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Habit and Inhabitance: An Analysis of Experience in the ClassroomAuthor(s): James OstrowSource: Human Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1987), pp. 213-224Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20008997 .

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Human Studies 10: 213-224 (1987) ? Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands

HABIT AND INHABITANCY AN ANALYSIS OF EXPERIENCE IN THE CLASSROOM*

JAMES OSTROW

Department of Behavioral Sciences, Bentley College, Waltham, MA 02254

In this paper I focus on the phenomenon of environment on the level at

which it is a lived context for human action and consciousness, but is not

an object of consciousness, i.e., not a matter for attention and reflection.

The focus of my considerations will be the pupil's prereflective familiarity with the school environment, which I take to be the experiential grounds for being disposed to the particular practices of the classroom, including those that teachers might view as 'learning activities'. In this way I hope to demonstrate the importance of the phenomenological exploration of

prereflective experience for sociology, particularly that area of the sociol?

ogy of knowledge that concerns itself with the problem of 'common sense'.

I believe that a principal objective of phenomenological reflection in the

social sciences is to explicate the prereflective sensibility of inhabiting an

environment. Contemporary sociology is indebted to the efforts of Alfred

Schutz, who conceived of the basis for socially shared knowledge in terms

of the taken-for-grantedness of everyday life, and helped sensitize us to the

unreflective, habitual qualities of human consciousness. Nevertheless, I be-.

lieve the notion of taken-for-grantedness pulls us away from an apprecia? tion of the lived significance of the habitual. The concept does little more than identify habits of behavior and consciousness in their absence in re?

flection. It indicates nothing about the presence of the dynamics of habit in prereflective experience.

The insufficiency of the idea of 'taken-for-grantedness' for comprehend?

ing the depth of individuals' familiarity with their environments relates di?

rectly to the problem of understanding classroom experience. In his text,

Life in Classrooms, Philip Jackson notes the typically min?scule amount of



214

information about a school day that most pupils disclose to their parents.

This is attributed to the confinement of the parents' interests to the 'spice

of school life rather than its substance', and the corresponding confine?

ment of what the pupil is typically aware of to a

small number of signal events - 'I got 100 on my spelling test,' 'A new

boy came and he sat next to me' - or recurring activities

- 'We went

to gym,' 'We had music' His spontaneous recall of detail is not much

greater than that required to answer our conventional questions.

(Jackson, 1968: 3-4)

Jackson is arguing that because the school environment is so 'taken for

granted' and 'routine' for pupils, they typically have no memory of what

goes on there. This seems to me a gross oversimplification of the pupil's

consciousness. It is more accurate to say that the pupil remembers a ple?

thora of details of that day's events, and often with an intensity that satu?

rates his anticipation of the next day. However, it is also true that all of this

detail is not merely kept hidden by the pupil, but is to a degree unavailable

to awareness when interacting with his parents. This is no contradiction:

the practicality of the situations in which we find ourselves is at once an

environmental enclosure and generator of how we are actively aware of

past, present, and future circumstances. This means that, as both John

Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty demonstrate in their philosophies of

prereflective experience, consciousness is never an arbitrary occurrence, but

instead a possibility occasioned by our acquired habits of involvement. As

our practical conditions change, we are necessarily habituated to an?

ticipate, expect, and focus in different ways upon the world's events. Of

course, these shifts in habitual perspective are explicable in terms of a varie?

ty of social circumstances. When he is with his parents, the pupil is predis?

posed to a context of familiarity, and literally inhabits a perspective that

engenders possibilities of feeling, thought, and expression not typically

open to interaction with the teacher, sibling or friend.

Therefore, it seems a safe guess that what the pupil takes for granted

about a school day fluctuates enormously, depending on where he is and

whom he's with. The habitual conditions of reflection, and not the famil?

iarity of the school environment as experienced, accounts for what will

often appear to be its 'matter-of-factness'. This is enough to seriously ques?

tion the adequacy of the notion of the 'taken-for-granted' in an account

of the environment as lived. As suggested in my opening statement, to say



215

that the qualities of the school environment are taken for granted is to make

a statement about their absence in reflective awareness and communicative

expression, not about the qualities themselves. In other words, with this

concept we merely recognize the existence of the prereflective sense of in?

habiting an environment. We do not describe it at this level, and we do not,

if we persist on a level of recognition only, understand it.

Indeed, speaking to the derogatory connotations of the notion of

taken-for-grantedness (e.g., he 'takes her', or she 'takes him' for granted),

by merely recognizing without seeking to grasp the dynamics of the prere?

flective familiarity of environment, sociology takes the familiar for grant?

ed. The best we can do is deduce the socialization of a subject in a posited

process of 'internalized' rules, principles, values, or typifications. From a

phenomenological viewpoint it is readily apparent that this is a superficial conception of the genesis of sensibility and custom: it is only in terms of the directly experienced dynamics of environmental conditions that their habitual embodiment is practically intelligible and theoretically compre? hensible.

The dynamics of prereflective habit are a fundamental concern in the

philosophies of Dewey and Merleau-Ponty. Nevertheless, this element of

their writings has been given far less consideration in what has come to be

known as 'phenomenological sociology' than Schutz's theory of taken for

granted knowledge ('typifications'). Dewey's theory of 'habits of mind' and Merleau-Ponty's theory of the habitual body share the contention that

habits are not merely taken for granted reactions or behaviors that tend to

repeat themselves. Habit is a sense-enabling structure of experience, but is

irreducible to determined or determinate behavioral or cognitive schemes.

Through the habitually familiar and dynamically familiarizing qualities of prereflective experience, everyday life is a sustained involvement within

which situations 'make sense'. Habits are the dispositions and capabilities that comprise such involvement, which is why Dewey emphasizes that the

'grooves' worn by habit are not necessarily grooves of routine:

By a seeming paradox, increased power of forming habits means in? creased susceptibility, sensitiveness, responsiveness. Thus, even if we think of habits as so many grooves, the power to acquire many and varied grooves denotes high sensitivity, explosiveness (Dewey, 1925: 281)



216

Hence, feelings, beliefs, values, or perceptions are not reducible to 'typifi

cations' that exist aside from and prior to the situations of present expe?

rience. Believing, valuing, perceiving, thinking, and feeling are habitual

sensitivities of experience through which we inhabit a world possessing be?

lievable, valuable, perceivable, thinkable, and sentient qualities.

To say that experience is habitual is not, therefore, to suggest that expe?

rience occurs merely on the basis of, and thus regularly 'confirms' what we

taken for grantedly know. Dewey and Merleau-Ponty both argue that hav?

ing meaning is a prerequisite for knowing. When Schutz conceives of the

habitual foundations of social reality as a 'stock' of taken for granted

knowledge (Schutz, 1970; Schutz and Luckmann, 1974), he inverts the phe? nomenological relationship between having the qualities and intensities of the lived world and knowing its meanings. It follows that what Merleau

Ponty calls the error of 'intellectualism' applies to Schutz's theory of social

reality: it is interpreted as if it were habitually structured on the basis of

positing objects of reflection, rather than as a structure of the sensibility

and significance 'which we carry about inseparably with us before any

objectification' (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 362). The meaningfulness of the world is reduced to what we are capable of knowing, whether explicitly (the

form of knowledge that Schutz calls 'knowing about') or tacitly (the taken for granted knowledge that Schutz calls 'knowledge of acquaintance')

(Schutz, 1964: 91 -105). Dewey and Merleau-Ponty agree that involvement

in the world is grounded in what Schutz calls habitual 'sedimentations' of

meaning, but they seek to locate habit at the level of experience at which

we embody various forms of sensitivity to the world prior to its determina?

tion into distinct objects of knowledge. Hence, where Schutz posits a realm

of taken for granted 'schemes' existing independent and determinate of the

meanings of situated experience, Dewey and Merleau-Ponty conceive of

habit according to its Latin root habere, which means 'to have' or 'to hold',

in order to explicate the pre-objective dialectic between being and becom?

ing sensitive to the qualities of inhabiting an environment (Merleau-Ponty,

1962: 174). Phenomenologically, the meaningfulness of present experience is an ac?

tivity of habit, a 'tension' (Dewey, 1931: 184) between habitual grooves of

sensitivity and world, through which self and environment are simulta?

neously transformed. Merleau-Ponty asserts that 'habits express our power

of dilating our being in the world' (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 143). The pheno?

menological theory of habit is a theory of the structure of actual expe



217

rience, not a process of deducing latent determination of experience.1 The

remainder of my discussion takes its departure from Dewey's and Merleau

Ponty's common insight that habits are operative in the formed and form?

ing sensitivity of present experience.

A phenomenological conception of habit suggests an explication of the

socio-historical conditions of the school environment as a dynamic realm

of possibilities open to the sensitivity of self-as-pupil. In the present dis?

cussion I content myself with the analysis of one brief incident, a particle of the school day, that I hope offers some indication of the usefulness of

phenomenological exploration of the prereflective habituality of an envi?

ronment. The following example is from Jules Henry's chapter on school?

ing in Culture Against Man.

Boris had trouble reducing '12/16' to the lowest terms, and could only get as far as '6/8'. The teacher asked him quietly if that was as far as

he could reduce it. She suggested he 'think'. Much heaving up and down and waving of hands by other children, all frantic to correct him.

Boris pretty unhappy, probably mentally paralyzed. The teacher,

quiet, patient, ignores the others and concentrates with look and voice on Boris. She says, 'Is there a bigger number than two you can divide

into the two parts of the fraction?' After a minute or two, she becomes more urgent, but there is no response from Boris. She then turns to the

class and says, 'Well, who can tell Boris what the number is?' A forest

of hands appears, and the teacher calls Peggy. Peggy says that four

may be divided into the numerator and the denominator. (Henry, 1963: 295-296)

The scenario of pupils taking turns performing before the rest of the class

is a 'typical' one - a regular occurrence in any conventional school setting. The objective social features of this circumstance

- perhaps the most cen?

tral of which is the fact that the teacher solicits pupils to be visibly produc? tive in her presence and also prescribes how they should do so - are all

routine for pupils, and so rarely matters for reflection. Yet, apart from its

'taken for granted' status in reflection, these conditions are quite vivid in

experience -

intense enough to occasion a variety of emotions, including

unhappiness, yearning, or joy. The intrinsic quality of Boris' experience as one of 'failure', or Peggy's

as 'success', presupposes their rootedness within particular contexts of ha?

bitual sensitivity. Certainly, Boris must possess a particular disposition to



218

ward the situation, and have a sense of its impediments, or there would be

no basis for his unhappiness. With our 'cultural knowledge' of the class? room setting, Boris' unhappiness seems only natural: how else does one ex?

perience failure, especially failure in the eyes of so many? But what are the

grounds in experience for failure or success? What are the dynamics of ex?

perience through which the pupils' present sense of this situation is con?

sumed by the alternatives of failure or success?

This question will not inspire those convinced that understanding social

life is contingent upon the production of 'empirical' claims. In addition to

acting within situations, the term 'experience' connotes students' under?

going them, or, in the broad sense of the term, feeling them (Dewey, 1960). In this sense, experience does not appear to be available for direct scrutiny in the way that observable behavior is. Any claim to comprehend expe?

rience appears to be based less on empirical demonstrability than on the

analyst's own, private thoughts.

Yet explicating experiential sensitivity is not a matter of identifying the 'actual content' of particular individuals' experiences. The validity or inva?

lidity of an inquiry into the dynamics of involvement from a subject's standpoint does not rest on the production of empirical claims. Such an in?

quiry does rest on the potential of description to evoke these dynamics in

ways plausible to reflection. Standing apart from the need for empirical

'proof, phenomenological description offers reflective access to intensities

of human existence at a prereflective level of contact between subject and

world.

We may enter the prereflective thickness of the classroom situation out?

lined above through a descriptive evocation of what Pierre Bourdieu would

call its tempo. I use the term 'tempo' rather than, for instance, 'stream' or

'flow', in order to acknowledge the punctuations, interruptions, and

various other transformations in the quality of practically situated time,

'which is made up of incommensurable islands of duration, each with its

own rhythm, the time that flies or drags, depending on what one is doing'

(Bourdieu, 1977: 105). It follows that although all pupils in the above cir? cumstance attend to the same 'problem' at the 'same time', there are a varie?

ty of tempos, or some remarkable differences in their experiences of time.

In his responsive paralysis, I imagine that time drags oppressively for Boris.

Failing to 'think', meaning, unable to solve the fraction and thereby fill the

teacher's prescription for what to do this instant, within this productive



219

space at the blackboard, Boris lingers in time and space as a frozen spec?

tacle for the group. He is caught in a kind of limbo between moments of a building intensity of practical inertia, and the possibility of a rhythm of

productivity that he is unable to engage.

For Boris, failure is consumated in the teacher's turning away from him,

and saying, 'Well, who can tell Boris what the number is?' With this he is at once cut loose from the unfilled prescription, and released from public visibility

- severed from the possibility of actualizing the practical mean?

ing of this currently inhabited space. He is thrust into the silence and ano?

nymity of his peers, and, I assume, eventually directed back to his seat.

Boris' return to his seat may be felt as either relief or frustration; in any

case, it emanates from a tempo of confronted and unfulfilled possibilities

for inhabiting this environment. Hence, 'failure' is not located only in the

observable 'incorrectness' of a response. Also, the pupil's habitual sensitiv?

ity to failing is not reducible conceptually to his 'taken for granted' knowl?

edge of what constitutes the phenomenon of failure. Such a reduction oper?

ates on the presumption that once, using Schutz's terminology, 'sediment

ed' into a 'typification', the meaning of failure is fixed, and so its localiza?

tion in the temporality of present experience is just icing on the cake; i.e.,

experience becomes little else than a confirmation of the 'typification'. Yet

in our example we see that failure is concretized as a qualitatively changing duration in experience; it is structured by, while it simultaneously struc?

tures, the sensibility of the evolving situation. It follows that by merely say?

ing the situation is known as one of failure, we miss the qualities and inten?

sities of having the experience of failing. Boris' failure erupts, or builds, or tapers off, or lingers on, or perhaps

smoulders in anticipation of being recalled to the blackboard sometime in the future. In any case, it is an unreflective sensitivity of experience that at

once qualifies the meaning of the possibilities of the present and is requali fied as an enduring habit in the process. Through a shifting of the lived dy? namics of the context that is structured by the initial conditioning of habit, experience at once solidifies and expands habit by drawing the subject into

the fresh drama of the waxing and waning possibilities of a sensible envi?

ronment. There is thus a reciprocity between the 'accustomed' and 'accus?

toming' nature of inhabiting an environment, intelligible to reflection only through phenomenological recovery of the prereflective tempo of expe? rience. We may further expand on the habitually formed and habit forming



220

foundations of environmental inhabitancy by returning to our example, now examining the experience of the other pupils.

Speaking now of the pupil who desires to solve the mathematical problem written on the blackboard, I suspect that in waiting for a chance to occupy

productive space, and thus display oneself in this productive instant, time

flies, opportunities slipping away fast as the teacher facilitates Boris, refus?

ing to acknowledge the requests of those around her while, on the other

hand, growing numbers of raised hands increasingly threaten one's

chances. When the teacher turns away from Boris, the productive potential

of this space he occupies becomes 'free' -

accessible to another's expe?

rience. Peggy is chosen to speak, and it is literally the case that she has won

a tight race with a swiftly receding possibility of practice. To actualize this

possibility is therefore to enter into that spatio-temporal localization of ex?

perience reserved for a single member of the mass, which is the all embrac?

ing rhythm of a prescribed practice.

Peggy appropriates the prescribed usefulness of the space in which Boris still stands, she literally draws it to herself, the productive intensity of the blackboard area virtually disintegrating as its locus re-emerges at her desk.

Remaining in 'her place', Peggy thus surfaces from the anonymity of a

crowd of classmates into the region of their and the teacher's collective fo?

cus. This temporary transformation of her experiential posture within the

group is what she has clearly aimed for and 'earned' at the expense of all

around her who strive for the same.

In the wake of Boris' failure is the impending success of a classmate. Henry

attributes the conduct of Boris' classmates to their competitiveness as they

'yap at the heels of another's failure' (Henry, 1963: 296). The situation is

clearly a fiercely competitive one, and the pupils who have their hearts in

the struggle would, as Henry notes, be abhorred for their actions in many

other societies. However, rather than identify 'competitive values' as the

motivational source of the situation, I believe deeper understanding is

gained in locating the genesis of a competitive atmosphere within the habit?

ual sensitivity of direct experience. Competition is not 'for its own sake',

which is something that is logically implied by the idea of its taken-for

grantedness in a 'transmitted value'. When we conceive of competitiveness

in this way, thus presuming that the pupil's behavior is 'locked' through

some sort of latent determinacy into a routine, we miss its power in expe?

rience as an emergent saturation of the social relations of school.



221

If pupils regularly compete with each other, this is, at least with respect to the intelligibility of our example, grounded in the habit of being em?

broiled within the utter precariousness of one's practical mobility in the school environment. Such mobility is comprehensible largely in terms of

pupils' sensitivities to and degrees of control over their visibility to a group, the activities of which are governed typically in concert by the teacher. Any pupil, whether academically diligent, withdrawn from pedagogical matters at hand, or engaged in activities that deviate from a teacher's expectations,

often feels himself at the threshold between the undifferentiated submer?

gence within crowd life and the public observability of his conduct. Actual or imagined movement in and out of these possible modes of existence con?

stitutes much of the drama of the classroom. Obviously, the all-embracing,

if only momentary, metamorphosis of social invisibility into visibility is al?

ways to a large extent beyond the control of the pupil who undergoes it,

since it is the teacher who at any moment determines the participants with?

in and location of the 'productive space' of the lesson. The pupil who is

unprepared for yet called on to give an answer, the daydreamer who is ad?

monished for not 'paying attention', or the 'goof-off who is 'caught' and

reprimanded all have in common an unsuspected push into the realm of

visibility. The disconcerting quality of this general experience lies in the ab? sence of the anticipation through which this fundamentally new mode of

experience is established as an habitually sensible possibility. Without the benefit of an habitual foothold in the realm of public focus prior to its ac?

tualization, the pupil is suddenly steeped within this new situation and

must settle into its sensibility 'on the spot'. The difference between the pupils just described and the handraisers in

our example is that the latter actively anticipate the transformation of their

invisibility into visibility. I mean 'anticipation' in both senses of the term:

consciousness is immersed within the mode of anticipating, and the pupil's

visibility to others is literally anticipated in the setting by the deliberately observable practice of handraising. In this way, pupils are deeply commit?

ted to the process through which the teacher exercises her social power. By a seeming paradox, it is in their succumbing to the authority of the teacher

over their practice that pupils realize some authority over the imminent

possibilities of inhabiting this environment.2 The paradox is solved by recognizing that the pupil's social powerlessness vis-?-vis the teacher is not

reducible to some fixed social value or taken for granted typification of one's place in the social world. It is itself a situational dynamic of expe



222

rience, concretized as an enduring habit through the very means by which

the pupil controls the habitual sensibility of the environment.

I have attempted in this paper to offer an alternative to the reliance on the

notion of 'taken-for-grantedness' for identifying the realm of the prereflec?

tive in everyday life. The pupil is steeped within a context of possibilities that keep the daily school 'routine' alive in the intensities of misery, anger,

pleasure, ecstasy, boredom, etc. It is only in terms of these intensities as they

qualify the moment that the habituality of daily life in school is compre? hensible as a phenomenon of experience. The sights and smells, and other

constitutive factors of school life do not, as proponents of the popular idea

of a 'hidden curriculum' of classroom life contend, exist 'dimly, on the pe?

riphery of awareness' (Jackson, 1968: 7). They are dim (taken for granted)

only to reflection: prior to this, conditions of the school environment em?

body the dramatic meaning of opening and extinguishing possibilities of

experience.

It is in this sense that the school is, just as any other regularly inhabited

environment, a realm of conditioned feelings, perceptions, behaviors, and

thoughts. This is what Pierre Bourdieu argues when, remaining close to

Dewey's and Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of habit, he argues that the

'conditioned and conditional freedom' secured by a field of acquired dis?

positions to involvement within a particular socio-historical context 'is as

remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from a simple me?

chanical reproduction of the initial conditioning' (Bourdieu, 1977: 95).3 The human 'self is neither a mere product of 'external causes', nor an en?

closed 'inner' force of evaluation or definition of otherwise meaningless

situations. We must conceive instead of an environmentally experienced

self - an embodiment of prereflective familiarity with the surrounding

world. Hence Dewey's assertion: 'Through habits formed in intercourse

with the world, we also in-habit the world. It becomes a home, and the

home is a part of our every experience' (Dewey, 1958: 104). The embodi?

ment of habit, which exists nowhere else than within the qualities and in?

tensities of actual experience, lies at the heart of one's inherence within the

sensibility of an in-habited world. That is what I have tried to show in this

preliminary exploration of the classroom environment.



223

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This paper developed out of conversations with Victor Kestenbaum, who provided crucial advice on

its organization and content. The paper has also benefited from the comments of Kurt H. Wolff and

Thomas Luckmann. The final revision follows several suggestions offered by Christine Miyasato

Ostrow.

NOTES

*. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the International Society for the Sociology of

Knowledge at the Tenth World Congress of Sociology, Mexico City, Mexico, August 1982.

1. I have provided a very compact introduction to the concept of habit as it is employed by Merleau

Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception (1962), and by Dewey in two of his major works:

Human Nature and Conduct (1922), and Experience and Nature (1925). For an elaboration of the

phenomenological meaning of habit as it appears in the works of Dewey and Merleau-Ponty, see

Victor Kestenbaum (1977).

2. An example of this in the context of a pupil's deviance, rather than academic participation is docu?

mented in a recent article by Hugh Meehan (1980), although he is more interested in proving the

pupil's 'interactional competence' as a spontaneous initiator of meaningful action than establish?

ing the grounds for the intrinsic intelligibility of competent action in the habitual sensibility of the

school environment. In an elementary school classroom a teacher has enforced the rule that pupils

must limit changes of clothing, or other movements around the room, to breaks from academic

activities (lunch, recess). Yet one student (Carolyn) manages to walk away from an activity in pro?

gress, hang up her sweater, and does so without receiving any reprimand from the teacher. In fact,

she manipulates the situation in a way that earns her praise for cooperation in a teacher-initiated

task.

After whispering her plans to Leola, [Carolyn] announces to the teacher, 'I'm gonna go back

there.' ... [the statement's] ambiguity provides for the possibility that Carolyn is volunteering to help the teacher accomplish an item on her agenda ... [the teacher] transforms the ambig? uous utterance into an instruction to find out about the equipment in the closet: 'All right, Car?

olyn, go see if there's a jump rope or a girl's ball.' ... the sports equipment is kept in a closet

right next to the clothes closet, a feature of the classroom environment that facilitates the si?

multaneous accomplishment of teacher's and student's objectives. Carolyn leaves the circle

giggling (into the microphone, but such that the teacher can't hear), which leads me to believe

that she is aware of her manipulation of the situation. After taking off her sweater ... she then

checks the equipment, and returns to the circle shaking her head 'no.' The teacher ... thanks

Carolyn for her help ... Not only did this student reach her objectives while at the same time

contributing to the accomplishment of the teacher's agenda; moreover, she used the teacher's

agenda to accomplish her own objectives. (Meehan, 1980: 143)

Meehan's thesis is that 'children structure and modify their environment (including adults) just as

they are structured and modified by it' (Meehan, 1980: 148). This is certainly demonstrated in the

above episode; what Meehan fails to see is the drama in experience of a sustained tension between

the visibility of prescribed practice and the invisibility of deviation from this practice. This tension

establishes the inherent sensibility of this situation. In fact, Meehan presupposes it in the very char?

acterization of this behavior as a display of social competence. The tempo of Carolyn's actions is

saturated by an effort of concealment, and this is the basis for our view of her competence. In other



224

words, it is our 'cultural knowledge' of the sensibility of this setting which frames our view of her

actions. Hence, we immediately see that the fact that Carolyn whispers her plan to Leola, that her

announcement of intention to the teacher is ambiguous and opn-ended, that she times her actions

in perfect relation to the current 'official' matter-at-hand (need to locate the whereabouts of sports'

equipment), and that she giggles out of the teacher's earshot, are all mutually intelligible qualities of a cleverly contrived masquerade. And since the habitual intelligibility of the school environment

provides for our (and Meehan's) understanding as well as Carolyn's experience, it is clear that if

she very deliberately and visibly walked over to the closet, we would not talk of competence; only

of the unmitigated incorrigibility of a social incompetent.

Hence, it is not merely that Carolyn manages to complete her own agenda in addition to, or by

using, the teacher's agenda. That is on the surface true enough, but it should not blind us to the

fact that it is in the drama of being unseen that her own conduct has the intrinsic intelligibility of

a ruse. The competency in her completion of a self-initiated 'agenda' lies in its rhythm of accom?

plished invisibility before the teacher. Any 'showing through' which runs counter to the operative

mode of prescribed practice will be experienced as a failure in deviance - a clear case of

incompetence.

3. I discuss Bourdieu's social theory of human habituality (which he calls 'habitus'), and expand

upon its phenomenological implications in 'Culture as a Fundamental Dimension of Experience:

A Discussion of Pierre Bourdieu's Theory of Human Habitus,' Human Studies 4 (1981): 279-297.

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