Dana Anderson. "Questioning the Motives of Habituated Action: Burke and Bourdieu on Practice." Philosophy and Rhetoric. 37:3 (2004). 255-74.

How does one account for unconscious action in Burkean dramatism? Given that Kenneth Burke's humanism—he defines humans as "the symbol-using animal"—draws a sharp distinction between action and motion ("things move, persons act"), how do we begin to describe motive when actions effect unintended purposes?

These are precisely the questions that drive Dana Anderson to Pierre Bourdieu in search of an explanation for habituated action. In fact, Anderson shows that for Burke actions don't really have to be conscious to be analyzable—they simply have to be purposive. In other words, what we want to know is how we can wrest purpose from the agent’s ability to anticipate the outcome of her act.

But what is meant by purpose is nearly as unclear in Anderson’s article as it is in Burke (take A Grammar of Motives, for instance, wherein Burke lumps agency and purpose together—unlike his separate discussions of scene, agent, and act—a peculiar grouping, given that agency and purpose basically equate to means and ends). By purpose, do we mean intended effects (as in when something is done “on purpose”)? Or do we mean simply results (as in when something is done “to no purpose”)? If we mean the former, then clearly intention or consciousness is at issue. And if we mean the latter, we might instead need to distinguish between unintended, unforeseeable, and counter-intentional consequences. Anderson does not attend to this ambiguity of purpose. However, instead of seeing this non-attendance as (merely) a blind spot in Anderson’s essay, I think we should see it as an untapped potential.

In any case, Anderson thinks the possibility of identifying a motive of habituated action is available through attitude (which Burke has mentioned as what should have been the sixth term in a hexadic grammar of motives). Thus, he essentially argues that

Adapting attitude to thus underscore the body's potential to acquire socially inscribed dispositions—its "internalization of exteriority"—provides Dramatism with a more precise means of accounting for the dialectical nature of practice. (271)

The key point about practice is that it’s the kind of thing we do without thinking about—or (ever) questioning—why we do it.

Anderson finds Burke’s category of attitude useful because “as a kind of incipient future action, it must be by some means grounded in the set of the body” (qtd. in Anderson 270; emphasis added by Anderson). If a “conscious attitude” indicates a “state of mind,” then a nonconscious attitude—or what Bourdieu would call a disposition—could correspond to a “state of body.” And we see herein the correspondence between Burke and Bourdieu. A collection of attitudes, inasmuch as they remain more or less unexaminable, amounts to a habitus.

Anderson’s use of Bourdieu is basically for purposes of explanation. He doesn’t really advance Bourdieu’s work much, but he does provide one of the clearer explications of habitus and disposition I’ve encountered by way of isolating three functions and characteristics of habitus (drawn from two quotes in Outline of a theory of Practice). One, habitus is taught directly and indirectly and is “durable,” as well as “transposable.” Two, habitus generates behavior that appears to be repeated for the sake of the behavior itself. And three, such behavior, as “embodied understanding” (265), is more or less motiveless—or, perhaps more precisely, is irrelevant of motive. In other words, the habitus breeds action that serves a purpose, but the purpose is more or less beyond the comprehension of the actor.

And this is why I think the term purpose might be worth analysis here: to the extent that purpose both entails and eludes (an) intention (simultaneously), does it not cover the space ambiguously between conscious and nonconscious (and perhaps even unconscious) action?