Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu's Legacy by Elizabeth Silva Alan Warde

Author:Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde [Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415495356
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2010-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Many of our actions are not based upon decisions resulting from systematic deliberation, such as working through a list of pros and cons for some action.4 Sometimes we intermittently muse on a problem over a long period without clearly resolving it, and eventually ‘find ourselves acting’ in a way which decides the issue, perhaps ending a relationship, or volunteering to take on an onerous job. Such actions are not purely accidental and arbitrary; the semi-conscious or distracted musings may have changed the balance of our evaluations and priorities. Whether we later come to view them as rational or mistaken depends less on whether we arrived at them by a process of logical deliberation than on the appropriateness of the actions that followed. As Archer acknowledges, our internal conversations may vary from focused and coherent deliberation to fragmented and fleeting musings.

Embodied habits of thought and action can remain important even where we change our minds through deliberating on some issue. Thus if people come to see that something they have believed is wrong through encountering a convincing argument and decide that they should now act differently, this in itself is unlikely to be sufficient to change their ways of thinking and acting completely. For example, even if a white racist comes to renounce her racism on the basis of argument, she may still find herself unintentionally making racist assumptions in everyday life – assuming that the new doctor will be white, that a black child cannot be academically gifted, and so on. Having become consciously and sincerely anti-racist she may feel ashamed about the persistence of these unreformed reflexes, but it can take many years of practice and reflection to re-shape these completely. The process involves not just acknowledging errors of thought and action, but becoming a different person with different embodied habits of thought. Although these examples seem to fit with a Bourdieusian approach, they do involve at least some reflection and deliberation.

Iris Murdoch makes a convergent point, and one which again might incline us to modify, rather than reject, Bourdieu’s approach (Murdoch, 1970). She argues that modern philosophy has mistakenly equated normativity with free choice and the empty free will that steps back from, or out of the flow of practice, suspending emotions, abstracting from concrete matters, and deciding how to act purely on the basis of general principles (see also Filonowicz, 2008). Rather, we should understand lay normativity as embedded in the flow of practice and concrete experience, in which we continually monitor and evaluate things, partly subconsciously through our emotional responses, and partly consciously through reflection, whether this involves ephemeral musings or focused deliberation. Although we do much on automatic, we do so with some degree of attentiveness, often noticing failures of things to work out as hoped, feeling good or bad about them in various ways, and it is through these repeated minor evaluations that we confirm or gradually shift our moral inclinations.

If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement [i.

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