A dialogical conception of Habitus: allowing human freedom and restoring the social basis of learning

BOURDIEU’S CONSTRUCT OF HABITUS AND CRITIQUE The current sociological understanding of habitus expressed in the work of Pierre Bourdieu as its key academic construct emphasizes the importance of habits for human action. Bourdieu understands human behavior as fundamentally cultural; rejecting behaviorist view of cognition and action as related to a stimulus—response chains, the French sociologist posits instead that human action emanates from internalized habits (Swartz, 2002). Bourdieu, utilizes the concepts of field and habitus—the latin word for habit(1990/1977), to critically analyze the microsphere of society and economy elevated as habituated human action (Bourdieu, 2005). Bourdieu understands action as habituated, related to the unconscious reproduction of external social fields. This allows habitus to be this foundational concept it is in Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology, examining societies as socio-economic relations and classes, rather than actors. His emphasis on the social context’s influence on human habits being internalized relatively unconsciously is important, as it looks to action-interaction sequences as habituated, opposing behaviorist (Swartz, 2002) models of human action as simple stimulus-response chains, or objectivist accounts. Bourdieu’s habitus emphasizes two things relevant to human action: (a) opposing consciousness to habit(us), which continues the modern sociological tradition from Weber (Camic, 1986) and, (b) the socially learnt (externally located) nature of habit(us). A habit is viewed as an unconscious principle of action, a deeply internalized set of dispositions, schemas and ways of knowing (Swartz, 2002) which locate habits in a cultural, economic, or social field. In our opinion, the main problem in Bourdieu’s view of habitus is that it largely accounts for human action being reproductive of an existing field, rather than transformative. Because the Bourdieuian habitus is theorized as an adopted “thrown way of being” in the world (Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang, 2014 forthcoming) it blocks human freedom with social bonds, as action is posited to emerge directly from the internationalization of norms of relational exchange in the outside field(s) of practice. Our critique regarding Bourdieu’s (quintessential) sociological habitus is that its conception explains processes accounting for human behavior regulation to carry forward existing conventions and rules, reproductive of existing social bonds; it is less mindful to processes of critical questioning or transformation of an existing status quo and the role of human cognition in generating action which can interrupt and interrogate the field. To explain our critique further, even when Bourdieu accepts that actors can generate new action, he understands the “new” as habits from earlier socialization. Our main concern with Bourdieu’s view is that looking to habitus as outside introjection means that individual habitus is in the best case “an active residue of (one’s) past” (Swartz, 2002, p. 63S) which is Bourdieu’s view! But we wish to critique this as it theoretically misses to account for the possibility for human freedom, which can be appreciated by reference to other understandings of habitus (Aristotle’s for example).