Practices and actions: A Wittgensteinian critique of Bourdieu and Giddens
Philosophy of the Social Sciences; Thousand oaks; Sep 1997; Theodore R Schatzki;
Volume: 27Issue:3Start Page: 283-308
[Headnote]
This article criticizes Bourdieu's and Giddens's overintellectualizing accounts of human activity on the basis of Wittgenstein's insights into practical understanding. Part 1 describes these two theorists' conceptions of a homology between the organization of practices (spatial-temporal manifolds of action) and the governance of individual actions. Part 2 draws on Wittgenstein's discussions of linguistic definition and following a rule to criticize these conceptions for ascribing content to the practical understanding they claim governs action. Part 3 then suggests an alternative, Wittgensteinian account of the homology between practices and actions that avoids this pitfall.
Social theory has long relied on two master concepts, individuality and totality, in specifying the nature of social life. Although this dualism never exhausted the range of social ontological starting points, its dominance was evidenced by the variety of approaches whose analyses of the social commenced from either the individual or some totality. In recent decades, as with dualisms generally, the individuality and totality twosome has yielded preeminence under diverse challenges to the integrity of its terms. Against the foundational claims of individualism, communitarianism, poststructuralism, phenomenological hermeneutics, and others joined in analyzing individuals as products or by-products of social phenomena. This insight problematized the individual as the social ontological point of departure, for if individuals systematically presuppose social phenomena, these phenomena cannot obviously be construed as nothing but individuals and relations among them. More recently, the sundry thinkers problematically labeled postmodern made complexity, difference, particularity, and locality theoretically noteworthy features of social life. The holistic credo, that the social either is or is made up of wholes governed by specifiable principles, lost appeal in the face of the observation that contingent and shifting relations among social phenomena weave these phenomena into fluctuating and nonsystematic constellations.
One reaction to the weakening traditional duality has been the development of new organizing concepts for theorizing social life. One promising start can be called "practice theory."1 Practice theory envisions social life as a nexus of practice. The social is a contingent and perpetually metamorphosing array of manifolds of human activity.2 On this view, at least most of what people do is done as part of some practice(s) or other, and such social phenomena as institutions and power are to be understood via the structures of and relations among practices. Prominent practice theorists are Pierre Bourdieu (1976, 1990b), Anthony Giddens (1979, 1984), Jean-Franqois Lyotard (1984, 1988), and Charles Taylor (1985). Theorists with significant practice leanings include Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) and Cornelius Castoriadis (1984, "Koinonia").
Since the nature of practice and the analysis of actions and social phenomena vary greatly among these theorists, the term practice theory designates at best a family of accounts. Beyond the vision of the social as a nexus of practice and the accompanying thesis of the social constitutional centrality of practice, practice theorists are united by the proposition that practical understanding and intelligibility are articulated in practices. Disagreement about the analysis of this site notwithstanding, these theorists concur that it is in practices that meaning is established in human life. Indeed, practices qualify as the basic social phenomenon because the understanding/intelligibility articulated within them (perhaps supplemented with normativity) is the basic ordering medium in social life. This position resembles a variety of other 20th-century social theories in promulgating the foundational significance of intelligibility. It differs from many (e.g., poststructural theories of textuality) in situating intelligibility within manifolds of activity. I should add that practice thinkers, as partisans of an ontological point of departure tangent to the master social either/or, are further linked both by critique of the foundational claims traditionally raised for individuals and wholes and by recognition of the significance of complexity and difference in social life.
This article seeks to further the practice approach to sociality by examining how practices and actions are entwined. What is the relation between practice and action, in particular, between the organization of practice and the determination of action? My narrative focuses on Bourdieu and Giddens, whose analyses are considerably more detailed and evince a deeper sensitivity to things practical than those of other practice theorists. Using Wittgenstein's incisive reflections on the articulation of practical understanding and intelligibility in practice, I argue that Bourdieu and Giddens overintellectualize practices and actions and that Wittgenstein's texts suggest how this can be avoided. What's more, although Wittgenstein did not construct a theory of practices or actions, his remarks, I suggest, motivate an account of these phenomena that furthers the practice agenda in social ontology. However, the implications of this account for the nature of the social, the constitution of social phenomena, the social constitution of individuals, and the establishment and linking of individuality and sociality through practices lie beyond the scope of the present article (see Schatzki 1996).
I. BOURDIEU AND GIDDENS ON PRACTICE AND ACTION
What is a Practice?
The term practice has fascinated thinkers and rallied polemics during the past 150 years of social thought. To a large extent, this reflects its status along with theory as two allegedly contrasting vocations. Although the notion of practice as involvement in political and/or economic affairs is hardly absent from Bourdieu's and Giddens's texts, two other connotations of the term define the practices they analyze: (1) practices as spatially-temporally extended manifolds of actions and (2) practice as the carrying out of actions.
Practices are interwoven activities in a given social domain such as agriculture, cooking, the economy, and politics. Each is a spatialtemporal manifold3 of actions whose constituents form a nexus-as opposed to an aggregation-in existing only in conjunction with other members of the manifold. Bourdieu and Giddens differ about what this involves, but the general point is that practices are ontologically more fundamental than actions;4 the identity (being) of at least most, if not all, actions is tied into practices. Individualist theories, by contrast, accord priority to action, tying the identity of particular actions to properties of the individuals who perform them (e.g., goals, intentions, and other mental states), and treat practices as contingent agglomerations of already constituted actions. Whereas on practice accounts the actions that comprise a practice are governed essentially by something in common, those comprising social phenomena on individualist analyses are governed by the conjunction of the relevant, only circumstantially identical or interwoven properties of individuals.
The second notion of practice defining the object of Bourdieu's and Giddens's accounts is that of performing an action or carrying out a practice of the first sort. This notion denotes the doing-the activity or energization-through which action takes place. Since it names the activity at the core of human life, it is central to any analysis of human existence. It is also closely related to the first sort of practice. The actions that comprise a practice are only in being performed. Hence, practice in the sense of doing actualizes and sustains practices in the sense of spatial-temporal nexuses of doings.
The practice theories of Bourdieu and Giddens are accounts of both sorts of practice at once.5 They specify the organization of action nexuses, that which unifies actions as a manifold, while also detailing that which governs the performance of individual actions. This formulation might suggest that practice theories contain two disparate components, one concerned with the organization of practices, another with the determination of actions. These formulaically distinct components are in fact two sides of a single account, for Bourdieu and Giddens treat the organization of practices as identical and/or homologous with the determination of individual actions. This coincidence reflects the facts that nexuses of action exist only insofar as their constituent actions are performed and that the being of an action is tied to the manifold of which it is part. Although Bourdieu and Giddens disagree about the extent of identity or homologous structuring, delineations of the common structure of practices and actions are central to their accounts. Each theory's particular and differentlooking accounts of the organization of practice and the determination of action results from the application and differing roles of the common structure in different domains. I add, parenthetically, that the coincidence between a practice and its constituent actions does not imply that all properties of practices are inscribed in the determination of action. The characteristics of practice nexuses, for instance, are generally not transcribed there.
Bourdieu: Habitus and Practices
My discussions of Bourdieu and Giddens focus on their abstract, theoretical accounts of practice and action (i.e., Bourdieu 1976,1990b; Giddens 1979,1984) and consider neither the remaining wealth of their theoretical corpora nor the relation of these accounts to their empirical or more empirical investigations (for discussion of the relation of empirics and theory in Bourdieu, see Robbins 1991, chaps. 8 and 9). My presentation also highlights certain aspects of their accounts (above all, practical understanding) while de-emphasizing other important components (e.g., power). I do this because the bearing of Wittgenstein's texts on relations between practice and action centers on the nature of practical understanding and because Bourdieu's and Giddens's analyses of this understanding underlie many further components of their wider accounts. Their analyses here are also less attended to in the secondary literature.
Bourdieu's governing intuition is that practices are self-perpetuating. Practices, in his scheme, are the interwoven activities (or games) carried out in a specific domain of practice, or field. Activities in a given field are produced by dispositions, which are acquired under the objective conditions characterizing this field and, structured homologously with these objective conditions, produce actions that perpetuate the practices and conditions found there. Bourdieu calls these dispositions habitus.
The common structure of fields and habitus is most clearly revealed in Bourdieu's analysis of the latter. The first thing to note is that habitus is responsible not just for action, but for thought, understanding, motivation, and perception as well. These dispositions maintain, moreover, a twofold relation to action: they generate actions, that is, causally produce them, while also selecting which actions to generate. Of greatest significance in the present context is Bourdieu's analysis of habitus as the selection principle of practice. The actions that habitus selects are sensible and reasonable (e.g., Bourdieu 1990b, 14, 50). Sensible and reasonable means first, that an action is appropriate given the situation and the functions of action in that situation and second, that it makes sense to the actor, that is, to someone whose dispositions have been formed within certain practices (e.g., Bourdieu 1976, 79;1990b, 60). It follows that the actions habitus selects will also seem sensible and reasonable to other actors who have grown up and are accustomed to the same practices and conditions. Correlatively, the actions of these other people will make sense to the actor. The homology of the habitus of actors who grow up and live amid the same practice-established objective conditions further ensures that the actions they individually perform add up to regular, unified, and systematic (Bourdieu 1990b, 59) practices.
Most important, the selection of action obeys what Bourdieu calls "practical logic." Practical logic is a representation of the principles habitus observes in selecting actions. In any context, habitus selects actions by producing (a) a definition of the situation of action (which assigns meanings to objects, persons, and events; delineates a probable upcoming future; and prescribes things to do/say and not to do/say) and (b) a definition of the functions of action in that situation (Bourdieu 1976,142;1990b, 267). Following the Saussurian intuition that meaning devolves from differences, Bourdieu contends that these definitions are composed via systems of difference, which in Bourdieu are oppositions. Examples are day versus night, wet versus dry, soft versus hard, smooth versus rough, and hot versus cold. The oppositions that habitus wields form families, each based on a fundamental opposition, sets of which vary among societies.
Practical logic, then, is a description of the principles that govern the definition of the situations and functions of action through the construction and application of families of oppositions. Although Bourdieu never spells this out precisely, it is reasonable to suppose that objects, persons, and events acquire meaning by being subsumed into the families of oppositions; that probable futures and prescribed/proscribed actions are delineated on the basis of these meanings; and that the functions of actions follow from these assignments and delineations. In this way, the selection of action is structured by oppositions.
I note that the action that best fits the definition of the functions of action in a given situation is often the action that maximizes the actor's capital. Bourdieu argues that practice generally follows the logic of the maximization of capital, not only material (economic) capital, but social and symbolic as well (Bourdieu 1976,183;1990b, 16). With regard to the governing of action, this presumably means that habitus observes this logic in selecting which of those actions that could fulfill the functions of action is the one performed.
Three features of this account should be highlighted. The first is the strongly teleological character just referred to. Not only does privileging the maximization of capital lash action to one overall sort of end, but analyzing actions as selected through definitions of their situation and functions obscures the practical significance of emotions and moods. The second notable feature is that the definitions that select actions are multidimensional propositions. The third feature is the thesis that habitus alone determines activity. This follows from the claim that habitus generates other putative activity-determining phenomena such as thoughts and motivations (including ends, projects, and plans) (Bourdieu 1976, 21, 72; cf. 1990b, 61).
The system of oppositions that structures the selection of action also structures the organization of practices. Bourdieu's account of this organization is problematic, however, for he insists in his theoretical work (see note 10 on other texts) that it is not with practices but with the objective conditions established by them that dispositions are homologously structured.
These objective conditions have two basic dimensions: statistical regularities and networks of groups. Examples of the relevant statistical regularities are price curves, chances of access to higher education, and frequency of holidays. Groups are objective entities (a) defined by the possession of certain cultural, symbolic, and material capitals (thus by age, education, occupation, possessions, rank, family, and the like) and (b) marked by the pursuit of certain actions and lifestyles. One extremely important type of group is economic class, which is an ensemble of individuals occupying similar positions within the distribution of economic capital. Bourdieu's idea is that within a given field (and thus more generally in a world composed of such and such games in this and that field), such parameters as prices, chances of access, and frequencies of holidays are statistically regular and the particular prices, chances, and frequencies people face reflect the groups to which they belong (thus the capitals they possess) as well as relations among these groups (for discussion, see Bourdieu 1985).
Problematic here are not the objective conditions per se, but how they can even in principle be homologous to habitus. Suppose that certain statistical regularities having to do with prices, frequencies, and the like track economic class-specifically, the distribution of economic, in possible conjunction with other, capitals. The structure of these regularities would then consist of conjunctions of the values assumed by different socioeconomic variables together with whatever mathematically or linguistically describable relations characterize either the regularities or the sets of conjuncts. These conjunctions and relations are clearly not homologous with the oppositionbased structure of habitus's definitions of the situation. Bourdieu is right, of course, that people belonging to a given economic class tend to face similar frequencies of holidays and the like. He may also be right that such people tend to act in similar ways, at least insofar as their actions are keyed to those conditions. But these facts in no way suggest that their dispositions and the collocation of statistical regularities are structured alike. It is logically wiser to postulate that habitus is structured homologously with the action manifolds it produces.
Indeed, pace his general formulations, in Bourdieu's analyses of particular fields (e.g., cooking, farming, and gift giving) in the texts under consideration, what in these fields the families of oppositions that structure habitus are analyzed as organizing are practices, not the objective conditions practices establish (cf. Bourdieu 1976, 130-157; 1990b, book II). The Kabylian cooking cycle, for instance, exhibits a temporal organization of what is cooked when that is structured by such oppositions as boiled/roasted, sweet/salt, bland/spiced, and wet/dry Similarly, the layout of the built environment, the house and its spaces (see Bourdieu 1990b, 271-83) as well as the wider arrangements of towns and agricultural fields, exhibits an opposition-based organization. It turns out that what the system of oppositions that structures the selection of actions simultaneously structures is the spatial-temporal organization of the nexuses of which these actions are parts.
Giddens: Rules, Resources, and Practices
Giddens's guiding intuition, much like Bourdieu's, concerns the perpetuation, in his words, the "space-time extension," of practices. As he sees it, practices extend themselves by continuously renewing the conditions that determine them. For both theorists, therefore, structures are the "medium and result" (Giddens 1979, 69; 1984, 25) of practices (for a third version of this figure, see Bhaskar 1979). I should add that for Giddens, practices form constellations called systems, whose structures encompass relations among the structures of practices.