Habitus as Cultural Capital

Habitus   |   Bourdieu

The physical embodiment of cultural capital, or, the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that we possess due to our life experiences.

Appropriated by the French sociologist of culture and education, Pierre Bourdieu from, in his own account, the tradition of Aristotle, Aquinas and figures in European philosophy, including Hegel and Durkheim.

Bourdieu defines habitus as 'a durable, transposable system of definitions' acquired initially by the young child in the home as a result of the conscious and unconscious practices of her/his family. This comprises the 'primary habitus'.

Subsequently this is transformed into a secondary, tertiary or further habitus by the child's passage through different social institutions, principally schooling.

This developed habitus contains within it, however, as Bourdieu makes clear, the characteristics of early socialization in the home and family, which persist as 'the basis of all subsequent experiences ... from restructuring to restructuring'.

Bourdieu's notion of structure implies a flexible idea of Determination. The habitus is both structured and structuring. It is the consequence of an individual's family, class position, status, education, ideology and distinctive tastes (derived from the individual histories of its contributing members), and might also be more broadly derived from a common historically produced set of dispositions on the part of a particular social or ethnic group.

As Bourdieu writes, 'The habitus - embodied history, internalized as second nature and so forgotten as history - is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product'.

At the same time this acquired configuration is open to creative variation as the individual meshes with a relatively stable common habitus and conducts this forward. The individual's habitus therefore emerges from a dialogue with a family, ethnic, class-based or gendered collective habitus in an evolving process of structuration and restructuration that shapes individual and social mobility.

Confy on 'Re-visioning the Nation' @ MGR Janaki College, Chennai

Department of English

Dr MGR Janaki College of Arts & Science for Women

Chennai – 600 028

Takes pleasure in inviting you to the

National Seminar

On

Re-visioning the Nation: Histories, Literature and Media

01 August 2018 | Auditorium | 9 am

This is a personal invite, on behalf of Dr. Aparna Srinivas, the Organising Secretary of this National Seminar! This invite is for all scholars in general, and to my II MA students & MPhil scholars, in particular!

Power of Words, Language, and Speech in the Task of Resistance! - Thiong'o

MATIGARI

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o | 1987

Book Review by Michael D Sollars

Published in the African Writers Series by Heinemann, Matigari is a deeply felt call to workers, peasants, and students to rise up against what the Kenyan-born author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o refers to as “imperialism.”

In keeping with the themes and attitudes of his first two decades of writing, the book was published in his native language, Gikuyu.

Its pairing of Western Marxist thought with an allegorical story based on a Gikuyu folktale makes Matigari a quintessential postcolonial novel.

This is the story of Matigari, who first renounces violence after slaying his colonial masters, and who, in the pursuit of truth and justice for the people, later rearms himself against a corrupt native polity.

After the publication of the novel, the figure of Matigari took on the quality of legend among peasants in Kenya.

The police sought to arrest this man, but upon discovering that he was a character in a book, they seized all copies of the novel instead. In “A note on the English edition,” Ngugi laments that “with the publication of this English edition, [Matigari, the figure and the book] have joined their author in exile.”

Any discussion of Matigari must necessarily consider the novel’s form as well as plot. The story is prefaced by the five-verse song “To the Reader/Listener.”

This address, which points out that the story is to be heard and read, alerts the reader that the shape of the novel is influenced by the traditions of oral storytelling.

For instance, the story is divided into three parts, each of which is similarly structured. All the sections begin with a determination on Matigari’s part to lay down arms in the first, to seek truth and justice in the second, and to rearm in the third.

They then feature a public display of Matigari’s benevolence, strength, and desire for a fair and just home.

Finally, they conclude with a conflict between him and the police, but each time a question is left floating among the public: “Who was Matigari?” This type of repetition, restatement of themes, and recurring formal structure encourages ease of remembrance and retelling and is crucial to what Ngugi terms African “orature.”

Readers of this novel will also encounter the overwhelming presence of rumors, hearsay, reports, and gossip.

Radio broadcasts, or the Voice of Truth, are heard many times over the course of the story.

These italicized interruptions in the narrative report on local, national, and international events, and are complicit with the hegemonic interests of the corrupt leader!

The Luxuries of Art and Literature: They Help Create Imaginary Worlds!

Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternate Realities, from Plato to String Theory 

(by way of Alice in Wonderland, Einstein, and The Twilight Zone)

Author: Lawrence M. Krauss

Excerpts from Chapter One of this lovely book...

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

So begins perhaps the most famous mathematical romance ever written.

Penned in 1884, under the pseudonym “A. Square” by the Shakespearean scholar Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland was a poignant tale told by a wistful two-dimensional being who had just discovered the miraculous existence of three-dimensional space and longed to enjoy it.

The unhappy hero of this saga urged us lucky Spacelanders to recognize the beauty of the higher-dimensional universes that he thus envisaged.

At around the same time that Abbott was writing Flatland, a lonely and tragic artist on the Continent was imagining another universe beyond the realm of our perception.

Vincent Van Gogh was a tortured genius who is said to have sold but a single painting in his lifetime.

Yet you cannot walk the streets of Amsterdam today without seeing reproductions in storefront windows of his haunting self-portraits or his landscapes with yellow skies and blue earth.

In 1882, he wrote to his brother, who was his sole supporter, “I know for certain that I have a feeling for color, and shall acquire more and more.”

Through his paintings Van Gogh freed our minds from the “tyranny” of color, daring us to imagine everyday objects in a completely different way, and thereby demonstrating that exotic realities could be discovered in even the otherwise most ordinary things.

His paintings are haunting not because they are so bizarre but because they are just bizarre enough to capture the essence of reality while at the same time forcing us to reexamine what exactly reality is.

These are the luxuries of art and literature: to create imaginary worlds that cause us to reconsider our place within our own world.

Science has comparable impact. It, too, unveils different sorts of hidden worlds, but ones that we hope might also actually exist and, most importantly, can be measured.

Nevertheless, the net result is the same: In the end we gain new insights into our own standing in the universe.

On the complex nature of history!

The novel Baudolino has struck quite a lovely chord in me, even as Umberto Eco delves deep into the dual nature of language with consummate ease – or rather, into the Spivakian double bind, as a source of imaginative creativity and a vehicle for conveying truth.

Be it a compelling discussion on the complex nature of history, through the hero Baudolino, who is a consummate liar, or the construction of reality, or his compulsive habit of generating false realities, or how he constructs elaborate lies about his life and his involvement in historical events, yet! yettt! we are carried away by the sheer innovation of Baudolino’s implausible narration, or how Eco helps us critique the past, by putting forward the proposition: How do we narrate the past when language itself becomes untrustworthy?

A very insightful novel worth many many reads, to get to understand the nuances and the strands that exemplify the monumental ‘crisis of narration!’

Syncs to a tee with Calvino’s formulation of the literary work ‘as a map of the world and the knowable!’

Here goes the review for y’all – with Michael Sollars -

BAUDOLINO

By UMBERTO ECO (2000)

The fourth novel by the prolific Italian novelist UMBERTO ECO charts the adventurous life of the eponymous hero, a medieval adventurer and consummate liar with a gift for making the most of chance.

The book opens with Baudolino rescuing the hapless historian and Byzantine court official Niketas from the marauding knights of the Fourth Crusade during the sack of Constantinople in April 1204.

As he and Niketas wait for the chaos in the burning city to subside, Baudolino narrates the story of his extraordinary life and his continuing quest for the mythical kingdom of Prester John.

Baudolino has certainly had an interesting life. Born in 1137, in what later becomes the city of Alessandria, a chance childhood encounter with Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the Great rescues Baudolino from his impoverished environment.

As Frederick’s adopted son, he is given an excellent education, but Baudolino is soon stealing historical parchments written by Frederick’s uncle, Bishop Otto, in order to write the first draft of his life story.

The young Baudolino’s desire to construct his own version of reality is to become a recurring theme in the novel, for when his theft of Otto’s manuscripts appears to be on the brink of discovery, Baudolino simply forges new ones from his own imagination.

Biopiracy! How Corporations gain control over Indigenous knowledge!

Noted environmentalist Vandana Shiva, who is also a Lyotard’ian alter-globalization advocate, in her wonderful book titled Biopiracy explores the ethical, ecological, and economic consequences of patents on life.

Vandana Shiva laments on how genetic engineering has seen the mushrooming of quite a lot of seeds and patents on life! 

She bemoans that, these corporations with ‘vested’ interests, and with the avowed objective of raking in the moolah - by adding just one new gene to the cell of a plant, they ironically claim they had invented! and created!! the seed, the plant, and all future seeds, which are now their ‘property.’

Shockingly, they have even declared seed to be their “invention,” their patented property.

Since a patent implies an exclusive right granted for an “invention,” and since it allows the patent holder to exclude everyone else from making, selling, distributing, and using the patented product, now, with patents even on seed, this implies that the poor farmers’ rights to save and share seed—something farmers have done for millennia—is now, shockingly, defined as “theft,” an “intellectual property crime.”

Advocating the fact that Life is NOT an invention to be patented, Vandana laments that, over the past decade, corporations have gained control over the diversity of life on earth and people’s indigenous knowledge through new property rights.

Now, this lovelyyy book by Vandana Shiva, titled, Biopiracy gives an incisive insight into the ecological, ethical and economic consequences of patents on life!

I’ve personally felt, after reading through all the chapters in this delightful little book, that the author puts forth the angst of an activist at the alarming day-light robbery of indigenous wisdom and knowledge by giant corporations, that deny the farmer the right to access his/her seeds for planting/seeding!

Just some interesting excerpts from this great environmentalist of our times, in a tri-part series for y’all!

Title of the Book: BIOPIRACY: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge

Author: VANDANA SHIVA

Over the past decade, corporations have gained control over the diversity of life on earth and people’s indigenous knowledge through new property rights.

There is no innovation involved in these cases; they are instruments of monopoly control over life itself. Patents on living resources and indigenous knowledge are an enclosure of the biological and intellectual commons.

Life forms have been redefined as “manufacture” and “machines,” robbing life of its integrity and self-organization.

How is the 'Past' remembered, represented and reconstructed?

Foraging ledges and rummaging racks for an insightful study on the fledgling field of Memory Studies, for quite some time now, I had a chanced rendezvous with a delightful wonder-read of sorts, on the Ashgate series, where i found the various takes on Memory quite absorbing, appealing and astounding by all means!

Titled, The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies, the book has many wonderful articles from cultural critics, historians and scholars in memory studies!

Well, the book discusses quite a lot of important concepts in the field of memory studies, and offers a comprehensive view of Memory in all its rich and diverse usage!

Starting with Walter Benjamin’s beautiful take on the ‘process of remembering’, to how forgetfulness played a very vital role in the political life of ancient Greece! (any semblances to the present is pure-o-purely incidental!), to how past events are remembered, misremembered, understood, contested, forgotten, learned from, and shared with others, to insights on the first historian Herodotus, to interesting takes on concepts that include collective memory, mentalities, cultural memory, monuments, museums, tradition, trauma, nostalgia, historical consciousness, forgetting, silence, commemoration, cosmopolitanism, narrative, mnemohistory, myth, event, modernity and hauntology, and how reflections and memoirs have their own history, bordering sometimes on the confessional, self-reflection or self-promotion, this wonder-companion has got it all!

Since memories are fluid and change over time, what is remembered or forgotten follows different paths, trajectories and vectors.

In its various permutations as cultural memory, mnemonic practices, multidirectional memory, politics of memory, postmemory, prosthetic memory, remembrance, social memory and transcultural memory – and whether collective memory qualifies as a ‘travelling concept’!

For this and for everything else connected with Memory Studies, this book is a real treat to the ‘memory studies’ connoisseur!

This excerpted piece is a take on this ever-dynamic concept of Memory by Siobhan Kattago.

So here goes –

Memory has long been a subject of fascination for poets, artists, philosophers and historians.

When recalling the past, it is impossible to fully capture the complexity of memory. Instead, as Walter Benjamin noted, the process of remembering seems to unfold like a fragile and unending fan.

He who has once began to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside!

According to Greek mythology, Mnemosyne was the mother of the nine muses, one of whom was Clio, the muse of history. And yet, remembrance also includes what is forgotten – either deliberately or accidentally.

Indeed, forgetfulness played a very important role in the political life of ancient Greece.

Ashis Nandy on 'Science as a Hegemonic Enterprise of the State!'

Title of the Book: Science, Hegemony & Violence: A Requiem For Modernity

By Ashis Nandy

Much similar to Vandana Shiva’s thought-provoking take on Biopiracy, Ashis Nandy’s profound, impactful and insightful read is a glorious take on yet another aspect of Science which is quite unknown to the lay – Science as a Hegemonic Enterprise of the State!

This is quite alarming, by all means, and hence it becomes all the more imperative to focus on this hegemonic strategy of the State, the world over, especially in the US, as an interesting subject for study in Cultural Studies too, as the ramifications of Science as a Reason of State are quite disturbing and requires an intense proby study of sorts!

Although I ain’t gonna sound political here, still, this introductory essay by Nandy, titled, Science as a reason of State, in quite many ways, reminds me of the welfare/development policies adopted by States - world over, where farmlands, people’s habitations, dwelling places are mercilessly grabbed, and a pittance of a compensation given to the owners!

And in the name of Science as a Reason of State, or a Hegemonic Enterprise of the State, violence is unleashed on the people when they resist such violent takeovers! Good examples of these we find in Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Jacinta Kerkatta, G. N. Devy, Gayatri Spivak, Mahasweta Devi, Thomas King, Judith Wright, et al! Just to name a few!

Well, Ashis Nandy, social theorist, is known for his critique of the ‘development’ politics in general, and European colonialism in particular!

He’s traced the politics behind ‘development’ as a strategically ‘scientific’ one, and the scientific has always been the domain of the state, for reasons well-known!

Ashis Nandy’s points are highly thought-provoking, in that, they draw the line between the academic and the professional!

Here goes this thought-provoking essay for y’all –

The thinking person cannot but notice that since the Second World War, two new reasons of state have been added to the traditional one of national security.

These are science and development. In the name of science and development one can today demand enormous sacrifices from, and inflict immense sufferings on, the ordinary citizen.

That these are often willingly borne by the citizen is itself a part of the syndrome; for this willingness is an extension of the problem which national security has posed over the centuries.

Camp Aesthetics and Failed Seriousness!

Definition of ‘Camp’ by Susan Sontag

[A Glossary of Literary and Cultural Theory, By Peter Brooker]

According to Susan Sontag, Camp is a sensibility that revels in artifice, stylization, theatricalization, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration rather than content.

Camp aesthetics disrupt many of modernism's notions of what art is and what can be classified as high art by inverting aesthetic attributes such as beauty, value, and taste through an invitation of a different kind of apprehension and consumption.

In her essay 'Notes on Camp' (1966), the critic Susan Sontag identified camp as 'the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience'.

This she distinguished from the 'seriousness' and intensity respectively of 'high culture' and 'Avant-Garde art'.

Camp has been chiefly associated with an exaggerated style, with Parody and self-dramatization, and Sontag's terms are clearly applicable to this.

'Notes on Camp' and other essays in the collection in which it appeared, Against Interpretation (1966), was part of Sontag's polemic against the liberal humanist defence of modernism and an associated hierarchy of high, middle-brow and Mass art on the part of a contemporary generation of New York Intellectuals.

Sontag associated camp with a 'new non-literary culture' of music, dance, films and architecture whose creativity needed to be recognized in a new critical vocabulary.

To Sontag,

Camp must be “passionate,” be the result of an “uncontrolled sensibility,” be an attempt to “do something extraordinary.”

 Camp “incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ of irony over tragedy.” “Camp and tragedy are antitheses.”

Art is found in the numerous sketches all along the road...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (ZAMM), by Robert M. Pirsig, is such sweet Monday inspiration!

Well, it quite reminds me of our oft-discussed cult favorite from the 1950s, Jack Kerouac's On the Road quite much-o-much!!!

The father-son duo have been such tremendous inspiration to us all for years! Ain't they? This apart, he’s also got such a huge Heideggerian streak to him!

The protagonist beautifully sets out to resolve the legendary clash between ‘the classic values that create machinery, such as a motorcycle, and romantic values, such as experiencing the beauty of a country road’!!!

How beautifully he comes to terms with the central question in this wonder-read of sorts!

‘What is quality? What makes a thing or a person or an idea good?’

Art, to him, is not necessarily when rubber hits the road, but it is there, found in the numerous sketches and portraits and vivid details all along the road!

How trueee!

“In a car you’re always in a compartment,” Pirsig writes, “and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more of TV!!!!!”

Well, you’re just a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in and through a frame!

But but but…

How a Text, a Work of fiction, can be a Labyrinth...!!!

Labyrinthine literature, today, has become a hot favourite amongst litterateurs the world over. The reasons are not far to seek, though!

It’s been the mighty muse of a host of writers, especially to J. L. Borges, who is also called the King of the Labyrinth! Other lovely writers of the labyrinth would include the mighty likes of Umberto Eco, Michael Ayrton, Amelia Gray, Carol Shields, etc, to name a few!

According to Emily Temple, the labyrinth is one of Borges’s signature themes! aka the Borgesian labyrinth!

A few of his other themes include doubling, mirrors, infinite spaces, imaginary texts, etc.

Many of his works engage with the maze as structure, form, or topic.

Emily Temple also connects the labyrinth with its origins in Greek mythology, where the labyrinth was an enormous maze built by Daedalus for King Minos of Crete in order to contain the Minotaur, who lived at the center. At the demand of Minos, fourteen Athenian youths would periodically be sacrificed into the labyrinth—forced to wander until caught and eaten by the Minotaur—until the creature was finally killed by Theseus.

So here’s giving you Borges’ quintessential short story titled, “The Garden of Forking Paths” that explores the labyrinthine theme in much detail.

A LABYRINTH OF SYMBOLS

Exploring  J. L. Borges’  “The Garden Of Forking Paths”

Excerpts from Ethan Weed

1. J. L. Borges’ short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” gives us the suggestion that a text, a work of fiction, can be a labyrinth.

2. A physical labyrinth has a plan, although the victim of the labyrinth has no access to it. But if a text can be labyrinth, then it must be a labyrinth of symbols and ideas, such that it may be difficult, if not impossible, to guess the plan of the labyrinth.

3. A physical labyrinth has walls, hedges, or some other form of boundary that impedes or guides the movement of the subject. But in a textual labyrinth, it’s not so clear where the walls are, or when one has reached the center.

Bloom on Books! A Lovely Critique on 'Art and the Artist!'

Well, I’m just done with Harold Bloom's Essayists and Prophets. What a wondrous charm it has, on one’s interpretation of art and the artist!

I've always loved the Bloomian touch to a text - the Bloomian critique, or Bloomian interpretations to a text, which have a charisma of their own. He's quite got that unique way with words, and 'charm'd magic casements’ aplenty, that make his reads such grippy unputdownables of sorts!

Giving below the legend’s own words on Books, and on his own criteria for Greatness in Imaginative Literature!

[Psst: Practitioners of all things Theory, excuse this once! J But yesss! With a sheepish grin let me acknowledge the fact that, he’s been such a fierce-o-fierce defender of the Canon, something that is anathema, or taboo, or impermissible, or out of bounds for practitioners of the poststructuralist, postmodernist ways of thinking, and.. and… and… irony of ironies, I’ve been handling this particular text for the II MA English Lit., for quite many years now! This said, I should also sincerely announce that he has utterly renounced what he had once so strongly pronounced! (This he did in a candid tete-a-tete with Vice Magazine in Fall 2008, where he says that, it was only at his publisher’s behest that he had to formulate such a canonical array of books!)

Do take your time to inhale this Bloomian bloom right into your hearts n minds… and yes! These are just a few snippets…

Here’s Bloom speaking, for y’all –

I began editing Anthologies of Literary Criticism in early 1984, but the first volume, Edgar Allan Poe: Modern Critical Views, was published in January, 1985, so this is the twentieth anniversary of a somewhat Quixotic venture.

A thousand books across a score of years can touch many shores and many lives, and at seventy-four, I am a little bewildered at the strangeness of the endeavor, particularly now that it has leaped between centuries.

Yet the books have to be reasonably reflective of current critical modes and educational fashions, not all of them provoking my own enthusiasm.

But then I am a dinosaur, cheerfully naming myself as “Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator.”

I accept only three criteria for greatness in imaginative literature: aesthetic splendor, cognitive power, wisdom.

What is now called “relevance” will be in the dustbins in less than a generation, as our society (somewhat tardily) reforms prejudices and inequities.

The fashionable in literature and criticism always ebbs away into Period Pieces. Old, well-made furniture survives as valuable antiques, which is not the destiny of badly constructed imaginings and ideological exhortings.

Time, which decays and then destroys us, is even more merciless in obliterating weak novels, poems, dramas, and stories, however virtuous these may be.

Wander into a library and regard the masterpieces of thirty years ago: a handful of forgotten books have value, but the iniquity of oblivion has rendered most bestsellers instances of time’s revenges.