Many thanks to Chris for many thoughtful and useful posts!
I wish to draw a distinction between 'habit' and habitus'. I have
not yet read DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION - and so benefit greatly from your
discussion on that work. But it seems to be that habit refers to an act
in time. For Bourdieu 'habitus' (condition) describes the socio-cultural
niche within which individual subjects find themselves and which dtermines
their socio-cultural practices. DISCTINCTIONS, the work in which B.
articulates this most clearly, has often been - justly! - criticized for
being too rigidly determinist; nevertheless I think that the idea of a
*strong tendency* for class to determine taste is all too useful in
industrial society. I suppose that one could fall into the habits
produced by habitus, but the terms remain distinct.
This ties into the much-trashed-about question of ideology as
well. For ideology is both the expression of each habitus-niche and the
general ways of thinking that keep the structure of many habituses
(habitii?) in place. I can accept arguments reducing the causative power
of ideology - but am still unconvinced that class does not play a
radically determining role.
So: assume that nomadism is ontologically radical. It must also
be socially radical in order to succeed at all. The true nomadic subject
then in not desribed by class and drifts (derives) between strata. But
fall back: is not this idea a product of a late-20th-century habitus, the
middle class intellectual? For those above and below this
destratification is not the same: the underclass has no choice, usually,
about its site - and the upper class damn well wants to remain where it
is. Maybe nomadism collapses into a cover for middle class myths of
social mobility - yet this seems antithetical (or at least opposed to)
D+G's projects. I return to what I read as the spirit geist of D+G and
am forced to conclude that nomadism is socially radical, unavoidably an
act of (among many other things) class warfare. Since nomadology is as
much a way of thinking as of being (I realize that this opposition is
dubious - bear with me for a moment) successful nomadic behavior must be
a full-fledged revolutionary praxis. "The philosophers have only thought
like nomads while being in the world; the point is to nomadize the world
itself"??
Back, back, to my starting point. Hazlitt then suffers from
divided nomadist practice: he thinks and talks like someone busily
deterritorializing his milieu - but his practice, his real-world ground,
adheres to the lattice of already-drawn maps, of habitus. To find
nomadism in the British Romantic era we must look to working-class poets
and pamphleteers who are busily turning the old periodical medium into
something new. And of course Blake, who defies habitus with every breath.
Does this make any sense? I fear that I'm losing coherency...
--Bryan N. Alexander a/k/a Bryan Case a/k/a godwin@xxxxxxxxx--
"He wasn't the real thing, but he sure was a good imitation of it,
which is frequently better than the real thing, for the real thing can
relax but the imitation can't afford to and has to spend all the time
being just one more cut better than the real thing, with money no object."
-Robert Penn Warren
------------------
I wish to draw a distinction between 'habit' and habitus'. I have
not yet read DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION - and so benefit greatly from your
discussion on that work. But it seems to be that habit refers to an act
in time. For Bourdieu 'habitus' (condition) describes the socio-cultural
niche within which individual subjects find themselves and which dtermines
their socio-cultural practices. DISCTINCTIONS, the work in which B.
articulates this most clearly, has often been - justly! - criticized for
being too rigidly determinist; nevertheless I think that the idea of a
*strong tendency* for class to determine taste is all too useful in
industrial society. I suppose that one could fall into the habits
produced by habitus, but the terms remain distinct.
This ties into the much-trashed-about question of ideology as
well. For ideology is both the expression of each habitus-niche and the
general ways of thinking that keep the structure of many habituses
(habitii?) in place. I can accept arguments reducing the causative power
of ideology - but am still unconvinced that class does not play a
radically determining role.
So: assume that nomadism is ontologically radical. It must also
be socially radical in order to succeed at all. The true nomadic subject
then in not desribed by class and drifts (derives) between strata. But
fall back: is not this idea a product of a late-20th-century habitus, the
middle class intellectual? For those above and below this
destratification is not the same: the underclass has no choice, usually,
about its site - and the upper class damn well wants to remain where it
is. Maybe nomadism collapses into a cover for middle class myths of
social mobility - yet this seems antithetical (or at least opposed to)
D+G's projects. I return to what I read as the spirit geist of D+G and
am forced to conclude that nomadism is socially radical, unavoidably an
act of (among many other things) class warfare. Since nomadology is as
much a way of thinking as of being (I realize that this opposition is
dubious - bear with me for a moment) successful nomadic behavior must be
a full-fledged revolutionary praxis. "The philosophers have only thought
like nomads while being in the world; the point is to nomadize the world
itself"??
Back, back, to my starting point. Hazlitt then suffers from
divided nomadist practice: he thinks and talks like someone busily
deterritorializing his milieu - but his practice, his real-world ground,
adheres to the lattice of already-drawn maps, of habitus. To find
nomadism in the British Romantic era we must look to working-class poets
and pamphleteers who are busily turning the old periodical medium into
something new. And of course Blake, who defies habitus with every breath.
Does this make any sense? I fear that I'm losing coherency...
--Bryan N. Alexander a/k/a Bryan Case a/k/a godwin@xxxxxxxxx--
"He wasn't the real thing, but he sure was a good imitation of it,
which is frequently better than the real thing, for the real thing can
relax but the imitation can't afford to and has to spend all the time
being just one more cut better than the real thing, with money no object."
-Robert Penn Warren
------------------