ABSTRACT
One of Bourdieu’s central contributions to socio-cultural analysis is his developed framework for grappling with the relationship between social structure and practice, and especially the mediating role played by his conceptualisation of the habitus. Through the habitus, Bourdieu attempts to overcome objectivesubjective dualism, articulating the processes of social reproduction and the capacities for improvised individual action. It could be argued that he never resolved these dilemmas: Bourdieu’s insistence on the improvisational nature of social action has not prevented commentators from criticising his structuralist tendencies. But that would be rather ungenerous given the elaborate architecture Bourdieu develops to address these issues. The point is not that he provides a resolution of what is traditionally a theoretical minefield but that his framework entails a productive tension which compels us to address these issues. Bourdieu argues that this problem is an issue of the temporality of practice; I agree, but this chapter goes further and argues that we need to extend Bourdieu’s framework to develop ways of thinking about the dynamic and cumulative formation of the capacities needed for social action. I characterise this as a problem of pedagogy. Despite recurring references to processes of accumulation, inculcation and
trans mission, Bourdieu doesn’t give much attention to the practices through which capacities are acquired, preferring instead to focus on the reproduction of relations of power through forms of inheritance and the inculcation of the appropriate habitus. This chapter will explore the pedagogical imperative in Bourdieu’s work, drawing on an example from everyday life – toilet training – which is crucial to both the formation of a socially competent human and the instilling of a ‘cosmology’ fundamental to social reproduction (Bourdieu 1977: 93-94) to argue that we need to augment Bourdieu’s toolbox to consider the pedagogic action under lying subject formation. This is in line with Bourdieu’s claim that ‘the most fundamental problems of political philosophy can only be posed and truly resolved by means of a return to the mundane observations of the sociology of learning and upbringing’ (Bourdieu 2000: 168), but Bourdieu himself largely blackboxes the problem of acquisition. Bourdieusian sociology can be enriched by foregrounding the collective enterprise of inculcation through a conceptually elaborated, empirical program which explores the ensemble of pedagogic relations, setting, mode, space and the temporality of teaching and learning.
