Practice and discourse about practice

From WikEd

In this section Bourdieu, explores schemes and customs as arising out of interactivity in cultural practice. He is careful to differentiate customs as implict patterns from transcendental rules or laws governing human activity in order to illustrate the problems with objectivism, formalism and structuralism in science. For Bourdieu, schemes and customs within practices are not properly understood as metaphysical structures determining behavior. Rather they are reinforcing regularities that emerge and change over time. For example, unlike Sassure's emphasis in linguistics on the 'structure of signs' over their 'practical functions', Bourdieu is interested to highlight the interactive situations and contexts that shape language for varied purposes. In his view the 'fallacy of the rule' is that it reifies abstractions, falsely attributing agency to cultural patterns. Likewise, the problem with theory is that it absolutizes mental constructs in order to account for practices. He writes,

"To consider regularity, that is, what occurs with a certain statistically measurable 'frequency', as the product of a consciously laid-down and consciously respected ruling (which implies explaining its genesis and efficacy), or as the product of an unconscious 'regulating' by a mysterious cerebral and/or social mechanism, is to slip from the model of reality to the reality of the model. (p. 29)"