Creature of habitus: Latour on Bourdieu Pt. 1

Hi guys. Back from my road trip and returning to active duty. I definitely want to weigh in on the plasma/secularism question, but in the meantime here is the first of a few posts I started preparing before the holidays, on Latour and Pierre Bourdieu.

The subject of Latour's relation to Bourdieu is so complicated that I'm going to have to split it up over several posts. Before I get started, I'll quickly indicate what I think the complications are. There are basically four: (1) Bourdieu was arguably the central figure in French sociology from the early 1960s until his death in 2002 and Latour is, from what I understand, frequently seen to be his successor in this role; (2) Latour is heavily critical of Bourdieu in Reassembling the Social; (3) Bourdieu, for his part, attacked Latour and science studies in one of his last books, Science of Science and Reflexivity; and finally (4) Bourdieu has been a very strong influence on me personally, basically serving as my entry point into the world of sociology and social theory — so for me to accept Latour's pretty much wholesale dismissal of "critical sociology" requires a good deal of rethinking and unlearning on my part, a process which is still taking its way. (And this is interesting, actually, because one of the points of disagreement between Bourdieu and Latour is, essentially, about the way learning works, and how permanent and conscious it is — more about this in a moment.) So we have (1) what sociology thinks of Bourdieu and Latour, (2) what Latour thinks of Bourdieu, (3) what Bourdieu thinks of Latour, and (4) what I think of both of them, and whether they admit of being combined — that's a lot to cover. I'll do my best.

In this first post I'll have nothing to say about (3) — Bourdieu's Latour — and I'll focus on (2), with (1) and (4) perhaps bleeding in at the edges.

According to the index of Reassembling the Social, there are ten direct references to Bourdieu, though he's present by implication in many other passages — whenever Latour starts referring to "critical sociology" or "reflexivity," for example. In fact, despite the general spirit of opposition, a number of the citations of Bourdieu's work are rather admiring, though nearly all of these refer to Bourdieu's 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice (cf. 101, 169, 175). Thus it seems fairly easy to see that the Bourdieu that Latour values is the close examiner of local interactions and the thinker of habitus, not the analyst of fields and capital that emerges in Bourdieu's work from Distinction on. This is a Bourdieu that Latour can plausibly associate with interactionism and ethnomethodology, a "micro" or "local" Bourdieu, as opposed to the "macro" or "global" Bourdieu we get with the subsequent development of field theory. This is consistent with Latour's general resistance, all throughout Reassembling the Social, to "contexts" or "frameworks" of any kind: it makes sense that he would like the "genetic" Bourdieu that is attentive to the tiniest behavioral tics and traces, but not the "structural" Bourdieu that uses all this data to build new versions of the class structure to correlate with this behavior. That is, Latour doesn't want to know, or claim to know, what the outside of the network consists of; he doesn't want to "fill in the blanks" as he puts it somewhere.

So one could imagine many of Bourdieu's analyses of social causation of seemingly natural human behavior adapted to actor-network theory — in a sense he's all about breaking up the nature-society divide, after all — but not the claim that such causation forms a rational structure or system. The point here is, Latour likes habitus, and he makes advances on the concept in the latter part of his chapter "Second Move: Redistributing the Local." For instance, here's Latour at his most Bourdieuvian (in thought, if not in style):

How many circulating clichés do we have to absorb before having the competence to utter an opinion about a film, a companion, a situation, a political stance? If you began to probe the origin of each of your idiosyncrasies, would you not be able to deploy, here again, the same star-like shape [i.e., a network] that would force you to visit many places, people, times, events that you had largely forgotten? That tone of voice, this unusual expression, this gesture of the hand, this gait, this posture, aren't these traceable as well? And then there is the question of your inner feelings. Have they not been given to you? Doesn't reading novels help you know how to love? How would you know which group you pertain to without ceaselessly downloading some of the cultural clichés that all the others are bombarding you with? (209)

Again, though it's a little more lyrical in tone, this could be taken from Distinction, Bourdieu's massive "social critique of the judgment of taste." So far it sounds as though Latour is merely recapitulating Bourdieu's own meditations on habitus: we incorporate into our bodies something from outside, which then gets reproduced as seemingly spontaneous and context-specific action (judging a film, taking a political stance, loving a person, et al.). But where Bourdieu always insists on the habitus as a "structuring structure" — that is, not so much habits or skills as a way of seeing the world ("principles of vision and division," is the way he frequently puts it) — Latour characteristically wants to keep each habit or competence discrete. That word "downloading" should tip us off that something different is going on here: and in fact Latour's (admittedly, somewhat sketchy) rethinking of habitus is built around the internet-era idea of "plug-ins," "borrowing this marvelous metaphor from our new life on the Web":

When you reach some site in cyberspace, it often happens that you see nothing on the screen. But then a friendly warning suggests that you "might not have the right plug-ins" and that you should "download" a bit of software which, once installed on your system, will allow you to activate what you were unable to see before. What is so telling about the metaphor of the plug-in is that competence doesn't come in bulk any longer but literally in bits and bytes … Being a fully competent actor now comes in discreet [sic] pellets or, to borrow from cyberspace, patches and applets, whose precise origin can be "Googled" before they are downloaded and saved one by one. (207)

Rather than just somehow absorbing a principle of vision and division and then unconsciously letting it dictate the way we respond to any given situation (the way Bourdieu argues that class habitus, preeminently, does), Latour proposes that we grab very specific competences that will only come in handy in a very few situations, and then either use them or not. Also, where Bourdieu would insist that a habitus, once acquired, can only be altered or replaced by stringent conditioning, Latour rather suggests a "use it or lose it" proposition: we have to "ceaselessly download" competences or we forget them. In sum, Latour has a more volitional and specific idea of how habitus works: it's not a mysterious creature that gets inside you and bursts out of you just when you think you're all alone (in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology Bourdieu compares it to the creature in Alien), but a guest you willingly invite inside (more vampire than alien?), or, better, a party favor you take home, but are always at the risk of misplacing. The difference from Bourdieu gets underlined here: "If you take each of the rubrics as the mere 'expression' of some dark social force, then their efficacy disappears. But if you remember that there is nothing beyond and beneath, that there is no rear-world of the social, then is it not fair to say that they make up a part of your own cherished intimacy?" (209)

So, to finish this up in the spirit of Latour — and very much not in the spirit of Bourdieu — with a personal reminiscence. I spent basically a year reading through Bourdieu's work (and, as you've reported elsewhere, it really takes about a year of serious reading to get fully comfortable with a theorist). I gained a tremendous amount from it: it gave me an amazing sense of the field of theory, as well as providing numerous stylistic and conceptual tools I could put to work, and it even affected my political and moral opinions. In a real sense, then, it changed the way I think. On Bourdieu's view, I significantly altered my habitus by reading him: I made a series of epistemological breaks with my old, pre-Bourdieuvian self and ended up with new "principles of vision and division" that governed how I saw and thought about everything.

The trouble was, it also made me deeply unhappy in a lot of ways. (I can't lay all of this at Bourdieu's doorstep: last year was a tough one for a number of reasons, but certainly reading him was a major part of it, and the only one that's relevant here.) I felt, as I think many graduate students feel when immersing themselves in a single theorist's work, taken over or subjected t0 Bourdieu's thought more than I wanted to be. The influence was too powerful, too total. And beginning to read Latour seriously has been part of a larger project of attempting to extricate myself from Bourdieu a little, or eliminate some of what Bourdieu had managed to incorporate into me (along the lines of the logic of the pharmakon: the cure for too much social theory is… more social theory!). But I also haven't wanted to lose what I gained from reading Bourdieu and being, in some sense, "taken over" by him. On Latour's view — and this is the great thing about it, I think — I don't have to make yet another epistemological break and throw over Bourdieu for Latour, reflexive critical sociology for ANT (however much the rhetorical antagonism toward "the sociology of the social" throughout RTS might make that seem to be the case). In fact, on his view, I never acquired a Bourdieuvian habitus in the first place: I just subscribed to so many Bourdieuvian "plug-ins" that I was tricked into thinking that he really had taken me over and changed the whole way I see the world. So what I can do now, if I want, is download some new plug-ins from Latour, which may or may not be compatible with those previously acquired from Bourdieu — and if they're not and I find Latour's more useful, I can delete the old plug-ins. Not only this, but if I don't keep "ceaselessly downloading" Bourdieu's plug-ins — by rereading him, and talking about him, and putting his ideas to work — then they will stop acting on and in me whether I voluntarily delete them or not. And this seems true: what's surprising to me now is how much cognitive work I have to do to access Bourdieuvian concepts that at one time I could barely manage to think outside of. Depending on how you look at it, then, this whole question of "theoretical influence" has become either much less terrifying or much more daunting: because you don't have to worry so much about being "taken over," but you do need to do a lot more maintenance work.

OK, so that's habitus. I'll move from here into a post on structure and agency, and then finish by considering Bourdieu's critique of Latour.