child is introduced from
an early age to a “noble” instrument—especially the piano—the effect is at
least to produce a more familiar relationship to music, which differs from the
always somewhat distant, contemplative and verbose relation of those who have
come to music through concerts or even only through records, in much the
same way as the relation to painting of those who have discovered it belatedly,
in the quasi-scholastic atmosphere of the museum, differs from the relation
developed by those born into a world filled with art objects, familiar family
property, amassed by successive generations, testifying to their wealth and good
taste, and sometimes “home-made” (like jam or embroidered linen). (Bourdieu
1984:75)
However, because the habitus is an “open system of dispositions” constantly subject
to new experiences well beyond infancy, Bourdieu adds, it is “endlessly transformed”
through a dialectic with its environment (Bourdieu 1990b:116; Bourdieu and Wacquant
1992:133). On the other hand, agents are statistically bound to encounter
similar, reinforcing situations as a result of their objective social conditions of existence
(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:133), and because so much is instilled in
4 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
childhood and the habitus operates as the individual’s lens through which to receive
new experiences, it proves to be remarkably durable. Thus, for example, the habitus
acquired in the family underlies the reception of the experiences of schooling, that
is, the “reception and assimilation of the pedagogic message,” with the habitus as
transformed by schooling going on to frame all subsequent experiences of culture,
work, and so on (Bourdieu 1977:87). On the basis of this process, Bourdieu often
describes the habitus as the “integration of past experiences” (1977:83) or the “active
presence of the past” in the present (1990a:56). Yet this does not imply a role for
consciousness in the form of memory, for the body
does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past, it enacts
the past, bringing it back to life. What is “learned by body” is not something
that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is.
(Bourdieu 1990a:73)
The habitus is not an apparatus of the conscious, then, but instead functions “below
the level of consciousness and language, beyond the reach of introspective scrutiny
or control by the will” (Bourdieu 1984:466). The “unchosen principle of all choices”
(Bourdieu 1990a:61), it orients action and practices based not on consciousness or
intentional aims but on the dispositions and inclinations built out of a practical,
prereflective, corporeal sense of limits and realistic possibilities, leading agents, as
captured in the phrase “that’s not for the likes of us,” to refuse what they are refused
in reality anyway (Bourdieu 1977:77). Bourdieu is, however, keen to stress that
the habitus is not a mechanistic translation of objective structures into action, but a
generative and creative capacity for thought and action within limits (e.g., Bourdieu
and Wacquant 1992:122). More particularly, he claims, the habitus is predisposed to
generate unconscious “lines of action” or strategies aimed at maximizing agent’s profits,
whether they be economic or, more importantly, symbolic (1990a:16, 2000a:55;
Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:25).
The picture painted so far, however, is complicated by the fact that agents are
positioned not just in social space but also in multiple fields, that is, the various
domains of practice in which they participate—such as art, politics, sport, the
media—organized as relational spaces dependent upon the possession of the forms
of capital valued there. An individual’s position within each field further differentiates
the conditions of life and hence the form of experience sedimenting into the
habitus and generating lines of action, again seen by Bourdieu largely in terms of
strategies to either conserve or subvert the state of the field. So, for example, in
his study of Heidegger, the German existentialist’s habitus—and thus the underlying
principle of his action—is said to be a product of not just his position and trajectory
within social space (a rural Mittelstand background to philosophy professor),
as important as these are, but also of his positions and trajectories within the academic
field and the field of philosophy (Bourdieu 1991:47; cf. Bourdieu 1975, cited
in Lahire 2003:334–35). An individual’s collection of positions in fields and social
space Bourdieu (2000b:302) dubs their “social surface” and ties to an analytical distinction
between “empirical individuals”—concrete human beings in their biological
singularity—and “epistemic individuals”—analytically constructed individuals with
only their pertinent properties for the study of any one field isolated (cf. Bourdieu
1988:21ff, 2000b:303 n8).
PHENOMENOLOGICAL ADDITIONS TO THE BOURDIEUSIAN TOOLBOX 5
TWO PROBLEMS, PHENOMENOLOGICAL SOLUTIONS
Such are the rudiments of Bourdieu’s position, and so far, it seems, so good: the
recognition of practical knowledge and perceptual schemes in the formation of action
effectively reintroduces the creative agent banished by structuralism, while the
anchoring of subjective states in objective structural relations dispels the subjectivist
myth of unfettered meaningful action. However, if we begin to probe a little deeper
in pursuit of sources of critics’ discontent, it soon becomes clear that the Bourdieusian
conceptual machinery is far from faultless. There are, in particular, two issues
that pose a serious challenge to its explanatory capabilities, though these are not the
ubiquitous accusations of objectivism, determinism, or materialism primarily because
such indictments usually fall victim to Bourdieu’s greatest bugbears—misreading,
misinterpretation, and decontextualization—and are also often driven by intentions
to forward more subjectivist, voluntarist, or idealist agendas (this is certainly the
case, for example, with King 2000). To be sure, the two issues to be investigated have
been misconstrued and exaggerated by critics—hence the need to clear the ground
by showing their errors—but they nevertheless draw attention to areas that even
those who sympathize with Bourdieu can recognize are in need of elaboration and
modification. So what are these two problems?
Individuation: Bringing in the Structured Lifeworld
The first font of dissatisfaction Lau describes as a “well-known” problem and has
been discussed by various critics (see, e.g., Cicourel 1993; Reay 2004; Silva 2006), but
Bernard Lahire (2003) has voiced it most forcefully. This is the treatment of what
might be called individuation, that is, the ability to explain the multitude of differentiating
factors among individuals in similar relational locations that make them—their
habitus and hence their practices—idiosyncratic. This might seem a strange concern
for the sociologist, whose theories are often designed for generality and reductionism,
yet Lahire’s point clearly has ramifications for qualitative studies that, equipped
with Bourdieu’s conceptual tools, seek to dissect individual lives and lay bare the
multitudinous social forces refracted through concrete events, persons, and places
that have and continue to fashion them while being able to handle conceptually
the individuality of their circumstances and habitus that may in extreme cases, such
as the capital-poor individual with a love for fine art, engender “dissonance” from
established homologies between structural positions and practices (see Bennett 2007;
Silva 2006). The question is, therefore, can Bourdieu adequately grasp in abstracto
the interplay of individuality and social structure or, as he himself puts it, the comprehension
of “particularity in generality and generality in particularity” (Bourdieu
and Wacquant 1992:75)?
The thrust of Lahire’s criticism is that Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus and its
constitutive dispositions built out of distance from necessity, while offering promise,
capitalize on the supposed homogeneity of habitus between individuals in sectors
of social space and, as a result, are unable to adequately handle the heterogeneity
and subtlety of human lives. Furthermore, the reduction of the individual habitus
to the collection of positions occupied in different fields, argues Lahire, fails to
remedy the situation. The use of fields to study Heidegger, for example, just cannot
grasp the impact on his habitus and dispositions, and thus actions, of a whole
array of social factors such as the different schools he attended, his family, his
friendships, his political contacts, and so on (Lahire 2003:335)—and for the less
6 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
celebrated members of society, one might conjecture, their work, their neighborhood,
particular events, and the like. There is, however, a sense in which Lahire’s account is
premised on a simplistic understanding of Bourdieu on individuation. For one thing,
the focus on membership in different fields allows a greater grasp of the factors
shaping individuals, such as their specific workplace or their particular schooling,
than Lahire makes out. After all, in one of his later studies Bourdieu (2005:69ff)
suggested that firms, at least those with a large workforce, can themselves be fields
generating different positions and thus experiences for their employees, putting flesh
on his earlier assertion that sociologists must account for “occupational effects” on
agents’ habitus, that is, “the effects of the nature of work, of the occupational milieu,
with its cultural and organizational specificities” (Bourdieu 1987:4). Similarly, in the
case of schooling, in the methodological addendum to The Weight of the World—
a study very much concerned with concrete individuals—Bourdieu stresses that to
“grasp the essential of each [person’s] idiosyncrasy and all the singular complexity of
[his or her] actions and reactions” sociologists must uncover the objective structures
past and present expressed in the actual academic establishments through which they
traverse and which are themselves organized with other academic institutions in a
relational field (Bourdieu et al. 1999:618).
Furthermore, the “social surface” is only one aspect of Bourdieu’s approach.
Elsewhere, while rightly stressing the homogeneity of habitus between individuals in
the same region of social space, he also writes that
[t]he singular habitus of members of the same class are united in a relationship
of homology, that is, of diversity within homogeneity reflecting the diversity
within homogeneity characteristic of their social conditions of production. Each
individual system of dispositions is a structural variant of the others, expressing
the singularity of its position within the class and its trajectory. “Personal” style,
the particular stamp marking all the products of the same habitus, whether
practices or works, is never more than a deviation in relation to the style of a
period or class . . .
He continues: “The principle of the differences between individual habitus lies in the
singularity of their social trajectories, to which there correspond series of chronologically
ordered determinations that are irreducible to one another.” No two members
of the same class will have had “the same experiences in the same order,” he argues,
but “it is certain that each member of the same class is more likely than any member
of another class to have been confronted with the situations most frequent for
members of that class,” and so while the habitus brings about a “unique integration”
of experience it remains an integration of “the experiences statistically common to
members of the same class” (Bourdieu 1990a:60).
However, probing into Bourdieu’s perspective on individuation to counter Lahire’s
claims reveals that the former’s thought on this issue is not entirely unproblematic.
On the one hand there is a sense in which the idea of the social surface yields a
fragmented depiction of the agent, with individuals being abstracted from the total
experiential context of their lives as they live them in concrete time and space to
trace the effects of each field without then recombining these multiple field effects
to grasp the whole. Indeed, at its most extreme it leads Bourdieu (2000b:299–300)
to imply that a single person should be conceived and analyzed as multiple social
agents, unified only by a personal name and biological individuality, as if the stream
of experience and action could be neatly compartmentalized. Such a strategy, and the
PHENOMENOLOGICAL ADDITIONS TO THE BOURDIEUSIAN TOOLBOX 7
conjoined distinction between empirical individuals and epistemic individuals, may
be parsimonious in the analysis of any given field, but it proves less palatable when
the focus of analysis is either an individual or a set of individuals whose practice, unlike
that of Heidegger (Bourdieu 1991), Flaubert (Bourdieu 1996), or even Bourdieu
himself (Bourdieu 2008), is difficult to map into fields other than the social space (it
is hard to imagine, for example, a field of workers in a small factory). This raises,
on the other hand, a second, related issue: it remains unclear how some elements of
the individual’s experiential and situational milieu, which clearly imprint upon the
dispositions, expectations, sense of what is “normal,” and schemes of perception of
the habitus (such as his or her particular job, locality, certain events, consociates, and
so on), while remaining generally configured by material and cultural conditions of
existence and fields, are graspable with Bourdieu’s conceptual tools. After all, even
Bourdieu surreptitiously admitted that fields did not exhaust the social but only
captured the effects of those realms of practice where difference and competition are
key—for example, he himself “seriously doubted” whether the “ensemble of cultural
associations” of a given area (“choirs, theatre groups, reading groups, etc.”) could
form a field, leaving open the question of how the social effects of being a member
of these groups is to be understood (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:100). There is,
in short, a residual element of formative experience and thus practice seemingly left
unaccounted for.
Consider the passage from Distinction cited above, in the exposition of conditions
of existence, on the practical familiarization with music or art in early life. This
account, highlighting the structuring of formative experience by possession of cultural
capital and the latter’s reproduction, is highly persuasive, yet the experience and
incorporation into the habitus of the specific worlds of art or music is not fully
accounted for by position in social space (both require the same level of economic
and cultural capital), participation in fields (what field is the young child a member
of?), or trajectory, only its general conditions of possibility. A similar example is
offered, though in a different conceptual vocabulary, by Margaret Archer (2000):
though position in social space may indicate a likely “set of the role array” (or
a “field of possibles” in Bourdieu’s terminology) for a future career—for example,
semiskilled or skilled manual work, or perhaps life in the emergency services where
an occupational culture centered around masculinity, toughness, excitement but also
conservatism, honor, and respectability (on the police, e.g., see Reiner 2000) accord
with the dispositions of a certain section of social space (in this case, the upper
reaches of the lower section of social space)—only a more differentiated account of
residual factors such as “available information, role models, and work experience”
would allow a fuller understanding of precisely “why Johnny becomes a fireman and
Tommy a policeman” (Archer 2000:285).
The task, then, is to mop up this residual element in a way compatible with, while
deepening the explanatory powers of, Bourdieu’s framework. To achieve this, I want
to argue, we can introduce the phenomenological notion of the lifeworld, though,
admittedly, not as commonly interpreted by the majority of phenomenologists. The
founding stone is Schutz’s (1970b:320, emphasis added)—or more precisely Helmut
Wagner’s, the editor of the volume in which it appears in the glossary—specific
declaration that the lifeworld denotes “[t]he total sphere of experiences of an individual
which is circumscribed by the objects, persons, and events encountered in the
pursuit of the pragmatic objectives of living.” On this definition, the lifeworld is
the agent’s practical, everyday world consisting of the domains encountered in his
or her routine “time-space paths” (see Giddens 1984:110–16, 132–39)—their home
8 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
and family, school or work, neighborhood, and so on—and containing a certain
type and particular manifestation of objects (tools, clothes, furnishings), events and
people (friends, family, work colleagues), the last of these conveying certain values,
beliefs, and discourses. The agent is born into this world, experiencing it from the
outset as not only “already constituted” (Schutz 1962:133) but as what is “normal,”
familiar, and taken for granted. There are phenomena that are only peripherally part
of one’s lifeworld because of their infrequent occurrence and there are phenomena
that, because they are never or rarely encountered, are not a part of the lifeworld
at all, yet that which is distant in physical space can, because of telecommunications
and the media, be brought into the lifeworld in the form of “secondary” or
“mediated” experience (Schutz and Luckmann 1973:44; cf. Giddens 1991; Thompson
1995).
This characterization of the lifeworld differs in two key respects from alternative
usages of the concept and, in so doing, avoids following phenomenological sociology
and its offshoots down the less fruitful path they trod post-Schutz. First, the
lifeworld is not, as some understandings seem to imply (e.g., Crossley 2002:173), a
phenomenon of consciousness similar to or collapsible into the habitus. It is, to be
precise, the stream of incoming experience granted by the recurrent material, spatiotemporal,
and interpersonal—and always socially differentiated—milieux and read
by the extant perceptual schemes of the habitus, which, because of recurrence, sediments
into the latter as familiar and taken for granted.2
The habitus and lifeworld
are thus analytically separable, such that even if the constitution of the former is
embedded in the nature of the latter, their interplay can be analyzed, as in the case
of the “hysteresis effect” noted by Bourdieu in which the dispositions of the habitus
jar with the lifeworld on account of the conditions and experiences of the latter
shifting too rapidly.
The second departure from received phenomenological wisdom is more significant
and, in all likelihood, more controversial: conceiving the lifeworld as an individual
rather than collective entity. The prevailing view among phenomenologists, invariably
lodged in a reading of Husserl and Schutz, has long been that the lifeworld
is essentially coextensive with, in Gurwitsch’s words (1970:50), “the cultural world
of a certain socio-historical group,” that is to say, the web of shared taken-forgranted
meanings and intersubjective understandings within collectivities of varying
size—whether more or less coterminous with a society as a whole, as in Vaitkus’s
(2000:292) assertion that there is “one and only one life-world pre-given to everyone,
which allows for no plurals,” or, following Benita Luckmann’s (1970) analysis,
the smaller realms of experience such as occupations (e.g., the “lifeworld of nursing”),
communities, associations, and so on—the parameters of which are testable
with the infamous breaching experiments of phenomenology’s ethnomethodological
outgrowth. The reality is, however, that both Schutz and Husserl were, to say the
least, equivocal, constantly wavering between the collective, cultural definitions of
the lifeworld seized upon by the majority and the more individual-level characterization
sometimes employed by a minority and favored here. Husserl, for example,
regularly referred to the lifeworld as the “surrounding world” or the realm of “immediate
perception” or “immediate experience” and elucidated its spatial patterning
with the body as the ultimate locus, all of which—as even the translator of The
2This definition takes insight from the Lund school of time-geography (and Giddens’s [1984] reworking
of it to better incorporate routinization), which traces individual spatiotemporal trajectories and in certain
versions—and here is one of the fundamental links to phenomenology (and indeed Bourdieu)—views these
as the conduits of formative experience (for an overview, see Parkes and Thrift 1980:Ch. 6).
PHENOMENOLOGICAL ADDITIONS TO THE BOURDIEUSIAN TOOLBOX 9
Crisis of the European Sciences, where the lifeworld is given its fullest expression,
noted (Carr 1977, 1970:xl–xli)—points more toward the lifeworld being an individual
phenomenon. Schutz, too, discussed the spatial structuring of the lifeworld in
terms of “reach” (actual, potential, attainable), described the lifeworld as a reality
perceived as “my world” (e.g., Schutz 1970a:134ff) and, as the quote above acting
as the launching pad for this discussion indicates, often talked of the lifeworld in
individual terms more generally. Perhaps the most favorable way to characterize this
oscillation is to say that, for Schutz and Husserl, the lifeworld concept covers several
levels of experience, from the individual to the communal.
In any case, the collective definition of the lifeworld is not only limited but already
assimilated by Bourdieu. It is limited because, like the Hobbesian/Parsonsian
“problem of order” that undergirded much American phenomenological sociology
and favors such a definition, it overemphasizes homogeneity and the shared elements
of experience—despite purportedly allowing a grasp of “micro” sociality
in all its complexity—at the expense of differentiation, degrees of similarity and
difference, cases of mutual incomprehension (“why would anyone like rock music/opera/boxing/ballet/etc.?”),
and, ultimately, inequality. Yet it is assimilated and
transcended by Bourdieu in his use of the terms nomos, doxa (from Husserl), and illusio,
the first indicating the fundamental orientation of any field (“art for art’s sake”
or “business is business”) and the other two denoting, respectively, belief and interest
in the nomos, parameters and stakes of the social space and separate fields (including
those of certain occupational groups), which all presuppose shared comprehension
among participants—thus recognizing that there are experiences and conditions binding
large numbers of people—but also generating difference and struggle within and
between each realm. What Bourdieu is missing, though, is a conceptual means of
unifying the realms of experience, doxa, and illusio in a biographical whole and incorporating
those experiences that otherwise fall between the gaps. This can, I believe,
be supplied by the individual-level characterization of the lifeworld.
So, cleaving away the defunct collective conceptualizations and keeping only the
useful, the lifeworld is conceived from here on as the individual agent’s milieu and
conduit of everyday experience that, being particular to her, builds uniquely into her
biography and habitus. However, having now wrestled a suitable definition of the
lifeworld from phenomenology, here is the point where we turn back to Bourdieu
and situate it among his theoretical tools, avoiding the predominantly descriptive and
antigenetic tendencies of phenomenological sociology by arguing that the experiences
of the lifeworld are structured by, among other things,3
one’s positions in social space
and fields, such that while the actual articulation of experience is particular to the
individual it remains patterned by the material and cultural conditions of existence
and field effects associated with his or her positions.4
So, two agents close in social
space have individual lifeworlds insofar as they attended different schools, have
3Such as, for example, gender, a binary relation that mediates position in social space and the various
fields.
4Compare Bourdieu’s (1977:86) fleeting remarks on both the structuring of the “physiognomy of social
environments” by the “dead ends,” “closed doors,” and “limited prospects” associated with particular
conditions of existence (cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:144 n96) and the “immersion in a world of
cultivated people, practices, and objects” (Bourdieu 1984:75) characteristic of bourgeois socialization,
as well as his earlier frequent appeals to “milieu” (e.g., Bourdieu 1974) and definition of conditions of
existence as including “dwelling place and the daily life associated with it” and “environment and working
conditions”—a definition broader than simply distance from necessity and suggestive of the lifeworld
(Bourdieu and Passeron 1979:12, 1990:259; see also the passage building on a revealing quote from
Husserl in Bourdieu 1971:205). A similar argument to that pursued here, but using Merleau-Ponty rather
than Schutz, is presented in Bufton’s (2003) investigation of the lifeworlds of working-class university
students.
10 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
different occupations and workplaces, live in different neighborhoods, and have had
and have different consociates—not just because of their membership of different
fields—and thus have distinctive experiences, biographies, and habitus, but because
all these facets of the lifeworld are structured to some degree according to material
conditions of existence they and the experiences and habitus they generate display
clear analogies or, to use Wittgenstein’s (1952) phrase, “family resemblances,” which
are, as Bourdieu so astutely noted, perceived by the agents themselves as a sense of
social similarity (they are “like me” or “one of us”). This can then help explain the
differences that lead one agent in the cultural section of the dominant class to pursue,
be at ease with, and be knowledgeable of music and another art—both agents’ past
and present lifeworlds involve a cultured upbringing and distance from necessity, but
one may well be characterized by musicality (e.g., a musical parent or family friends,
instruments and paraphernalia around the home), the other by all things artistic
(most lifeworlds are, obviously, more complex than this and full of contradictory
elements, which then play out in the habitus and patterns of action). It can also
bring within explanatory reach the dispositions and practices stemming from experiences
granted by particular locales, interactions, consociates, nonfield associations
(including workplace dynamics), and particular biographical events, at all times noting
the effects of the structural positions of all interactants and institutions involved,
thus allowing deeper social analysis of, say, vocational options (police officer or
firefighter), workplace culture, perceptual schemas, or dissonant consumption
tastes—all of which are of interest to the qualitative researcher or “micro”
sociologist—without reference to some account of unconstrained meaning (or, worse,
rationality).5
Positions in social space and fields designate the structuring of the lifeworld and
typical experiences at any one time, not those that have flowed into the agent’s
habitus hitherto (unless their position has remained more or less static over time). So,
Bourdieu’s focus on trajectory, the temporal dimension, is still of crucial importance,
for it designates the past structuring of the lifeworld, and thus the past experiences,
that have shaped the individual’s habitus. The individual can remain in the same
point of social space and thus face similar, reinforcing experiences over time, though
the character of the lifeworld and experience inevitably changes in other respects and
over time as one gets older; or individuals can move through social space and fields
with the accumulation, depletion, or conversion of capital and enter and leave fields,
changing the domains of and thus character of experience in the lifeworld, through
“gearing into it” with his or her own actions (see Schutz 1970b:318) or through the
actions of others, including distant, “abstract” others.
Mundane Consciousness and the Habitus as Stock of Knowledge
As one of the central columns in Bourdieu’s theoretical edifice the habitus has been
subject to a multitude of criticisms from all sides of the sociological spectrum, from
5Of course, if the explanatory concern is more “macro,” historical, or quantitative—for example, if one is
studying the general structure and dynamics of a particular field, much like Bourdieu did, or the historical
shifts in the relations of social space—then the complexities of lifeworlds can be largely “bracketed” in
the same way that Giddens (1984) bracketed “strategic conduct” when conducting institutional analysis,
that is, set to one side but not neglected. On the other hand, when the detailed analysis of lifeworlds and
biographies is the task at hand, knowledge of the general structures of fields and social space cannot be
fully bracketed. This serves to reiterate that the concept of lifeworld is not meant to replace fields and
social space, but to work with them to allow a more differentiated account of micro processes, dissonances,
and the impact of social relations and ties on individual biography.
PHENOMENOLOGICAL ADDITIONS TO THE BOURDIEUSIAN TOOLBOX 11
structuralists such as Levi-Strauss condemning it as a vehicle for a “spontaneist” philosophy
of action (see Bourdieu 1990b:10, 61–62) to Jeffrey Alexander’s (1995:136)
infamous description of the term as a “Trojan horse for determinism.” Much of this
criticism is, to my mind, misplaced, yet there is one issue raised by Alexander
(1995:143ff) and noted by an increasing number of other commentators (e.g.,
Crossley 2001; Jenkins 2002; Lau 2004; Margolis 1999; Reay 2004; Sayer 2005; cf.
Schatzki 1987) that seems to have more weight behind it: the extent to which Bourdieu
claims that action based on the habitus, including strategic action, is “bodily”
and seemingly undertaken without any consciousness or intention. In Alexander’s
(1995:144) terms, Bourdieu practices a crude “sociologized biologism” that “allows
him to ignore the complexities and subjectivities that the category ‘self’ implies,”
“eliminates the significance of motive” (1995:139), expunges reflexivity and intentionality
from social life (1995:146), and, ultimately, as McLennan (1998:84) summarizes
it, eradicates any sense of a “thinking, feeling self.” Similarly, Jenkins (2002:93), another
scathing, though slightly more sympathetic, critic of Bourdieu, claims that the
focus on the primacy of the corporeal effectively reduces conscious activity to “an
epiphenomenon, almost an effect, of the body,” while Reay (2004:437) and Sayer
(2005:29) argue that Bourdieu is in danger of denying the “life of the mind” in
others. Other critics (e.g., Crossley 2001) recognize that Bourdieu does not deny that
there is conscious or “rational” action, but decry the fact that he generally sees it
as an exception, separate from the habitus, and, as in pragmatism, surfacing only
in times of crisis such as when the habitus fails to fit with a situation (see, e.g.,
Bourdieu 1990b:108, 2000a:64).
Bourdieu supplies plenty of ammunition for this kind of criticism: his descriptions
of the habitus do underscore the bodily dimension, especially in later works such as
Pascalian Meditations, and can give the impression that talk of intentions or consciousness
should be banished from sociology altogether. Thus, we are told that the
habitus grants “spontaneity without consciousness or will” (Bourdieu 1990a:56; cf.
2000a:137) and “intentionless improvisation” (1977:79), with the underlying practical
sense being nothing other than social necessity “converted into motor schemes
and bodily automatisms” (1990a:69) that “lead the mind unconsciously along with
[them]” (1990a:68). “[S]tates of the body,” he puts it elsewhere, give rise to “states
of mind” by “awaken[ing] ready-made feelings and experiences” or “recall[ing] associated
thoughts and feelings” (1984:474, 1990a:69). Furthermore, he argues, action
takes place “without a conscious aiming at ends” (1977:72) and is guided not by
projects and plans, that is, the future, but by the past as embodied in dispositions
(1977:72) or, if anything, by the protentive sense of the upcoming immediacies
furnished by the “feel for the game” (1990b:12, 2000a:Ch. 6, 2005:214). As such,
“thought objects,” reasons, and motives should never be treated as the “determining
causes of practices” (1977:21). At its most extreme there are, as Crossley (2001:115)
and Farnell (2000:403) have noted, moments in Bourdieu’s writing when the agent
disappears from the formulation of action altogether and is effectively replaced by
the habitus, with the latter, as in Freud’s depiction of the id, ego, and superego, being
falsely attributed capacities (action, comprehension) only agents possess (cf. Giddens
1984:42). For example, adopting the antihumanist idiom of structural Marxism,
agents are said to be “supports” of the habitus (Bourdieu 1977:85) “possessed by
[it] more than they possess it” as it “acts within them” to organize action (1977:18),
while it is the habitus rather than the agent that comprehends the similarities and
differences of social space (2000a:130) and possesses a margin of freedom (2005:131).
12 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
The result of all this, it seems, is a model of action grossly at odds with the
realities of the social world, including those documented in The Weight of the World
(Bourdieu et al. 1999, esp. 580–89), where agents appear as thinking, intending,
deliberating beings. Conscious and intentional (including, though not necessarily,
“rational”) action, deliberation, and even some form of reflexivity, Bourdieu’s critics
argue (e.g., Crossley 2001:117, 140–60; Jenkins 2002:97; Mouzelis 1995:112; Sayer
2005:27–30), are simply much more of a routine feature of the human condition
than he admits. However, these points often (though not always) miss the point that
Bourdieu, borrowing a phrase from Mao Tse-tung, is usually “twisting the stick in
the opposite direction,” that is, playing up his propositions in reaction to academic
orthodoxy. In fact, buried underneath the kind of assertions documented above, and
especially in his earlier writings, is a much more subtle concept than that typically
described by critics, one in which conscious thought, intentions, and “rational” action,
despite Bourdieu’s usual disclaimers, are not antithetical to or separate from
it at all, but rather based on it. Thus his contention that agents’ “wills and intentions”
depend on their positions in social space (Bourdieu 1981:308), his claim that
the propensity to be “rational” depends on one’s habitus and particular conditions
of existence (1990a:64; cf. Bourdieu 1979, 2005; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:124),
his assertion that the habitus informs “all thought and action (including thought of
action)” (1977:18, emphasis added), and Wacquant’s (2005:316, emphasis added) description
of the habitus as “propensities to think, feel, and act in determinate ways,
which then guide them in their creative responses to the constraints and solicitations
of their extant milieu.” Indeed, Bourdieu’s stress on the “generative” capacities of the
habitus should be read as a claim that the schemes of perception and dispositions
of the habitus generate, alongside more automatic modes of conduct, intentional actions,
with his refutation of “conscious” or “rational” action simply being a justified
dismissal of the idea that agents—for example, the working-class adolescent leaving
school—fully consider and weigh up all options (work, college, university, etc.) in
formulating their intentions rather than a rejection of intentional action altogether
(the working-class adolescent still thinks about and intends to get a job). Perhaps to
make this clearer and to separate it from scholastic visions of voluntaristic agents
formulating action ex nihilo, the latter should be called, adapting a phrase from
Sayer (2005:29), “mundane consciousness.”6
This reading of the habitus accords with well-established arguments in the philosophy
of mind and cognitive neuroscience to the effect that there are different
layers of consciousness and knowledge, or rather a continuum—for example, declarative
and procedural memory, “knowledge that” and “knowledge how” for Ryle,
Dewey, and James, or even discursive and practical consciousness for Giddens—but
that this whole continuum and its allied forms of action, though involving different
6I use the term “consciousness,” knowing this to be a contentious word, rather than Sayer’s own
phrase “mundane reflexivity,” which he posits as a criticism of and addition to Bourdieu’s conception
of the habitus, for two reasons. Firstly, it avoids the intellectual minefield generated by the proliferating
meanings of the term “reflexivity” in sociological theory. For Beck (1992), Giddens (1991), and Sweetman
(2003), for example, it refers specifically to the (empirically unsubstantiated) self-orientedness of latemodern
individuals, whilst for some Bourdieu-inspired feminists (e.g., McCall 1992; McNay 1999), it
denotes a gendered disposition toward self-consciousness—an idea that generally remains locked within a
“disjunctive” rather than mundane model of consciousness insofar as, similar to Bourdieu, it presupposes
critical prompting by discordant situations. There is also the only use of the term “reflexivity” that I
would endorse: the epistemic reflexivity of the well-trained social scientist according to Bourdieu (2004).
Secondly, I have doubts over the prevalence of the “internal conversation,” a concept taken from Peirce
and developed by Archer (2003), on which Sayer’s term is based—while more conscious forms of action
often involve some from of “mental talk,” as well as mental images, projections, and such like, only a
proportion of deliberated forms of action involve something approaching an inner conversation.
PHENOMENOLOGICAL ADDITIONS TO THE BOURDIEUSIAN TOOLBOX 13
regions of the brain, remain guided by the synaptic connections established through
experience—the neural base of the habitus as the repository of lifeworld experiences
channeled by past and present structural locations and sedimented into dispositions
(especially in the form of schemes of perception and interpretation), and the tacit
sense of the “normal,” “acceptable,” and so on it yields.7
Yet it remains true that
Bourdieu has not really done the theoretical work to accommodate all this. His comments
on thought and volition are unelaborated and submerged by his more frequent
assertions that “practical sense,” the primary mode of being in the world granted by
the habitus, is comparable to such phenomena as tennis players rushing the net (e.g.,
Bourdieu 1990b:11) and, thus, a low level of mental participation and conditioned,
skilful reflex that, as others have pointed out, comes close to a behaviorist-style tale
of stimulus and response (cf. Jenkins 2002:93). Fortunately, however, the groundwork
for such a conception of the habitus has been provided within phenomenology,
and no prizes for guessing by whom in particular: Schutz, with his concept of the
“subjective stock of knowledge” and its framing “attitudes.”
A number of clear convergences between the two theorists’ concepts facilitate
cooption here: for example, like the habitus the stock of knowledge and attitudes,
according to Schutz, serve as the agent’s “scheme of interpretation” (or perception)
for making sense of the world and experience (Schutz 1964:283; cf. 1972:84), and
both are products of sedimentations of multiple past experiences anchored in manifold
situations and encounters, which, as should be established by now, are shaped by
the material and cultural conditions of existence characterizing the agent’s lifeworld.8
However, what Schutz makes explicit is that the stock of knowledge is multilayered,
that is, inclusive of many different interpenetrating levels, from the more declarative
forms of knowledge gleaned from past experiences and “at hand” in consciousness
from situation to situation in different degrees of clarity and coherence (which Bourdieu
seems to downplay), through routinized modes of knowledge, conduct, and
skills (or “know how” to borrow the terminology of Ryle 1949) down to the most
basic, habitual, and bodily forms of knowledge so ingrained into agents that they
no longer appear as elements of knowledge at all but are instead “on hand” in all
instances, that is, automatically implicated in situations and acts without the need to
direct attention at them (Schutz and Luckmann 1973:105–11). As Bourdieu would
say, the latter are less something we have than that we are. This is even more the case
for what Schutz calls “attitudes,” that is, the complex of “inclinations to act” and
propensities to “steer toward certain goals and modes of conduct” (i.e., dispositions)
combining skills, habitual knowledge, and “frames of mind,” which articulate the
stock of knowledge and underlie expectations and verbalizable forms of knowledge
7This appeal to the neural level should make clear that I am not trying to rehabilitate some form
of Cartesian dualism when I complain about the overly “bodily” nature of the habitus—the schemes of
perception and dispositions underlying all levels of consciousness are rooted in the material (yet malleable)
brain—but simply surmount Bourdieu’s equation of dispositional action with corporal skills and minimal
mental activity. Nor, though, am I advocating a strict physicalism. There is not the space to argue it here,
but a nonreductive materialism in the philosophy of mind seems the best companion for the habitus (cf.
Crossley 2001; Elder-Vass 2007).
8Schutz, however, rarely considered explicitly the broad structural patterning of stocks of knowledge
(e.g., by class, ethnicity, gender, and so on), though it is implicit in his entire corpus (for an encouraging
exception, which is likely due to the co-author’s influence, see Schutz and Luckmann 1989:115–16).
Furthermore, though the stock of knowledge is clearly compatible with the quasi-structuralist relational
conception of social structures advanced by Bourdieu, the Schutz-inspired have tended to operate with a
weak, nonrelational conception of social structure, usually in terms of roles (e.g., Berger and Luckmann
1967). It is for this reason that I advocate ferrying Schutz’s concept over to the Bourdieusian toolbox
rather than phenomenological sociology, or indeed ethnomethodology, per se.
14 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
without themselves (usually) being reflectively grasped (Schutz and Luckmann
1973:215–23, 1989:20–21).9
Importantly, for Schutz the different levels of the stock of knowledge and the
attitudes that frame it combine, in conjunction with the characteristics or demands
of the situational context in the lifeworld (and sometimes pronounced physiological
prompts, e.g., hunger), to give rise to a variety of forms of action, from consciously
deliberated projects and long-term plans through habitual or routinized modes of
conduct that “unreel almost without the actor’s participation and conscious planning”
at all, the goals of which enter consciousness “at most just briefly” (Schutz
and Luckmann 1989:39, 27), right down to the “completely autonomized” elements
of action, which Bourdieu puts under the label of hexis—ways of walking, standing,
and so on (Schutz and Luckmann 1973:108). Furthermore, more conscious or
intentional action is seen as having two faces: one in which it is motivated by the
future, by the actor’s consciously formulated projects, or goals of varying time-scales
and clarity that they can supply reasons for, that is, in which it is constructed “in
order to” do something;10
and one in which it is “caused” (or “generated”) by the
sedimented past experiences constituting the stock of knowledge and attitudes or,
to use the preferred nomenclature, the habitus, that is, in which it is done “because”
of the prior experiences sedimented as dispositions, inclinations, and so on
(Schutz 1962:69–72, 1964:11–12, 1972:86–96; Schutz and Luckmann 1973:209–23,
1989:19ff). To put it more simply, action is often driven by conscious projects, but
those projects themselves issue from the past experiences of the agent—combining
particular declarative sedimentations and the totality of sedimentations embodied in
dispositions or giving rise to the sense of what is “reasonable” or “for us”—which
are, of course, materially and culturally patterned. This is true even for action preceded
by deliberation—the “dramatic rehearsal in imagination of various competing
possible lines of action,” as Dewey (1922:190) defined it—and even so-called rational
action: what is rehearsed, considered and weighed up, the ends valued and means
considered, and the final choice or decision, are not separate from the interpretative
schemes and dispositions of the situated habitus but based on them (cf. Sayer
2005:27). The habitus thus remains the unchosen principle of choices, but those
choices—such as those of the cogitating working-class adolescent—are infused with
intentions and mundane consciousness and originate not from the body alone.11
What, in all this, of the vexed notion of strategy, a concept closely tied to the
habitus? Bourdieu’s use of the term seems, as several commentators have noted
(Alexander 1995; Crossley 2001; Jenkins 2002; Sayer 2005; Swartz 1997), problematic,
9A common reference point should serve to put the similarities and differences in sharp relief: Bourdieu
(1990b:108) and Schutz (1962:211) both referred to Leibniz’s claim that “we are empirical [i.e., practical,
habitual, unthinking] in three-quarters of our action.” Schutz accommodated, if hastily, this “empirical”
element and saw it as flowing from the stock of knowledge, but also incorporated (and spent most of his
time considering) more discursive levels of knowledge and intentional forms of action, with the “whole”
person therefore being seen as guided by his or her stock of knowledge, whereas Bourdieu tended, for
the most part, to view the habitus as covering the empirical behavior alone and ignored, downplayed or,
perhaps most unconvincingly, saw as a special case—a “principle of action” separable from the habitus
(including its schemes of perception?) even—the nonempirical.
10For Schutz, projects—from the most short-term to elaborate life plans—always seem to involve an
envisioning of the completed act, but this is surely a universalization of a particular possibility.
11Conceiving the habitus in this way also has ramifications for the way in which its subjective schemes
of perception are understood and, given that Bourdieu was usually content to say no more than that they
represented the internalization of objective divisions, provides a fuller account of their genesis. There is
not, however, the space to consider it in any detail here, so suffice it to say that they should be interpreted
in terms of what Husserl and Schutz called “typifications” and “pairings,” both of which are built out
of lifeworld experience. Crossley (2001:130–13) provides the starting point of such an account in his own
Husserlian-Merleau-Pontyian reading of the habitus.
PHENOMENOLOGICAL ADDITIONS TO THE BOURDIEUSIAN TOOLBOX 15
excessive, and, like rational action theory, tautological insofar as practically any action
can be reconstructed in retrospect as being a “move” in an “objectively economic”
strategy that the agent herself has no idea about (Bourdieu 1990b:90). Yet the
idea, notwithstanding Bourdieu’s infelicitous use of it at times, is more nuanced than
usually depicted. This is because strategies are aimed at maximizing symbolic profit
rather than economic profit, status or power per se—though these are misperceived
as means of achieving symbolic profit—and in the end this equates to nothing other
than the desire for social value, dignity, or recognition, to feel important and worthy,
in whichever walks of life one finds oneself in (Bourdieu 1990b:196–98, 2000a:240–
45; Wacquant 1998:218). It would thus be foolhardy to claim that the concept has no
theoretical mileage whatsoever. On the other hand its universality is still contestable,
and so perhaps it would be better to argue that agents often possess a deep-seated
and not necessarily verbalizable, calculative, or competitive inclination, instilled via a
complex combination of childhood socialization and later experiences, for themselves
or their offspring to “do well” or “better” or to conserve what they have through
some of the methods described by Bourdieu, even in disinterested spheres of life,
but that if action can be demonstrated not to be guided by this inclination then it
is inappropriate to superimpose the language of strategy onto it. The existence and
character of strategies would thus be more of an empirical question, as would their
differential distribution among agents (cf. Lau 2004:378).
This leaves one final issue to be resolved: What is the relationship between the
lifeworld and habitus? How, in other words, are lifeworld experiences translated
into the dispositions and interpretive schemes of the habitus? A complex issue for
sure, and one that Bourdieu has done much to answer convincingly. However, while
sedimentation and disposition formation do indeed take place through many of
the “practical” processes he identifies—the “sheer familiarization” with the objects,
events, and likelihoods of the lifeworld through recurrent experience, which builds
into the agent’s sense of what is “normal” and “reasonable,” a presymbolic “imitative
acceptance” of observed modes of conduct (Bourdieu’s “mimesis”) (Schutz
and Luckmann 1973:270), and so on—critics are right to note his tendency to
understate the extent to which some learning can involve or indeed require varying
levels of conscious participation—from phenomena simply becoming themes to
consciousness, however transient, fuzzy, and ill-formed, through to some form of
understanding (Sayer 2005:28). Not only is this slightly contradictory—pedagogy
and inculcation, both acknowledged by Bourdieu as key methods in forming the
habitus, presuppose conscious or cognitive internalization (Lau 2004:374)—but, as
Sayer (2005:26–27) and Schutz and Luckmann (1973:106, 1989:28) before him point
out, even the most “bodily” or “practical” of knowledge from dancing and boxing
to swimming and walking was once problematic and, to some extent, consciously
thematized. Bourdieu is, however, absolutely right to emphasize the disproportionate
weight of childhood experiences in the formation of the habitus, and these can be
conceived as flowing from the lifeworld into which the child is born and that is structured
by the capital of its parents or guardians and from the socialization practices
of the parents, again based on the parents’ capital possession (documented in the
research of, e.g., Bernstein 1971; Lareau 2003; Lawler 2000; Walkerdine and Lucey
1989).
CONCLUSION: ADDITIONS TO THE TOOLBOX
Some 15 years ago, Lo¨ıc Wacquant, Bourdieu’s most adroit advocate, defender, and
elaborator in English-speaking sociology over the last two decades, declared that
16 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
“Bourdieu’s work is not free of contradictions, gaps, tensions, puzzlements, and
unresolved questions,” such that to think with Bourdieu necessitates thinking beyond
and even against Bourdieu, “where required” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:xiii–
xiv). Guided by this inspiring maxim, the central aim here has been to demonstrate
that if we are to successfully think with Bourdieu then we are indeed required to
overcome gaps and problems in his theory and think beyond and against him by
integrating the insights from phenomenology he himself neglected. Schutz’s notions
of lifeworld and stock of knowledge in particular, I have argued, hold the key to
a framework better able to handle the sticky issues of individuation and conscious
action. If Bourdieu likes to think of his concepts as Wittgensteinian “thinking tools”
(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:160), then new tools can be said to have been added
to the toolbox—or more precisely, one tool has been added and another sharpened
up—in order to better equip us for the task of explaining the processes and patterns
of the social world.
This venture, then, is not a scholastic jaunt in total abstraction from the business
of sociological research, and neither is it merely a “synthesis of . . . sociological
and philosophical traditions decisively wrenched out of their context,” to use the
disparaging terms in which Bourdieu and Wacquant (2001:5) described Giddens’s
structuration theory. Bourdieu, it is true, was endlessly frustrated by the misunderstandings
of his ideas and fruitless attempts to compare them with those of this
or that thinker born of a decontextualized importation of his theory into an alien
national field of inquiry (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1999), and faithful Schutzians might
retort that their intellectual progenitor’s thought, honed in the American context
where the problem of order, unlike in France, loomed large and where Parsons was
a chief interlocutor (in the literal sense in Schutz’s case: Grathoff 1978), is irredeemably
at odds with Bourdieu’s, forged as it was against Levi-Strauss and Sartre
and focused more on the perpetuation of inequality, power differentials, and dif-
ference.12
Of course, this overlooks the fact that, while Schutz did indeed spend
his later years plugging into the American scene, both he and Bourdieu share the
intellectual heritage bequeathed by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and are hence easily
reconciled. More importantly, though, it should never be forgotten that ideas—their
explanatory power and interconnections—are irreducible to their context alone, as
important as an understating of the latter are for a full grasp of the formulation
of concepts, but, in the end, arbitrated by the twin pillars of applied rationalism:
logical analysis and empirical investigation (Bourdieu et al. 1991; Bourdieu
2004).
12This has not stopped people trying to work out how Bourdieu would approach the problem of order.
Bohman (1999:133), for example, claims that:
Bourdieu solves the Parsonian problem of order not through the internalization of norms, but
through the “inculcation” of dispositions that come not only from being socialized into a culture
generally but into a particular subordinate or dominant position within it. It operates through the
agent’s own dispositions rather than coercion, through “generative and implicit schema” rather than
sanctioned rules. Even if sanctions or rules were present, it would still have to be explained why it
is that agents are predisposed to accept them. This is the role of the habitus.
A little added historicization of the issue, perhaps drawing on Elias’s (1994) account of the internalization
of self-constraint in the “civilized” habitus as well as Bourdieu’s studies of education (e.g., 1971),
would complement this.
PHENOMENOLOGICAL ADDITIONS TO THE BOURDIEUSIAN TOOLBOX 17
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Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society. London, UK: Sage.
Bennett, Tony. 2007. “Habitus Cliv´e: Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu.” New Literary
History 38:201–28.
Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the
Sociology of Knowledge. London, UK: Penguin.
Bernstein, Basil. 1971. Class, Codes and Control, Volume 1: Theoretical Studies Towards a Sociology of
Language. London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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