However, if the social scientist is to include the subjective experience of agency as part
of the explanation of regularities, she cannot take the obvious course of reducing it to
conscious choice. Bourdieu calls this approach voluntarism, exemplified by a strain in
phenomenology, of which Sartre is the obvious exemplar, which explains action in terms
of the exercise of the agent’s will or identification with a course of action. However, the
concept of volitional action only applies to ends and means which are self-represented,
GERRANS Tacit knowledge and rule following and it is clear that many of the regularities in which social science is interested are not
the direct outcome of consciously entertained plans any more than a competent speaker’s
mastery of her language is the result of the conscious acquisition of a grammar. Furthermore,
Bourdieu is wary of conceiving of agency as conscious choice, because part of his
project is to show that regularities are produced by the way that social structure limits
the horizon of choice for individuals. The language of Sartrean voluntarism, which is
really that of the libertarian in the free will debate, tends to obscure the fact that the
agent’s options are partially foreclosed by her social environment (see the discussion of
aesthetic judgement later in this article).
Legalism and voluntarism constitute a dilemma for Bourdieu which his account of
tacit knowledge attempts to avoid. Legalism is a Charybdis because many aspects of
human social life are too open ended and complex to be plausibly formalized as a closed
system, and voluntarism a Scylla because agents’ conscious intentions do not include the
production of regularities. Furthermore, the horizon of agents’ choices is limited by the
pre-existence of regularities.
Bourdieu avoids this dilemma by weakening the notion of a rule from a determinately
codifiable algorithm to something more flexible and subject to circumstance; and the
notion of knowledge from assent to an explicitly represented proposition to practical
embodiment of a rule in skilful activity. His expression for this type of embodiment is
‘feel for the game’, which preserves the element of conscious awareness which accompanies
the control of skilled action. There is a way it feels to be a skilled tennis player
who instinctively chooses the right shot, which is the product of a regime of drills and
rehearsals rather than the learning of tennis rules and precepts from an instruction
manual. From the observer’s perspective we can formulate rules followed by the tennis
player, but the ‘fallacy of the rule’ is to assume that those same rules abstracted by the
observer are, as it were, ‘in the agent’s mind’ operating as unconsciously represented algorithms
which govern her actions. The agent’s subjective awareness of volitional control
of action is not a way of experiencing the operation of an algorithmic process.
For Bourdieu, we have to invoke rules to provide a unifying explanation of regularities
with a suitable psychological dimension to do justice to the fact that regularities are
produced by agents whose activities converge even if their conscious intentions do not.
The alternative would be to treat human activity as ‘chaotic’, Bourdieu’s word for a mere
aggregate of singular case histories that cannot be theoretically unified. To answer a
question as to why good right-handed tennis players approach the net off their backhand
when receiving serve in the first court but not the deuce court, we need a unifying theory
of tennis behaviour. Without the theory the observer has no explanation, only a catalogue
of descriptions of thousands of individual points. But the player has no need of that
theory, her practice and playing of thousands of points (the tennis habitus) has allowed
her to embody the rule in her practice and equip her with the correct ‘feel for the game’.
57
However, if the social scientist is to include the subjective experience of agency as part
of the explanation of regularities, she cannot take the obvious course of reducing it to
conscious choice. Bourdieu calls this approach voluntarism, exemplified by a strain in
phenomenology, of which Sartre is the obvious exemplar, which explains action in terms
of the exercise of the agent’s will or identification with a course of action. However, the
concept of volitional action only applies to ends and means which are self-represented,
GERRANS Tacit knowledge and rule following and it is clear that many of the regularities in which social science is interested are not
the direct outcome of consciously entertained plans any more than a competent speaker’s
mastery of her language is the result of the conscious acquisition of a grammar. Furthermore,
Bourdieu is wary of conceiving of agency as conscious choice, because part of his
project is to show that regularities are produced by the way that social structure limits
the horizon of choice for individuals. The language of Sartrean voluntarism, which is
really that of the libertarian in the free will debate, tends to obscure the fact that the
agent’s options are partially foreclosed by her social environment (see the discussion of
aesthetic judgement later in this article).
Legalism and voluntarism constitute a dilemma for Bourdieu which his account of
tacit knowledge attempts to avoid. Legalism is a Charybdis because many aspects of
human social life are too open ended and complex to be plausibly formalized as a closed
system, and voluntarism a Scylla because agents’ conscious intentions do not include the
production of regularities. Furthermore, the horizon of agents’ choices is limited by the
pre-existence of regularities.
Bourdieu avoids this dilemma by weakening the notion of a rule from a determinately
codifiable algorithm to something more flexible and subject to circumstance; and the
notion of knowledge from assent to an explicitly represented proposition to practical
embodiment of a rule in skilful activity. His expression for this type of embodiment is
‘feel for the game’, which preserves the element of conscious awareness which accompanies
the control of skilled action. There is a way it feels to be a skilled tennis player
who instinctively chooses the right shot, which is the product of a regime of drills and
rehearsals rather than the learning of tennis rules and precepts from an instruction
manual. From the observer’s perspective we can formulate rules followed by the tennis
player, but the ‘fallacy of the rule’ is to assume that those same rules abstracted by the
observer are, as it were, ‘in the agent’s mind’ operating as unconsciously represented algorithms
which govern her actions. The agent’s subjective awareness of volitional control
of action is not a way of experiencing the operation of an algorithmic process.
For Bourdieu, we have to invoke rules to provide a unifying explanation of regularities
with a suitable psychological dimension to do justice to the fact that regularities are
produced by agents whose activities converge even if their conscious intentions do not.
The alternative would be to treat human activity as ‘chaotic’, Bourdieu’s word for a mere
aggregate of singular case histories that cannot be theoretically unified. To answer a
question as to why good right-handed tennis players approach the net off their backhand
when receiving serve in the first court but not the deuce court, we need a unifying theory
of tennis behaviour. Without the theory the observer has no explanation, only a catalogue
of descriptions of thousands of individual points. But the player has no need of that
theory, her practice and playing of thousands of points (the tennis habitus) has allowed
her to embody the rule in her practice and equip her with the correct ‘feel for the game’.
57
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