Social Turns, Gee, Vygotsky, and Bourdieu's 'Habitus'

When Gee (1998) summarizes the ways in which rhetoric (or literacy studies) has taken a social turn, he approaches—without pinpointing—some of what we discussed in 8040: Rhetoric of Emotion, Affect, and Motive. Take, for instance, Gee’s fourth summary in “The New Literacy Studies and the ‘Social Turn’”:

“4. Closely related work on situated cognition (Lave 1996; Lave & Wenger 1991), also with an allegiance to Vygotsky, has argued that knowledge and intelligence reside not solely in heads, but, rather, are distributed across the social practices (including language practices) and the various tools, technologies, and semiotic systems that a given "community of practice" uses in order to carry out its characteristic activities (e.g., part of a physicist's knowledge is embedded and distributed across her colleagues, social practices, tools, equipment, and texts). Knowing is a matter of being able to participate centrally in practice and learning is a matter of changing patterns of participation (with concomitant changes in identity).”

I would add that there is also a precognitive level of feeling—emotion that exists or arises responsively in the body prior to language and not necessarily through language—that is also influencing and influenced by the “social.” Relatedly, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the “habitus” could add “bodily dispositions” to Gee’s list of “the various tools, technologies, and semiotic systems that a given ‘community of practice’ uses in order to carry out its characteristic activities.” Whereas Vygotsky, like Volosinov’s “slovo” or Bakhtin’s dialogic, posits the speech act to be “dynamic” and “distributed across social practices,” Bourdieu suggests that there are internalized, bodily responses that are also socially mediated and socially mediating (reproducing the appropriate body language for the socially defined / prescribed conduct of a gathering), which he labels as the “habitus.”

If “knowing is a matter of being able to participate centrally in practice,” then Bourdieu, in works like In Other Words (1990), believes that this “knowing” and “participating centrally in practice” is imprinted or incorporated on us at such a bodily level that it seems like instinct or a “feel for the game” when we behave socially. Moreover, we have a “bodily disposition” that places parameters on what we see as possible (discovery) and what we may later voice (cognitively) as knowledge. While the habitus is not passed on to future generations genetically, it is through social reinforcement from parents, education, and, as we mentioned Monday, Althusser’s ideological apparatuses of state.

All of this is to say that at the boundary of sociology and rhetoric, there has certainly been interest in how “deep” the imprinting of the social goes, and how early (and bodily) this networking into the “social” occurs. I’d be interested in working with Bourdieu for a semester project, due partly to passages like the following that seem to intersect with what we’re calling the “social turn” and what Lefevre discusses as “invention”:

“The source of historical action, that of the artist, the scientist, or the member of government just as much as that of the worker or the petty civil servant, is not an active subject confronting society as if that society were an object constituted externally. The source resides neither in consciousness nor in things but in the relationship between two stages of the social, that is, between the history objectified in things, in the form of institutions, and in the history incarnated in bodies, in the form of that system of enduring dispositions which I call habitus” (In Other Words 190).