mysophobia 潔癖

Discourses do not produce practices. Discourses can’t even explain discourses themselves.

In the theory of practice of Bourdieu, the agent’s practical sense confronts a field of operation, but it is not exactly the agents actual own conception of the situation that is guiding action , because it expresses the agents imaginary relation to his real situation, but the agents embodied practical sense with its roots in accumulated real history. Human social action is like an orchestra playing without conductor, a strategy without a strategist, an intentionality without a subject.


Bourdieu insists that the main difference between him and Foucault lays in these concepts of field and habitus. Bourdieu has constantly argued that human social action has a dimension that consists of objective relations (that is, structure), and a dimension that consists of subjective involvement, and altogether these two dimensions are linked through habitus or structuring structure, which ensure the reproduction of the structure while producing the subject. As a result, human social action is conceived of as directed more by an objective orientation than the subjective intentions of the agent with the domain of doxa, even though subjectivity is indispensible element in the sustainment of the doxa.



Bourdieu is faulted with being too mechanical. However, it is also clear that his image of modern society and traditional society takes different levels of the changeability of doxa. Nevertheless, his theorization of practice only explains where does the doxa come from, but not how doxa can be challenged and changed, despite that he envisages some avenues of reflexivity to arise from the sense of limits (doxa) in ordinary experience, such as radical social changes.

Discourse (or Reflexivity)	Doxa
logos	Praxis
Discursive rationality	Embodied sensibility