Habitus and Learning to Learn: Part II

Beyond the Content-Storage Metaphor

The underlying neural structures constitutive of habitus are procedural (Kolers & Roediger, 1984), based on motor-schemas constructed from the experience of interacting with persons, objects, and material culture in the socio-physical world (Gallese & Lakoff, 2005; Malafouris, 2013). Habitus affords the capacity to learn because we are embodied beings endowed with the capacities and liabilities afforded by our sensory receptors and motor effectors. In this respect, the neurocognitive recasting of habitus is thoroughly consistent with the “embodied and embedded” turn in contemporary cognitive science.

Traditional accounts of learning rely primarily on the content-storage metaphor (Roediger, 1980). Under this classical conceptualization, experience modifies our cognitive makeup mainly via the recording of content-bearing representations into some sort of mental system dedicated to their inscription and “storage,” most plausibly what cognitive psychologists refer to as “long-term memory.” Because the habitus is seen as the locus of social and experiential learning, and as a sort of repository of past experience, it is tempting to conceptualize it using this content-storage metaphor.

In the current formulation, the metaphor of long-term memory storage emerges as a highly misleading one, and one that would severely limit the conceptual potential of the notion of habitus. In its place, I propose that the habitus contains the “record” of past experiences but it does not store these records as a set of individualized content-bearing “facts” or “propositions” to be accessed as (declarative) “knowledge” or as (episodic) memories that can be recalled in the form of a recreation of previous experiences (Michaelian, 2016). Explicit forms of memory are reconstructive rather than restorative, and rely on the procedural traces encoded in habitus.

The same goes for the procedures generative of goals and plans of action the conscious positing of a future project (Williams, Huang, & Bargh, 2009). The (consciously posited) goal-oriented model of action, rather than being the fundamental framework’ that constrains the very capacity to make meaningful statements about action, as Talcott Parsons (1937) once proposed, is reinterpreted under a habitus-based conception of action as a cognitively unnatural activity (Bourdieu, 2000). Thus, the deliberative positing of a possible future rather than being taken as the point of departure or as the privileged site where a special sort of “agency” is located, must be re-conceptualized, as a puzzling, context-dependent phenomenon in need of special explanation.

Offline Cognition as Habitual Reconstruction

Recent work in the psychology of memory and “mental time travel” support the idea that both the seeming recollection of past events, the imagining of counterfactual and hypothetical scenarios, and the simulation of possible future events, all share an underlying neural basis and even share some recognizable features at the level of phenomenology. Rather than being faithful records of past experiences, autobiographical memories are as reconstructive and hypothetical as the (embodied) simulation and situated conceptualization of future experiences (Michaelian, 2011). What all of these socio-cognitive states do seem to share is a suspension of our (default) embodied engagement with the world (Glenberg, 1997). As such, they represent exceptional states removed at least one step away from “action” and not the core prototypical cases upon which to build a coherent model of action. Habit-based action made possible by habitus is the default, and these other more contemplative and intellectualist mode the exception.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to posit to sharp a divide between habitus and scholastic contemplation of possible futures, counterfactual states, or representational pasts. All of these more intellectualist and content-ful states are rooted in habitus, if only indirectly. The habitus provides the underlying set of capacities making possible the (re)creation of mental “content” on the spot, via processes of situated conceptualization, embodied simulation, and affective-looping (Barsalou, 2005; Damasio, 1999). Nevertheless, while the online activation of facts and memories —for instance during an interview setting—is made possible via habitus, these objectified products are not to be taken as the constituents of habitus.

Habitus and Learning to Learn

In this respect, the habitus stores nothing that can be legitimately referred to as “content.” Instead, the primary form of learning that organizes the neural structures constitutive of habitus is the one that sets the stage for, and actually makes possible, the traditional forms of episodic and declarative learning-s, and the context-sensitive recreation of those contents, which come later in ontogenetic development. When the habitus forms and acquires structure in childhood what the person is doing is in essence “learning to learn.”

As noted in the previous post, the notion of learning to learn has a somewhat obscure pedigree in social theory, but it has figured prominently in the accounts given by Gregory Bateson, who called “deutero-learning,” and in Hayek’s proposal of a groundbreaking theory of perception in the Sensory Order. In both of these accounts, learning is not taken for granted as a pre-existing feature’ of the human agent, but the very ability to be modified by the world is conceived as something that must be produced by our immersion and coupling to the world. The world must prepare the agent to learn before learning can take place.

The standard model of learning takes what Bourdieu referred to as the “scholastic” situation as its primary exemplar. Under this characterization, to learn is to commit a content-bearing proposition (e.g. a belief or statement) to memory. The problem with this conception, as Bourdieu noted, is that it takes for granted the tremendeous amount of previous development, immersion, and “connection-weight setting” that happend in the previous (home) environment to prepare the person for these forms of scholastic learning. The proposed habitus-based model of learning takes the decidedly non-scholastic case of skill-acquisition as its primary exemplar of learning (Dreyfus, 1996; Polanyi, 1958).

Procedural learning, in this sense, results in the picking up of the structural features that characterize the most repetitive (and thus experientially consistent) patterns of the early environment. This is learning about the formal structure of the early world not a passive recording of facts. The structure of habitus primarily mirrors the systematic, repetitive structure of the world in terms of the overall constitution (e.g., empirical and relational co-occurrences) and temporal rhythms of the environment, especially that characteristic of the earliest experiences (e.g., the environment that predates “learning” as traditionally conceived).

Subsequent experiences will then be actively fitted into this pre-experiential (but nonetheless produced by experience) neural structure. In connectionist terms, the procedural learning giving rise to habitus is essentially equivalent “setting the weights” that will remain a durable, relatively resistant to change, part of our neuro-cognitive architecture. These weights partially fix our overall style of perception, appreciation and classification of all subsequent experience. As Philosopher Paul Churchland puts it,

…the brain represents the general or lasting features of the world with a lasting configuration of its myriad synaptic connections strengths. That configuration of carefully turned connections dictates how the brain will react to the world…To acquire those capacities for recognition and response is to learn about the general causal structure of the world, or at least, of that small part of it that is relevant to one’s own practical concerns. That knowledge is embodied in the peculiar configuration of one’s…synaptic connections. During learning and development in childhood, these connection strengths, or “weights” as they are often called, are to progressively more useful values. These adjustments…are steered most dramatically by the unique experience that each child encounters (1996, p. 5)

Accordingly, and in contrast to the view construing habitus as a mnemonic repository of experiential contents the connectionist recasting of habitus as the set of synaptic weights coming to structure further experiential activation, reveals that the habitus stores coarse-grained structural patterns keyed to “reflect” previously encountered environmental regularities and not fine-grained experiential content.

The experiential content that the person is exposed to further down the developmental line will be made sense of using the (perceived, classified and made part of practical action schemes) synaptic weights acquired in early experience. Thus, as a precondition for subsequent experience and (skillful) practical action in the world, pre-experiential learning and adjustment have to happen first. The notion of habitus is useful precisely because it captures an ontogenetic reality: the fact that this learning to learn is sticky and produces durable cognitive structures that modulate the way in which persons are allowed to be further modified by experience.

As the cognitive scientist Margaret Wilson puts it:

Research on skill-learning and expertise has primarily been conducted in the context of understanding how skills are acquired. What has been neglected is the fact that when the experiment is done, or when the real-life skill has been mastered, it leaves behind a permanently changed cognitive system. This may not matter much in the case of learning a single video game or a strategy for solving Sudoku; but the cumulative effect of a lifetime of numerous expertises may result in a dramatically different cognitive landscape across individuals.
(Wilson 2008: 182)

If the active construction, initializing, and relative equilibration (“setting the weights”) of pre-experiential neural structures necessary for making sense of further experience was not an ontogenetic reality and a presupposition for traditional forms of learning, the notion of habitus would not be a superfluous, gratuitous adjunct in social theory. But the cognitive reality is that “the rate of synaptic change does seem to go down steadily with increasing age”(Churchland 1996: 6). This statement is not incompatible with recent findings of neural “plasticity” lasting throughout adulthood, but it does force the analyst to distinguish different types of plasticity in ontogenetic time and the new capacities they are attuned to and result in. This means that a structured habitus is the ineluctable result of any type of (normal) development. Thus, exposure to repeated regularities will create a well-honed habitus reflective of the structure of the regularities encountered early on. It is in this sense that the habitus cannot but be a product of early experiential (socio-physical) realities.

References

Barsalou, L. W. (2005). Situated conceptualization. Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science, 619, 650.

Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian Meditations. Stanford University Press.

Churchland, P. M. (1996). The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey Into the Brain. MIT Press.

Damasio, A. R. (1999). The Feeling of what Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Harcourt Brace.

Dreyfus, H. L. (1996). The current relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 4(4), 1–16.

Gallese, V., & Lakoff, G. (2005). The Brain’s concepts: the role of the Sensory-motor system in conceptual knowledge. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22(3), 455–479.

Glenberg, A. M. (1997). What memory is for: Creating meaning in the service of action. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 20(01), 41–50.

Kolers, P. A., & Roediger, H. L., III. (1984). Procedures of mind. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 23(4), 425–449.

Malafouris, L. (2013). How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. MIT Press.

Michaelian, K. (2011). Generative memory. Philosophical Psychology, 24(3), 323–342.

Michaelian, K. (2016). Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past. MIT Press.

Parsons, T. (1937). The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press.

Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge, towards a post critical epistemology. Chicago, IL: University of.

Roediger, H. L., 3rd. (1980). Memory metaphors in cognitive psychology. Memory & Cognition, 8(3), 231–246.

Williams, L. E., Huang, J. Y., & Bargh, J. A. (2009). The Scaffolded Mind: Higher mental processes are grounded in early experience of the physical world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 39(7), 1257–1267.

Wilson, Margaret. 2010. “The Re-Tooled Mind: How Culture Re-Engineers Cognition.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 5 (2-3): 180–87.

Habitus and Learning to Learn: Part I

In this and subsequent posts, I will attempt to revise, reconceptualize and update the concept of habitus using the theoretical and empirical resources of contemporary cognitive neuroscience and cognitive social science.

I see this step as necessary if this Bourdieusian notion is to have a future in social theory. Conversely, if no such recasting is coherent or successful, then it might be time to retire the idea of habitus.

My reconstruction of habitus in what follows is necessarily selective. I keep historical and conceptual exegesis to a minimum (see e.g. Lizardo 2004 for that), and I will not engage in an attempt to convince you that the concept of habitus is a useful one in social science research. I presume that my undertaking this effort presupposes that the notion of habitus is useful and that its “updating” in terms of contemporary advances in the cognitive sciences is a worthwhile exercise.

There is a theoretical payoff in this endeavor. By connecting the notion of habitus as a conceptual tool for social analysis with emerging developments in the cognitive and neurosciences a lot of standing problems in social scientific conceptualizations of cognition, perception, categorization, and action are shown to be either pseudo-problems, or are resolved in more satisfactory ways than in proposals made from non-cognitive standpoints. In what follows, I address a series of the theoretical issues that I believe are properly recast using a version of the habitus concept informed by cognitive neuroscience, beginning with the notion of “learning” and ending with a reconsideration of the notion of categories and categorization.

The habitus as a “learning to learn” cognitive structure

The habitus is a set of durable cognitive structures that develop in order to allow the person to exploit the most general features of experience most effectively. These structures are constitutive of our capacity to develop an intuitive, routine grasp of events, entities, and their inter-relations and yet are also the product of experience. In neuroscientific terms, this presupposes “a durable transformation of the body through the reinforcement or weakening of synaptic connections” (Bourdieu 2000, 133).

As the economist and social theorist Friedrich Hayek once put it, “the apparatus by means of which we learn about the external world is itself the product of a kind of experience” (Hayek 1952, 165). The cognitive structures constitutive of habitus themselves, are a product of a special kind of learning, the process of “learning to learn” (something that the anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1972) once referred to as “deutero-learning”). From this point of view, “the process of experience does not begin with sensations or perceptions, but necessarily precedes them: it operates on physiological events and arranges them into a structure or order which becomes the basis of their `mental’ significance” (Hayek 1952: 166).

The experience-generated cognitive structures constitutive of habitus are designed to capture the most significant axes of variation–in essence the abstract causal and temporal signatures–of the early environment (Foster 2018). They make possible subsequent practical exploitation and even the fairly unnatural contemplative “recording” of later experiences in the form of episodic and semantic learning. The habitus itself is not a repository of “contents” in the traditional sense (e.g., a “storehouse” of individuated beliefs, attitudes, and the like) but it is generative of our ability to actively retrieve the experiential, mnemonic and imaginative qualities that form the core of our everyday experience.

Beyond Plasticity

From the point of view of a neuro-cognitive construal of habitus as a learning-to-learn structure, extant notions of learning (or socialization) in sociology come off as limited. Most consist of general accounts regarding the “plasticity” of the organism (Berger and Luckmann 1966), and are usually anxious to separate whatever is innate or biologically specified from that which comes from experience. At the extreme, we find accounts suggesting that nothing specific comes from biology and that all specific content is, therefore, “learned.”

Most social theorists, after making sure to set down this rather crude division, are satisfied in having secured a place for the cultural and social sciences in having delimited the scope of that which can be directly given by “biology.” Most analysts are then satisfied to establish broad statements about how humans are unique because so much of their cultural equipment has to be acquired from the world via experience, or how the human animal is essentially incomplete, or how biological evolution and the biological “inner code” requires reliance on externalized, epigenetic cultural codes for its full expression and development (Geertz 1973).

The actual experiential and cognitive mechanisms making possible learning in the first place and the constraints that these mechanisms pose on any socio-cultural theory of learning are thought of as exogenous. Learning from experience just “happens” and the role of social science is simply to keep track, document and acknowledge the existence of the external origins of the contents so learned.

What is missing from these standard accounts? First, that persons are capable of learning or that the brain is plastic is a very important but preliminary point. Only the most narrowly misinformed nativist argument would fall when confronted with this fact. Second, the issue is not whether persons learn, but how to account for this ability without begging the question. In this respect, standard definitions of culture as that which is learned and standard definitions of persons as essentially “cultural animals,” are well-taken, but ultimately fail to make a substantively consequential statement. This views are limited because they fail to distinguish between different forms of learning, the accomplishment of which are presuppositions for others.

A neurocognitive conception of habitus can serve to re-specify the notion of learning in cultural analysis in a useful way. From the point of view of a neuroscientifically informed social theory (Turner 2007), it is not enough to acknowledge the commonplace observation that persons are modified by experience or that the current set of skills and abilities that a person commands is indeed a product of modification by experience. Instead, the key is to specify what exactly this modification consists of, and how it differs, for instance, from the experiential sort of “modification” we are constantly exposed to in our everyday life by virtue of being creatures capable of consciousness, or the modification that happens when learn a new propositional fact, or when form a new episodic memory as a result of being involved in some biographically salient event.

The neurocognitive recasting of habitus as learning-to-learn structure improves the standard account of learning by suggesting that all learning requires the early, systematic, and relatively durable modification of the person as a categorizing and perceiving agent. That is, before learning of the “usual” kind can begin (e.g. learning about propositional facts to be “stored” in semantic memory) a different sort of “learning” has to occur: the person must learn to form the pre-experiential structures that will have the function of bringing forth or disclosing a comprehensible world (in the phenomenological sense). This “deutero-learning” needs to be distinguished from the sort of recurrent experience-linked modification resulting in the acquisition of episodic (having a factual account of our personal biography) or propositional or declarative knowledge (knowledge that).

In a follow-up post, I’ll develop the implications of this distinction for contemporary understandings of enculturation and socialization in cultural analysis.

References

Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. University of Chicago Press.

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Anchor Books. New York: Doubleday.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Stanford University Press.

Foster, Jacob G. 2018. “Culture and Computation: Steps to a Probably Approximately Correct Theory of Culture.” Poetics 68 (June): 144–54.

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.

Hayek, F. A. 1952. The Sensory Order: An Inquiry Into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology. University of Chicago Press.

Lizardo, Omar. 2004. “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34 (4): 375–401.

Turner, Stephen P. 2007. “Social Theory as a Cognitive Neuroscience.” European Journal of Social Theory 10 (3): 357–74.

Culture, Cognition and “Socialization”

Culture and cognition studies in sociology are mainly concerned with the construction, transmission, and transformation of shared stocks of knowledge. This was clear in the classical theoretical foundations of contemporary work in the sociology of culture laid out in Parsons’s middle period functionalism (Parsons 1951) and in Berger and Luckmann’s decisive reworking of the Parsonian scheme from a phenomenological perspective (Berger and Luckmann 1966). In both traditions, the process of the transmission of knowledge and, with it, the creation and recreation of both conventional and novel forms of meaning was thought of as of the utmost importance. This was usually referred to, in its intergenerational aspect, as “socialization” (of newcomers into the established culture).

Despite its acknowledged importance, contemporary culture and cognition scholars in sociology have seldom laid out explicitly what are the consequences of taking cognition seriously for understanding socialization processes. The result is that sociologists live in a conceptual halfway house, with some misleading remnants of the functionalist and phenomenological traditions on socialization still forming part of the core conception of this process. This is coupled to the fact that, save for some signal exceptions (Corsaro and Rizzo 1988; Pugh 2009), sociologists seldom study children and primary socialization processes directly and thus lack a consistent body of empirical work to move theorizing forward. This is in contrast to the growing body of “apprenticeship ethnography” work that does deal with the issue of “secondary” socialization of adults (usually the ethnographer themselves) into new settings (e.g. Wacquant, Mears, Desmond, Winchester, etc.).

Outside of sociology, there is work, done under the broad umbrella of “psychological” or “cognitive” anthropology, that has dealt with the relevance of cognition to primary socialization processes in a more or less direct way. This work, despite its limitations, can serve as a good exemplar for sociologists as to the analytic benefits of this approach to the socialization process. Here I would like to focus on the exemplary work of anthropologist Christina Toren (2005) who provides one useful example of how a cognitive approach to the study of culture and socialization can be deployed in a profitable way. In particular, Toren’s work challenges the hegemonic account of socialization that pervades sociological thinking on the culture and cognition link while providing valuable starting insights to build on.

Toren notes that traditional anthropological and sociological theories of socialization presume that “with respect to cognition, to their grasp of particular concepts, children simply become—with perhaps some minor variations—what their elders already are” (1993, 461). Toren castigates this account for being “a-historical.” She points to studies of language acquisition that call into question the assumption that socialization consists in the transmission of ready-made models of adult culture to children. These studies show that children not just acquire the linguistic categories of the parental generation ready-made, but rather, engage in their own creative reconstruction of these categories (for recent work on this score see Tomasello 2005). In Toren’s view, “human cognition is a historical process because it constitutes—and in constituting inevitably transforms—the ideas and practices of which it appears to be the product” (1993: 461-462).

For Toren, to move beyond the restrictive account of socialization as the reproduction of the adult world, it is important to incorporate the inherently embodied essence of mind into our theorizing. This requires the recognition of the fact that, empirically, socio-mental and cultural phenomena are not exhausted by explicitly articulated knowledge processes and contents (see e.g. Bloch 1991). These language-mediated processes—which makes up the bulk of empirical material in contemporary sociology of culture—are just “the tip of the iceberg as against those unconscious processes we constitute as knowledge in the body—e.g. particular ways of moving” (1999: 102).

Toren point of departure is the proposition emphasized in Bourdieu’s (1990) work, that “we literally embody our history that is the history of our relations with all those others whom we have encountered in our lives” (1999: 2). She notes an implicit model of the nature of mind and cognition is essentially inescapable and such a model informs the underlying theory of cultural acquisition and a theory of cultural transmission used by the analyst.

Traditional accounts of socialization inherited from the Parsonian and the phenomenological traditions, in excluding the body as a locus of signification, reinstate the mind/body dualism squarely in the center of the theoretical toolkit of sociologists. In this respect, it is not surprising that a formalization of the Schutzian and Parsonian accounts of the functioning of culture and institutions can be done by drawing on the tools of cognitivist, disembodied artificial intelligence, such as the “production-system” formalism (Fararo and Skvoretz 1984). In this respect, there is an indelible link between disembodied approaches to cognition, mind, and cultural transmission and the metaphor of mind as “computer.”

For Toren, the disembodied socialization account relies on an untenable “copy” theory of knowledge acquisition, providing no plausible mechanisms as to how the complex set of categories comprising adult knowledge is acquired by the child undergoing the socialization process. This theory is suspiciously silent on (distributed) differences in the cultural understanding of agents at different (developmental) trajectories in the socialization process (i.e. children and adults or adolescents and children). Socialization theory presumes a passive agent which records this external culture.

These suppositions are dubious in the light of contemporary accounts of knowledge acquisition by infants. Toren argues that given these developments, “the process of physical development, the meaning—or knowledge-making process should be understood as giving rise to psychological structures that are at once dynamic and stable over time” (1999: 9). To refer to these psychological structures she—like Bourdieu (1990)—uses the Piagetian term of “scheme.” As Toren notes the notion of scheme is a “brilliant and essentially simple idea” (1999: 9). Schemes are self-equilibrating wholes simultaneously capable of being structured and of structuring reality by the dual processes of accommodation and assimilation (see e.g. Lizardo 2004)

Embodied and embedded socialization

Toren shows the payoff of this embodied and embedded approach to culture and cognition in her analysis of the acquisition of cultural categories regarding status and gender among Fijian children (Toren 1999: 50-55). According to Toren, designations of power and status rather than being available as discursive linguistic representations, are encoded in the physical arrangement of artifacts and persons in the interior of Fijian domestic and ceremonial dwellings. This is in line with Bourdieu’s (1971) analysis of the physical embeddedness of cosmological principles in the material structure and spatial arrangement of the Berber house, Schwartz’s classic work on vertical classification (Schwartz 1981), and with recent experimental work on the role of embodied perceptual symbols in the perception, understanding, and external signification of power (Schubert 2005).

In Fiji,

all horizontal spaces inside buildings and certain contexts out of doors can be mapped onto a spatial axis whose poles are given by the terms ‘above’ (i cake) and ‘below’ (i ra). Inside a building, people of high social status ‘sit above’ and those of lower social status ‘below’. However, this distinction refers to a single plane and so non-one is seated literally above anyone else…hierarchy in day-to-day village life finds its clearest physical manifestation in people’s relation to one another on this spatial axis and is most evident in the context of meals, kava drinking and worship (2005: 51).

Toren notes that “meals in the Fijian household are always ritualized” which makes the domestic group the primary face-to-face environment in which hierarchical distinctions are enacted and constructed. During meals, the cloth in which persons sit “is laid to conform with the above/below axis of the house space.” Household members proceed to take their place at the table “according to their status: the senior man sits at the pole ‘above’ others are ‘below’ him males in general being above females.” In this manner “the seating arrangements and the conduct of the meal are a concrete realization of hierarchical relations within the domestic group” (2005: 51, italics added). Through the habitual enactment of positioning of male and female bodies across the spatial axis, hierarchy is both practically enacted and transmitted, without the need to engage in “explicit teachings” transmitted through language. This involves the dynamic construction of an analogical mapping linking spatial locations, rank, and (gendered) bodies, which then becomes culturally conventional.

The same system is used to materialize and communicate hierarchical relationships based on village rank among men during the Kava drinking ritual. The drinking of Kava, which is associated “with ancestral mana and the power of God…is always hedged about by ceremony” (2005: 55). Thus, Toren points out that “however informal the occasion, the highest status persons present must sit ‘above’ the central serving bowl.”

Because hierarchy is structured and encoded in material space, it seldom fails to signify: “on the axis of social space, one is always ‘above’ or ‘below’ others, according to one’s position relative to the top, central position.” The explicit axis of hierarchy changes according to the occasion and the composition of the group of assembled persons (i.e. age, gender, rank, etc.). Accordingly, “the image of an ordered and stratified society exemplified in people’s positions relative to one another around the kava bowl is one encountered virtually everyday in the village o Sawaieke.” In addition, the schemes that are used to materially produce hierarchy are not only productive of action, but they also bias perception. This is shown by the fact, that as Toren notes, the arrangement of sitting positions in The Last Supper (ubiquitous in most Fijian household because of missionary activity and conversions to Christianity) is interpreted according to the same above/below axis.

Why Culture is not purely ‘symbolic’

The limitations of the usual “symbolic” approach to the study of culture and ritual is seen most clearly in Toren’s study of the lay categories with which children conceptualize gender and status hierarchy in Fiji. According to Toren, “we should give up the lingering notion that to understand ritual is to analyze its meaning [purely] as relation between metaphors.” Instead, Toren argues that the specifically “symbolic” aspect of culture and ritual is something that emerges from a “process of cognitive construction in persons over time.”

For young children, “ritual is not symbolic in the conventional anthropological sense” (2005: 87). Instead, “young children take ritualized behavior for granted as part of the day-to-day material reality of their existence” (italics added). Fijian children, rather than taking ritual practices as representational, take them rather literally: “the ritualized drinking of kava is, for children, merely what people do when drinking kava. The activity is of the same material and cognitive order as…house-building.” For Toren, even the claim that it is only for adults that ritual comes to have a “symbolic” aspect in the strict (i.e. ritual practices as “referring” to non-empirical meanings) is half true. Instead, “it is only when we understand the process through which ‘the symbolic’ is cognitively constructed” on top of an embodied basis, “that we can also understand the coercive power of ritual” (2005: 87).

Toren asked a sample of Fijian children ranging from five to eleven years old to examine a prepared drawing and provide the identity of unlabeled figures sitting around a table during the kava drinking ritual and during meals in the household, and to provide their own drawings identifying were different persons (mother, father, chief, etc.) would be seated in similar circumstances. Toren finds (2005: 88-90) that by the age of six, Fijian children can reproduce the structural correspondence between gender and rank hierarchy and the above/below spatial axis discussed above, although younger children produce less ranking gradations than do older children. Toren concludes from these data that “an understanding of above/below in terms of its polar extremes occurs just before school age” (2005: 94). For these children, the position of mother below “is the anchor for situations within the household…for prepared drawings of meals, all children chose the figure below to be mother…By contrast, the figure said to be above was either father, father’s elder brother, father’s father, mother’s brother or a ‘guest’.” Toren asks:

But how does this merging of status with spatial categories come about? Piaget has always emphasized that a child’s early cognitions are tied to concrete referents, a point also made by Bourdieu (1977). This is as much the case for my own data concerning a so-called ‘symbolic’ construct as it is for the so-called ‘logical’ constructs investigated by Piaget and his co-workers. What emerges most forcefully from the children’s data is the crucial importance of the spatial axis given by above/below as this is made manifest in concrete form in houses, churches, at meals and in kava-drinking (2005: 94).

The danger of taking an adult’s linguistic and conceptual elaborations (and justifications) for cultural practices, is exemplified in Toren’s account. When asked about the reason for the hierarchical seating arrangement of persons in the kava-drinking ceremonies, the adults’ discursive elaboration is in effect a reversal of that of children. While children provide explicitly tautological responses to the question of the ultimate reasons the Chief is the person who sits on top, adults provide elaborate descriptions regarding the superior mana of different persons, and in particular of the chief. Thus, “adults notion include [in addition to the notion of mana] ideas of…legitimacy, personal achievement, the significance of mythical relations of ancestors of clans…and so on” (95). This speaks to the fundamental difference in both format and phenomenology between culture as acquired in embedded and embodied forms and more explicit forms of articulation of embodied personal culture into explicit public cultural forms.

References

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Anchor Books. New York: Doubleday.

Bloch, Maurice. 1991. “Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science.” Man 26 (2): 183–98.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press.

Corsaro, William A., and Thomas A. Rizzo. 1988. “Discussione and Friendship: Socialization Processes in the Peer Culture of Italian Nursery School Children.” American Sociological Review 53 (6): 879–94.

Fararo, Thomas J., and John Skvoretz. 1984. “Institutions as Production Systems.” The Journal of Mathematical Sociology 10 (2): 117–82.

Lizardo, Omar. 2004. “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34 (4): 375–401.

Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press,.

Pugh, Allison J. 2009. Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture. University of California Press.

Schubert, Thomas W. 2005. “Your Highness: Vertical Positions as Perceptual Symbols of Power.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89 (1): 1–21.

Schwartz, Barry. 1981. Vertical Classification: A Study in Structuralism and the Sociology of Knowledge. University of Chicago Press.

Tomasello, Michael. 2005. Constructing a Language. Harvard University Press.

Toren, Christina. 1993. “Making History: The Significance of Childhood Cognition for a Comparative Anthropology of Mind.” Man, 461–78.

———. 2005. Mind, Materiality, and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography. Routledge.

Bourdieu as a (Hetero)phenomenologist

Toward the beginning of Pierre Bourdieu’s newly published 1999-2000 lectures from the College de France (Manet: A Symbolic Revolution), a perplexed art student asks Bourdieu the following question, one that the verbatim lectures show to have worried and preoccupied the great theorist of practice:

Your recent conferences have astonished me. For when you speak of developing a theoretical approach to art, taking note not of the intentions of the artist but of his dispositions, this implies that the artist cannot be the author of a theoretical work, as Kandinsky was, because he cannot be conscious of the dispositions that he has acquired unconsciously. As an artist, I find this point of view difficult to accept, for I see in it a risk of alienation that is heavy with consequences and, in this case, must I conclude that I am unable to write a thesis? (Bourdieu 2017: 60)

This question comes after Bourdieu makes claims like the 19th century French artist Edouard Manet included “explosive” qualities in his work “without necessarily being aware of it” (27), that if we were to ask about any Manet painting “Did Manet consciously want to do that and did he premeditate what he put into that painting?” the answer must be an unambiguous “no” (45), and finally, as Bourdieu claims, “What I am describing here is … not the conscious mind of the painter … [but] a painter who finds himself practically engaged with the creation of his picture. He has, then, a practical intention, which is not at all his conscious, premeditated intention” (49-50). No wonder the student was perplexed.

The Manet that appears in Bourdieu’s lectures is not a great conversationalist and really has no unique insight into the nature of his craft. Truly as dumb as a painter, as the old saying goes. If, on a given day, you were to ask Manet “what are you doing?” he would very likely give a most honest reply: “I’m painting a picture.” As Bourdieu continues, “He might even have said a little more, for example: ‘I want to paint something that’ll be a work of art. I want to show that you can make something modern out of a classical model.’” Bourdieu believes that a similar boring answer would be given by Zola or [fill in the blank] writer of renown, or really any one of us as we engage in any activity (I am writing a blog post. I’m not quite sure what it is about. I believe something about Bourdieu). “But that does not make [Manet or Zola] or us either totally unconscious automata, or perfectly lucid subjects” (2017: 49).

What is so interesting about these lectures, and other of Bourdieu’s late work on art (1996), is that here we see the application of practice for the purposes of phenomenology, seeking a reconstruction of direct experience, but which I want to claim fits more the profile of a true heterophenomenology (Dennett 1991; 2003), which I’ll explain. Bourdieu wants to put himself and his readers in the artists’ shoes. He wants to know what it was like to be in the world from the “artist’s point of view,” confront the pragmata they confronted, their problems and their solutions for those problems, which he ultimately claims is the legacy they leave behind for other practitioners in a field to recapitulate (e.g. “Beethoven’s solution” or “Manet’s solution”). An opus infinitum, as Bourdieu confesses, and on several occasions in the lectures he admits his embarrassment at what does not know and never will. Yet there is merit in the task, as he explains, especially when the topic is art, or “pure practice without theory” (as Durkheim said).

Heterophenomenology is a coinage of the philosopher Daniel Dennett and my argument is that it is particularly useful for understanding exactly what Bourdieu is up to in this work, as a particularly relevant application of practice. As Dennett claims, heterophenomenology is, quite basically, the “phenomenology of another not oneself” (2003: 19). It is therefore a third-person accounting scheme (e.g. “Manet does”), but one that takes the “first person point of view [e.g. “I did”] as seriously as it can be taken.” What this means is that a heterophenomenologist (mouthful, hereafter HPist) understands that answers to to questions that, seemingly, give access to dimensions first-person experience (“What were you thinking when you painted X?”) are actually third-person investigations that invoke a person’s verbal capacity to link an internal state to a proposition (“I was thinking that …”). An HPist does not dismiss that kind of data, but neither does she take it at face value.

Rather, the job of the HPist is comprehensive. It involves generating a “fictional world … populated with all the images, events, sounds, smells, hunches, presentiments and feelings that the subject sincerely believes to exist in his or her (or its) stream of consciousness. Maximally extended, it is a neutral portrayal of exactly what it is like to be that subject” (Dennett 1991: 99).

The catch is that even though the HPist trusts the person, and “maintains a constructive and sympathetic neutrality” toward what people say about their experience and their action, this does not make those people the authority on the truth of the experience. What the world is like to them is at best an “uncertain guide” to what is going on for them as they experience and act. But neither does this mean that they are zombies (Dennett) or unconscious automata (Bourdieu). The point is that the HPist tries to compile a definitive description of the world according to subjects, but uses everything in that description as primary data, part of a “fictional world,” that is just the beginning of the analysis. It is what must be explained.

Dennett (2003) demonstrates what this using the following example from a famous experiment by Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Melzer (1971). Shepard and Melzer asked subjects whether the two drawings below (Figure 1) were of different objects or just different views of the same object. Nearly every subject reported that they solved the puzzle by rotating one of the figures in their “mind’s eye” to make a comparison. But were they really doing this mental rotation? If we were to ask a hundred people (including me!), they would probably all say that, yes, I mentally rotate the object on the right in order to answer that, indeed, these are two different views of the same object. The phenomenologist would be satisfied with this. The HPist, however, is more intrigued by “mental rotation” as a belief about conscious experience. She willfully submits that what this experience is like for subjects could have nothing to do with what is going on for subjects as they have this experience. But we first need to know that “mental rotation” is what the experience is like for them (see Pylyshyn 2002; Foglia and O’Regan 2016 for literature on mental imagery).

Figure 1

Dennett’s HPist strategy bears a none too faint resemblance to the method Bourdieu uses in answering the art student and in his remarkable analysis (68-72) of Manet’s painting Luncheon on the Grass (1863). Here, he attempts to put himself and his audience in Manet’s “historical place … a kind of imaginary reconstruction [of] Manet’s point of view as he was engaged in producing the Luncheon” (2017: 69). Thus, what Manet does here is basically create a tableau vivant, those still life paintings of groups of people arranged in some kind of scene that were so fashionable under Napoleon III. But he does something more than this. Bourdieu’s analysis is too detailed (even though he declares his shame about lacking the “necessary competence to do it”) to reproduce in its entirety. I’ll just point to two examples that resemble a heterophenomenology, ones that relate specifically to mental imagery.

First, Manet’s “symbolic revolution” is found in microcosm in the Luncheon because he had placed himself in an impossible situation in relation to his models: “he got [them] to adopt a classical pose, but through [their] clothing and his pictorial manner, he gave [them] modern connotations” (2017: 70). Did he intend to do this? Bourdieu says no. And to build that case he says that Manet effectively “pictured in his mind’s eye” a Venetian painting that he had seen at the Louvre (Marcantino Raimondi The Judgment of Paris … people in the bottom right corner).

Second, the woman in the background is a mystery. The kind of wallpaper effect of the woman suggests Japanese art as a model. But Bourdieu argues that Manet likely had a work of “[Jean-Antoine] Watteau in mind” (maybe the Feast of Love, that woman in the righthand background) someone he admired a great deal. He puts this woman in as a “nod to Watteau … [that] closes the triangle of the three figures … She is treated differently: the brushstrokes are light, as in the style of Watteau” (71).

Luncheon on the Grass, Manet, 1863

The Judgment of Paris, Raimondi ca. 1510-1520

The Feast (or Festival) of Love, Watteau 1718-19

As Bourdieu finishes this “very strange exercise” he feels ashamed doing it, because he does not have the necessary competence. The problem is that those who do have the competence (art historians) don’t think of doing it and remain instead in the role of “interpreter, observer and analyst.” The question here is not a matter of “influence.” It is rather the HPist’s question that what painting the Luncheon was like for Manet gives no special insight into what was going on for Manet as he painted.

According to Bourdieu, what was going on for Manet was practice. This is particularly true because Manet was really never one to serve as Cartesian observer of his own interior process and usually gave boring, trite, cliche answers about his revolutionary work, including to Zola when Manet was doing his portrait. He seemed to be a zombie when he spoke about painting, but of course he was anything but a zombie. That in itself is data to the HPist, as it suggests a dimension of experience running so far past what we can access simply by recording verbalized beliefs about that experience.

At the end of this long examination, motivated by the art student who is despairing at the thought that his first-person experience may not have complete authority, Bourdieu finally gets around to answering him in the best way he can, with a kind of practical charity principle:

[Manet] was not entirely sure of what we wanted to do: he had a vague plan … And it was in the process of doing it that he found out what he wanted to do, as we do ourselves when we do something … To reply once again to the question put to me, which has caused me to slow down and fill out my argument: one can be very intelligent with one’s body, without using language, of course, when one is a dancer or pianist. Having said this, there is the particular problem of the executant as opposed to the person who produces his own text, or his own work of art. So there is an intelligence of the body … Painters know how to adopt towards painting a viewpoint that is a practical understanding; they have a practical perception which is based on know-how … they understand a savoir-faire as savoir-faire, and don’t write lectures on it (73)

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. (2017). Manet: A Symbolic Revolution. London: Polity.

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1996). The Rules of Art. Stanford: Stanford UP.

Dennett, Daniel. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Boston: Back Bay

Dennett, Daniel. (2003). “Who’s on first? Heterophenomenology explained.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 10: 19-30

Foglia, Lucia and Kevin O’Regan. (2016). “A New Imagery Debate: Enactive and Sensorimotor Accounts.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7: 181-196.

Pylyshyn, ZW. (2002). “Mental Imagery: In Search of a Theory.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25: 157-182.

Shepard, Roger and Jacqueline Melzer. (1971., “Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects” Science 171: 701–3.