Page 104 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

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Habermas, Jürgen (1929– ) A professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt
(Germany), Habermas stands in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, yet, he also
differs from them in important respects. Thus, rather than dismissing
Enlightenment reason per se, as Adorno was inclined to do, Habermas distinguishes
between instrumental reason and critical reason. The former, epitomized by
scientific rationality, involves the subordination of the social-existential questions
of the ‘lifeworld’ to the ‘system imperatives’ of money and administrative power.
However, the Enlightenment also has a critical side that for Habermas is the basis
of the emancipatory project of modernity, which remains unfinished. A critic of
postmodernism, Habermas has sought universal grounds for the validation of
claims to human emancipation through the exploration of communicative
processes that include the ‘ideal speech situation’ and the ‘public sphere’.
• Associated concepts Commodification, Enlightenment, ideal speech situation,
modernity, public sphere.
• Tradition(s) Critical theory, Marxism.
• Reading Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
Cambridge: MIT Press.

Habitus An idea developed by Pierre Bourdieu as a part of his sociology of culture
wherein the habitus is understood as a set of durable values, practices and
dispositions which is both structured and structuring. The habitus is the context in
which we understand the world and acquire beliefs, values and knowledge through
practice. Further, it is through practice that the habitus manifests itself at that
moment when a specific problem is approached and ‘solved’ through a particular
set of dispositions. Though formed within a particular field, the dispositions of the
habitus are transportable into other fields.
The dispositions of the habitus are the consequence of family, class and
educational background but appear to us as natural. Indeed, the universalism
attributed to the values, attitudes and practices of the habitus represents for
Bourdieu a misrecognition or forgetting in relation to the conditions of production
of the habitus itself. However, the habitus is not simply a fixed set of phenomena
as a consequence of structural conditioning but is also generative. That is, the
habitus consists of the practical mastery of skills, routines, aptitudes and
assumptions that can be modified and used as the basis of improvisations, especially
when transported from one field to another.
The concept of the habitus represents Bourdieu’s attempt to confront the
paradox of structure and agency or subjectivist (from the point of view of the actor)

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