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Doxa TaskCompleted1 #218542 Doxa is the experience that a given social order is as objectively given as 'natural laws,' hence the only one possible | The key concept is doxa, which Bourdieu took over from Max Weber (...) Much of Pierre Bourdieu's opus is illucidating our theme. Here are some characteristic excerpts. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Ch. 2: Structures and the Habitus, p. 72 we find that 'the theory of practice' is indeed a method or a way of looking that reveals the dialectic relationship between the way our social world is structured and the way we perceive it: Methodological objectivism, a necessary moment in all research, by the break with primary experience and the construction of objective relations which it accomlishes, demands its own supression. In order to escape the realism of the structure, which hypostatizes systems of objective relations by converting them into totalities already constituted outside of individual history and group history, it is necessary to pass from the opus operatum to the modus operandi, from statistical regularity of algebraic structure to the principle of the production of this observed order, and to construct the theory of practice, or, more precisely, the theory of the mode of generation of practices, which is the precondition for establishing an experimental science of the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality, or, more simply, of incorporation and objectification. Bourdieu's keyword habitus expresses the inner, psychological side of this relationship; Bourdieu here makes the point that habitus 'disposes' people to think and act in a way that conforms to power, without being a deliberate product of that power ( ibid, p. 72): The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively "regulated" and "regular" without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor. Bourdieu's keyword doxa points at for us centrally important experience that a given social order is just as objectively given as the nature and the natural laws ( ibid, p. 164): Systems of classification which reproduce, in their own specific logic, the objective classes, i.e. the divisions by sex, age, or position in the relations of production, make their specific contribution to the reproduction of the power relations of which they are the product, by securing the misrecognition, and hence the recognition, of the arbitrariness on which they are based: in the extreme case, that is to say, when there is a quasi-perfect correspondence between the objective order and the subjective principles of organization (as in ancient societies) the natural and social world appear as self-evident. This experience we shall call doxa, so as to distinguish it from an orthodox or heterodox belief implying awareness and recognition of the possibility of different or antagonistic beliefs. Shemes of thought and perception can produce the objectivity that they do produce only by producing misrecognition of the limits of the cognition that they make possible, thereby founding immediate adherence, in the doxic mode, to the world of tradition experienced as a "natural world" and taken for granted. The instruments of knowledge of the social world are in this case (objectively) political instruments which contribute to the reproduction of the social world by producing immediate adherence to the world, seen as self-evident and undisputed, of which they are the product and of which they reproduce the structures in a transformed form. In Language and Symbolic Power, Bourdieu talks about the 'symbolic power' of the instruments of knowledge and communication, which they derive from being instruments of social integration (!) (p. 166): As instruments of knowledge and communication, 'symbolic tructures' can exercise a structuring power only because they themselves are structures. Symbolic power is a power of constructing reality (...). Durkheim – and, after him, Redcliffe-Brown, who makes 'social solidarity' dependent on the sharing of asymbolic system – has the merit of designating the social function (in the sense of structural-functionalism) of symbolism in an explicit way: it is an authentic political function which cannot be reduced to the structuralists' function of communication. Symbols are the instruments par excellence of 'social integration': as instruments of knowledge and communication (...) they make it possible for there to be a consensus on the meaning of the social world, a consensus which contributes fundamentally to the reproduction of the social order. 'Logical' integration is the precondition of 'moral' integration. There can be no doubt, explains Bourdieu, that this symbolic power makes the 'instruments of knowledge and communication' instruments of domination and power par excellence ( ibid, p. 167): In criticizing all forms of the 'interactionist' error which consists in reducing relations of power to relations of communication, it is not enough to note that relations of communication are always, inseparably, power relations which, in form and content, depend on the material or symbolic power accumulated by the agents (or institutions) (...). It is as structured and structuring instruments of communication and knowledge that 'symbolic systems' fulfil their political function, as instruments which help to ensure that one class dominates another (symbolic violence) by bringing their own distinctive power to bear on the relations of power which underlie them and thus by contributing, in Weber's terms, to the 'domestication of the dominated'. |
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