Bodily practices have this power because they sediment into actions and
movements, sinking below conscious awareness. At this level they achieve
an inertia that can prove surprisingly resistant to conscious intentions
to modify or change them. By their nature, habits do not occupy
conscious thought; they are habitual precisely because they are done
more or less automatically, as if the knowledge of how to perform the
actions resided in one's fingers or physical mobility rather than one's
mind. This property of the habitual has political implications. When a
new regime takes over, it attacks old habits vigorously, for this is
where the most refractory resistance to change will be met. Bourdieu
comments that all societies wishing to make a "new man" approach the
task through processes of "deculturation" and "reculturation" focused on
bodily practices; hence, revolutionaries place great emphasis "on the
seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and
verbal manners," because "they entrust to [the body] in abbreviated and
practical, i.e., mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the
arbitrary content of the culture."
Bourdieu somewhat overstates the case when he asserts that "principles
embodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness and
hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation," but he
is correct in emphasizing the resistance of such practices to
intellection. He also rightly sees the importance of these practices
for education and discipline. "The whole trick of pedagogic reason," he
observes, "lies precisely in the way it extorts the essential while
seeming to demand the insignificant: in obtaining the respect for form
and forms of respect which constitute the most visible and at the same
time the best-hidden (because most 'natural') manifestation of
submission to the established order. ... The concession of politeness
always contains political concessions." "Every group," Connerton writes
along similar lines, "will entrust to bodily automatisms the values and
categories which they are most anxious to conserve. They will know how
well the past can be kept in mind by a habitual memory sedimented in the
body."
N. Katherine Hayles