The Plural Actor

by Lahire, Bernard

• ISBN13: 9780745646848
• ISBN10: 0745646840
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-02-07
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

The individual that the social sciences take as an object is most often studied in a particular context or from a single dimension. The actor is analysed as a student, worker, consumer, spouse, reader, sportsperson, a voter etc. However, in societies where individuals live often through simultaneously and successively heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory social experiences, each person inevitably carries a plurality of roles, ways of seeing, feeling and acting. The aim of this study is to consider the ways in which this plurality of worlds and experiences are incorporated into the being of each individual and to observe the individual's actions in a variety of settings. In addition to his sociological viewpoint, the author engages with psychology, history, anthropology and philosophy. His reflections lead him to embark on a program of psychological sociology to highlight the complexities of this plural view of the social.

Author Biography

Bernard Lahire is the author of The Plural Actor, published by Wiley.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Sketch of a Theory of the Plural Actor

The Plural Actor

On Singleness

The single self: a commonplace illusion, but socially well-founded

The sociohistorical conditions of singleness and plurality

The plurality of social contexts and repertoires of habits

The Proustian model of the plural actor

Splitting of the self and mental conflict: crossings of social space

The Wellsprings of Action

Presence of the past, present of action

The many occasions for maladjustment and crisis

The plurality of the actor and the openings of the present

Conditional dispositions

The negative power of the context: inhibition and latency

'Code switching' and 'code mixing' within the same context

Analogy and Transfer

Practical analogy and the triggers of action and memory

Involuntary action and memory

The role of habits

From analytic transfer to the interview relationship

A relative transferability

From general to partial schemas

From generalized transfer to limited and conditional transfer

Literary Experience: Reading, Daydreams and Parapraxes

Reflexivities and Logics of Action

School, Action, and Language

The scholastic break with practical reason

Saussure, or the pure theory of scholastic practices on language

The social conditions of departure from practical reason

The Everyday Practices of Writing in Action

Embodied memory, objectified memory

Everyday breaks with practical reason

'Doing it like that'

Memory for the unusual

The longer term and preparing the future

Managing complex practices

The official, the formal, and tense situations

The presence of the absent

Temporary disturbances of practical reason

The use of plans: lists of all kinds

The relative pertinence of practical reason

The Plural Logics of Action

The ambiguity of a singular practice

The sporting model of practical reason and its limitations

Intentionality and the levels of context

Plurality of times and logics of action

Forms of Embodiment

The Place of Language

The world of silence

The punctuation of action and its theorization

Language and the forms of social life

The mysterious inside

What Exactly Is Embodied?

Processes of embodimentÐinternalization

The polymorphic embodiment of written culture in the world of the family

Negative identifications and the force of implicit injunctions

Workshops and Debates

Psychological Sociology

An exit from sociology?

The objectivity of the 'subjective'

The singular folds of the social

Multideterminism and the sense of freedom

New methodological requirements

Pertinent Fields

On excessive generalization

The varying scale of context in the social sciences

Experimental variation and loss of illusions

The historicizing of universal theories and fields of pertinence

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