Doxa: Fun and games with acculturation
Relatively early in his career Pierre Bourdieu had the opportunity to pursue anthropological field work amongst the Kabyle people. Writing more than twenty years later of the stereotypical gender roles he found, Bourdieu comments:
“The constancy of the habitus ... transmitted from body to body, on the hither side of consciousness and discourse, they escape, in the main, the grasp of conscious control and by the same token are resistant to transformation or correction”
Bourdieu’s view was that his ’habitus’ was a product of history both individual and collective. Once a habitus is acquired he believed, it tended to reproduce patterns and regularities as cognitive and motivating structures, which themselves were originally inherent in its generating principle. If this view is correct, then I would suggest there is of necessity a consequent reduction - seldom perceptible to the individual or group - of freedom, or at the very least, freedom of action:
“There is no risk of overestimating difficulty and dangers when it comes to thinking the social world. The force of the preconstructed resides in the fact that, being inscribed both in things and in minds, it presents itself under the cloak of the self-evident which goes unnoticed because it is by definition taken for granted.” — Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieu used the term ’doxa’ to indicate the occurrence of the natural and social worlds being perceived as self-evident occurrences. That is, ’doxa was meant to indicate a high correspondence between objective order and subjective principles of organization. Or said another way, where there is doxa, there is non-awareness in the individual or group of the possibility of different or antagonistic beliefs. Unlike heterodoxy or orthodoxy then, Bourdieu’s doxa bodes no possibility of alternative. In fact it was Bourdieu’s immodest contention that:
“.. one can say of the teaching of sociology that it must first give new eyes, as initiatory philosophers, sometimes phrased it. The task is to produce, if not a "new person," then at least a "new gaze," - a sociological eye. And this cannot be done without a genuine conversion -
a metanoia - a mental revolution, a transformation of one’s whole vision of the social world.”
Perhaps. Probably not, but it sounds quite clever in a convoluted kind of way. Especially with the use of new terminology which is completely unnecessarily. But a moment’s reflection indicates religions of all types have claimed that their task is to open the eyes of ignorance and allow the indoctrinated person to imagine her new vision as freedom. I would personally be more comfortable with Bourdieu’s statement if it allowed or described self-discovery through experimentation and exploration rather than a ’giving’ of insight (the ethnomethodology of experimentation is a discipline of which he was apparently unaware). But then, Bourdieu and others of his ilk were not scientists, or even particularly familiar with science.
The only way out of this, he believes, is via inter-cultural contact wherein symbolic, social, political, and economic schema can be uncovered and challenged. That is, through the exchange of capital. So when doxa occurs in individual or group discourse, not only is there an implied habitus and its consequent reduction in freedom, but there is an additional implication that the very knowledge of such diminution is unavailable to those most effected by it. Hence the individual or group may believe it acts with total intellectual freedom – free will - while the very opposite may in fact be the case.
That such a state may occur is of course a popular point of analysis for a number of writers in disparate fields from philosophy to anthropology. Even Dewey was aware of the problem:
The familiar " goes without saying" means "it is understood." If two persons can converse intelligently with each other, it is because a common experience supplies a background of mutual understanding upon which their respective remarks are projected. To dig up and to formulate this common background would be imbecile; it is " understood"; that is, it is silently supplied and implied as the taken-for-granted medium of intelligent exchange of ideas.” — John Dewey, writing in 1910
Foucault took this further in addressing ’governmentality’, where
"... government is the right disposition of things... [that is] with government it is a question not of imposing law on men, but of disposing things" — Michel Foucault
That is to say, the acculturation to actions and of actors, via rules and processes of governmentality - is an induced habitus. Similarly, Althusser’s ’accumulation of effective determinations’ causes actors to be willing to submit to their own subjugation. Philosophers from Nayhayana philosophers through Spinoza to Nietzsche and to even (OMG) N. Poonja, have discussed ground, acquisition of habitus, and acculturation using a plethora of different terms and examples. But ultimately discussing the same thing. All speak of individual submission to acculturated impositions from authority manifesting through behaviour. Some, such as Rousseau, understood the process as a reduction in free will. But most did not.
To the psychologist William James the perpetuation of habitus was the ’flywheel of society’ that kept people, particularly the lower levels of society, in their place. He argued that this was a good thing, believing that too much free will and awareness would disrupt and destruct existing social patterns. In this he would have appreciated
Leo Strauss’ approach to the ’Noble Lie’ and do-it-yourself totalitarianism.
Like so many of his ilk, James believed that awareness of the mechanisms of acculturation should be
kept from the mass of society. This has been the dicta of much of the psychiatric and psychological community ever since, where response to environment has been viewed largely as individual mental dysfunction and rarely as response to enforced societal acculturation.
. That is, through the exchange of capital. So when doxa occurs in individual or group discourse, not only is there an implied habitus and its consequent reduction in freedom, but there is an additional implication that the very knowledge of such diminution is unavailable to those most effected by it. Hence the individual or group may believe it acts with total intellectual freedom – free will - while the very opposite may in fact be the case.