Can Bourdieu Swim? Habitus, Consciousness and Embodiment.

Greg Noble, Cultural Histories and Futures, and Megan Watkins, Communication and Media, University of Western Sydney Nepean

g.noble@uws.edu.au, m.watkins@uws.edu.au

Current preoccupations with embodiment have been useful in critiquing the cognitive bias and focus on representation in much social theory. Of particular use has been the contribution of Bourdieu, and his development of the notion of habitus drawn from the work of Mauss. However, in stressing the unconscious mechanisms of embodiment, an implicit form of mechanistic determination of the body has crept into these accounts, including Bourdieu's understanding of habitus.

This paper, drawing on Spinoza's monist logic and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception, and the work of a number of other theorists, will attempt to outline a way of thinking the mind/body relation in which consciousness and habituation can be articulated. Drawing on examples from sport, child development and education, the paper will argue that what has been missing from social theory is a developed understanding of the pedagogy of cultural processes. We will suggest that the processual analysis of intersubjective existence would recognise a number of key elements in the emergence and refinement of human capacities and interactional competencies: the enabling dimensions of disciplinary power, the guiding presence of the consciousnesses of others, the dialectic between subordination and agency, and the relation between habituation and reflection in the achievement of bodily 'disengagement'. Without these processes, Bourdieu would drown.