Digifesto

In Bourdieu’s sociological theory, habitus refers to the dispositions of taste and action that individuals acquired as a practical consequence of their place in society. Society provides a social field (a technical term for Bourdieu) of structured incentives and roles. Individuals adapt to roles rationally, but in doing so culturally differentiate themselves. This process is dialectical, hence neither strictly determined by the field nor by individual rational agency, but a co-creation of each. One’s posture, one’s preference for a certain kind of music, one’s disposition to engage in sports, one’s disposition to engage in intellectual debate, are all potentially elements of a habitus.

In Jungian psychoanalytic theory, the shadow is the aspect of personality that is unconscious and not integrated with the ego–what one consciously believes oneself to be. Often it is the instinctive or irrational part of one’s psychology. An undeveloped psyche is likely to see his or her own shadow aspect in others and judge them harshly for it; this is a form of psychological projection motivated by repression for the sake of maintaining the ego. Encounters with the shadow are difficult. Often they are experienced as the awareness or suspicion of some new information that threatens ones very sense of self. But these encounters are, for Jung, an essential part of individuation, as they are how the personality can develop a more complete consciousness of itself.

Perhaps you can see where this is going.

I propose a theoretical construct: habitus shadow.

When an individual, situated within a social field, develops a habitus, they may do so with an incomplete consciousness of the reasons for their preferences and dispositions for action. An ego, a conscious rationalization, will develop; it will be reinforced by others who share its habitus. The dispositions of a habitus will include the collectively constructed ego of its members, which is itself a psychological disposition.

We would then expect that a habitus has a characteristic shadow: truths about the sociological conditions of a habitus which are not part of the conscious self-indentity or ego of that habitus.

This is another way to talk about what I have discussed elsewhere as an ideological immune reaction. If an idea or understanding is so challenging or destructive to the ego of a habitus that it calls into question the rationality of it’s very existence, then the role will be able to maintain itself only through a kind of repression/projection/exclusion. Alternatively, if the habitus can assimilate its shadow, one could see that as a form of social self-transcendence or progress.