Abstract
Abstract This article examines points of convergence between Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the habitus and ancient and modern depictions of art as a model of knowledge. My discussion of art is intended to engage on-going conversations on rhetorical invention and to raise new questions concerning the relationship between invention and cultural critique. Notes 1. See Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition. 2. Young maintained heuristics could be used “for carrying out many phases of composing, from the formulation of problems to various kinds of editing…” (135). 3. See Young and Becker's “Toward a Modern Theory of Rhetoric: A Tagmemic Contribution” and Lauer's exchanges with Berthoff. 4. Bourdieu provides the following definition of the habitus: “The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an expressive mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor” (72). 5. Using the analogy of the game, Bourdieu explains that “those who are caught up in them have little interest in seeing the game objectified.” The paradox, Bourdieu observes, is that those who are not caught up in the game “are often ill-placed to experience and feel everything that can only be learned and understood when one takes part in the game…” (189). See also p. 164. 6. “The truth of doxa is only ever fully revealed when negatively constituted by the constitution of a field of opinion, the locus of the confrontation of competing discourses—whose political truth may be overtly declared or may remain hidden, even from the eyes of those engaged in it. … The critique which brings the undiscussed into discussion, the unformulated into formulation, has as the condition of its possibility objective crisis, which, in breaking the immediate fit between the subject structures and the objective structures, destroys self-evidence practically” (Bourdieu 168–169).