Problems and Perspectives in Cultural Studies - Case Study Example

Running head: PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES IN CULTURAL STUDIES Problems and Perspectives in Cultural Studies [Writer’s name] [Institution’s name] Table of Contents Problems and Perspectives in Cultural Studies Chapter 1 Introduction In this essay I shall highlight the fact that Pierre Bourdieu and Michel De Certeau have different theoretical approaches to the problem of understanding social practice, but both are attentive to the gap between what people do and what people say that they do. In order to confirm my assumption that both theorists have different points of view on the gap between what people do and what people say that they do, I shall use relevant literature from the texts of the above mentioned theorists. Chapter 2 Discussion Pierre Bourdieu believed that the beliefs, values and ways of thinking, acting and speaking of a social class were embodied within the individual. Where as According Michel de Certeau Those without place occupy space and are therefore transitory. These people without traditional power bases are seen as relying on tactics rather than strategies and must make due with what is available. In other words, they can calculate and prescribe from a position of power. In The Practice of Everyday Life is instructive on investigating spaces of resistance. For de Certeau those in power with established strongholds are considered to have place and are therefore able to work strategically where as Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and field was concerned with overcoming the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism. Objectivists ignore agency and the agent, while subjectivists focus on the way agents think about, account for or represent the social world. Bourdieu favoured a position that is structuralist without losing sight of the agent (Ritzer, 2004 p 23). To side step the objectivist subjectivist dilemma, Bourdieu focused on practice, which he saw as the outcome of the relationship between structure and agency. He labelled his own orientation 'constructivist structuralism' or 'genetic structuralism' (Ritzer, 2004 p 25). This is because he saw the analysis of objective structures (those of different fields) as inseparable from the analysis of the genesis. Bourdieu argued that social structures also exist in the social world itself. He saw objective structures as independent of the consciousness and will of agents. Bourdieu's constructively ignores subjectivity and intentionality. He thought it important to include in his sociology the way people, on the basis of their position in social space, perceive and construct the social world. However, the perception and construction that take place in the social world are both animated and constrained by structures (Ritzer, 2004 p 27). Although habitus is an internalized structure that constrains thought and choice of action, it does not determine them. The habitus merely suggests what people should think and what they should choose to do. People have the ability to engage in a conscious deliberation of options, although this decision-making process does in fact reflect the operation if the habitus (Ritzer, 2004 p 30). The habitus is the concept for which Bourdieu is most famous. Habitus are the 'mental or cognitive structures' through which people deal with the social world (Ritzer, 2004 p 24). People both produce their practices, and perceive and evaluate them. As a result, habitus reflect objective divisions in class structures such as age groups, genders, and social classes. Taking the issue of social class for example, an individuals tastes and preferences can often illustrate to what class they belong. For instance, perhaps people from the upper class would be more likely to appreciate the theatre than those from the lower class, as this is how they have been educated. In other words, those who occupy the same position in the social world tend to have similar habitus. This can be seen in the fact that art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences1. The habitus allows people to make sense out of the social world, but the existence of a multitude of habitus means that the social world and its structures do not impose themselves uniformly on all actors (Ritzer, 2004 p 23). Habitus is durable and transposable, transferable from one field to another. However, it is possible for people to have an inappropriate habitus and to suffer from what Bourdieu called hysteresis. The habitus is a unifying principle which associates the characteristics of a position into a single lifestyle, that is, a single set of choices of goods and practices etc. 2. Moving on from the habitus, the next key area of Bourdieu's work to focus on is the 'field'. While habitus exists in the minds of actors, field exist outside their minds. The field is a network of relations among the objective positions within it. The occupants of these positions may be either agents or institutions and they are constrained by the structure of the field 3. Social space is constructed in such a way that agents or groups are distributed in it according to their position in statistical distributions based on two principles of differentiation 4. Where as in Certeau‘s theory of The Practice of Everyday Life Perhaps the most important characteristic has emerged which is that Certeau’s gives the difference between the concepts of strategy as well as tactics. Certeau relates these "strategies" with institutions he then relates both of these with the structures of power; he believes that "tactics" are wisely utilized via individuals to make room for their own selves in environments that are completely defined by means of strategies. He believes that "the city” is a "concept,” that has been formed as a result of the government’s strategic management, corporations, as well as other functioning institutional bodies who make things such as maps that show the city as a integrated whole, the illustrations in these maps are like when someone looks down from a great height and can see everything as an integrated whole. By division, the person who is walking at street level walks in ways that are premeditated and by no means completely determined through the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts or wandering without direction although the network of streets has a well organized construction. This concretely strongly supports Certeau's statement that everyday life works throughout a process of poaching on the terrain of others, recombining the set of laws as well as commodities that previously existed in culture in a way that is predisposed, however never entirely determined, via those rules as well as products. According to Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from erstwhile practices of daily survival for the reason that it is recurring as well as unconscious. In this milieu Certeau’s research of everyday life is not the study of “popular culture,” nor is it the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power and authority. In its place, Certeau attempts to sum up the way individuals unconsciously find the way in which each and everything from city streets to fictional texts. Bourdieu’s ‘generative structuralism’ examines the formation of the ‘fields’ within which cultural institutions and works operate and take on meaning, and the ‘dispositions’ which cultural agents bring to their work; Certeau develops what one might call a cultural pragmatics that focuses on the often unpredictable reemployments to which users subject the cultural resources at their disposal5. Bourdieu explains that practice, or what people actually do is both constrained by, and develops as a response to, the rules and conventions for culture. Pierre Bourdieu believed that the beliefs, values and ways of thinking, acting and speaking of a social class were “embodied “within the individual. For him, if culture and material relations form a state of objective reality, this latter is only expressed and reproduced in ‘practice’; through a practical sense. He begins his book, Outline of a Theory of Practice by means of a well known quote from Marx criticizing a little materialism that does not relate to human activity as being a ‘sense’ activity: The external object, reality, the sensible world, is molded in the shape of an object or an insight; nevertheless not as real human activity, as practice, in a subjective manner. This is why the active aspect was developed by idealism, in opposition to materialism but only in an abstract way, since idealism naturally does not know real concrete activity as such6. Bourdieu strongly believes that objectivity can only be discovered in the nature of individuals’ practice. Objective structures are not basically inculcated as a manifestation of material relations. Human sense activity like social products arises historically in time however this can be exposed in actions of individuals. The habitus constitutes Bourdieu's most ambitious attempt to ground and explain practices in terms of both specific and general sociocultural contexts, rather than in terms of the grand narratives of history (Marxism), psychoanalysis (the Oedipus Complex), structuralism (LéviStrauss's ‘deep structures’) or ‘authentic being’ . Habitus can be understood as, on the one hand, the historical and cultural production of individual practices since contexts, laws, rules and ideologies all speak through individuals, who are never entirely aware that this is happening and, on the other hand, the individual production of practices since the individual always acts from self-interest7. Bourdieu has tried to understand and explain the relationship between people's practices and the contexts in which those practices occur. Bourdieu refers to these contexts discourses, institutions, values, rules and regulations which produce and transform attitudes and practices as ‘cultural fields’. In contrast to field, habitus is internal in nature and refers to the taken for granted, shared meanings and behaviors utilized by individuals within a social group. It is “A classification of lasting as well as identical dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at each moment as a milieu of perceptions, appreciations, and events and makes achievable the achievement of noticeably diversified tasks”8. In contrast to rational choice theory, which assumes that social action is determined by conscious, objective, rational decisions aimed at achieving specific goals, habitus follows a practical or pragmatic logic which may be imprecise, pre-objective and fuzzy. Bourdieu again uses a sport analogy to clarify the concept. He equates habitus with the “feel or sense of the game” that enables players to perform. A player maneuvers on the field according to his/her perceptions and general feel for the game more than according to conscious, rational, decision making processes. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the correctness of practices and their constancy over time, more reliable than all formal rules and explicit norms9. As the title of Bourdieu's book The Logic of Practice (1990) suggests, it is through examination of practices, and thereby field and habitus, that one can begin to understand a social group and its operating logic. Practices embody the dialectical relationship between field and habitus. Habitus is the internalization of the external by which basic dimensions of social life, such as gender, race, ethnicity, class and occupation come to guide our attitudes, values, perceptions and dispositions in ways in which we are seldom aware. It is this system that, in interaction with fields, gives rise to specific attitudes, feelings and dispositions. Conversely, social structures do not exist in isolation from social actors but are created, maintained, and transformed through the social relations made possible through a shared habitus. By investigating the relationship between field and habitus, we are able to move beyond more traditional theoretical frameworks that either focus on social actors and their immediate values and perceptions or take a more macro approach and focus on social structures. Compared to phenomenological approaches, social and economic conditions play a more central role in Bourdieu's framework The concept of habitus is similar to phenomenological approaches in that it explores the “taken for granted” which makes social interaction possible. However, it is significantly different when utilized in combination with Bourdieu's concept of field. Similarly, the concept of field is more dynamic than deterministic structural approaches that do not address the relationship between the objective and the subjective and that give limited attention to the role of social actors. Michel DeCerteau broke up this union and transformed everydayness into a static and indefinite figure of social life characterized by the endless circulation of strategies and tactics, resembling the interminable game of musical chairs Adorno once observed of Karl Mannheim's conception of sociology of knowledge. Everyday life has been associated with everything from forgetfulness to housework to walking; what interests me is just how it gets defined differently in different contexts not what it is but how it works. De Certeau implies is that an explicit emphasis on the series and the every day should take us beyond simply perpetuating dominant ideology; the unexamined logic of capitalism encourages an unthinking replication. Michel de Certeau sees the everyday as the place where the mundane and the utopic meet. The traditional denigration of the everyday and the minor as simply mundane degraded, inauthentic, alienating is meant to bracket or occlude such troubling paradoxes. The idea that the everyday might represent a kind of practice marks Michel de Certeau's contribution to the theory of the everyday, a characterization of everyday life inextricably connected to the city. De Certeau takes as the symbol of the practice of the everyday, of the relentlessly pedestrian, simply that: what he calls the enunciatory practice of walking in the city. De Certeau writes that the everyday recounts "moves, not truths" As one explores the terrain of these practices, something is constantly slipping away, something that can be neither said nor 'taught' but must be practiced. His concentration on the city echoes the theorists of the everyday that precede him it is an understanding of the everyday that is so prevalent and central that de Certeau, like these other theorists, almost simply assumes it. De Certeau takes as the symbol of the practice of the everyday, of the relentlessly pedestrian, simply that: what he calls the enunciatory practice of walking in the city. De Certeau builds on theorists that came before him in this field his complete concentration is directed towards the city as well as the street. He states that the everyday is in the street if it is anyplace however he does not emphasis a great deal on streets themselves as him main goals was to emphasis on everyday, as in what people do in the street and why they do it. The Practice of Everyday Life, a book devoted to the man on the street, makes negotiating the complicated sequence of the city's streets a shorthand for the practice of the everyday. Practices like these are intended to relate to the subject's relations to ideology. The response of the man in the street to this practice suggests something different (different even perhaps from de Certeau's view of it) about the subject's relation to ideology. Far from being the empty as well as unidentified individual the man on the street seems an advantaged individual to those of "us" who can only wish to have his privileges, most particularly his boredom: walking the streets is a great deal unusual activity for women, as well as for those racial groups who are usually called the turban underclass. For de Certeau, every day practices similar to walking in the city are eventually the recurrence of the procedure of aloofness, of differentiation from/indifference to the mother's body, the joyful treatment that can make the motherly entity go. Chapter 3 Conclusion The only similarities between the two as that Bourdieu and Certeau's notion that the structure of learned professions alters the way knowledge and the power associated with it are originated and distributed. By the above given literature in the discussion it can be concluded that Pierre Bourdieu and Michel De Certeau have different theoretical approaches to the problem of understanding social practice, but both are attentive to the gap between what people do and what people say that they do. References Bourdieu, P (1986); Distinction. Routledge: London, p 10. Bourdieu, P (1998); Practical Reason. Polity Press: Cambridge, p 15. Bourdieu, Pierre (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press p 214 findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3971/is_200307/ai_n9245331 retrieved on November 11 2007 http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mitchell/glossary2004/practice.htm retrieved on November 11 2007 http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/theatre_s/cp/publications/centrepubs/ccps_paper_7.pdf retrieved on November 11 2007 Pierre Bourdieu 1990, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, See in particular the chapter “Structures, habitus, practices,” pp55, 57. Ritzer, G. and Goodman, D. (2004); Sociological Theory (6th ed.). McGraw-Hill: New York, pp 23-30 Read More