which generate particular practices. It is because individuals in society act in accordance with such internalized systems -- what Bourdieu calls the 'cultural unconscious' -- that we can explain how their actions can be objectively regulated and harmonized without being in any sense the result of conscious obedience to rules. Through these structured dispositions, human actions may be lent a unity and consistency without any reference to some conscious intention. In the very 'spontaneity' of our habitual behaviour, then, we reproduce certain deeply tacit norms and values; and habitus is thus the relay or transmission mechanism by which mental and social structures become incarnate in daily social activity. The habitus, rather like human language itself, is an open-ended system which enables individuals to cope with unforeseen, ever-changing situations; it is thus a 'strategygenerating principle' which permits ceaseless innovation, rather than a rigid blueprint.

The term ideology is not particularly central to Bourdieu's work; but if habitus is relevant to the concept, it is because it tends to induce in social agents such aspirations and actions as are compatible with the objective requirements of their social circumstances. At its strongest, it rules out all other modes of desiring and behaving as simply unthinkable. Habitus is thus 'history turned into nature', and for Bourdieu it is through this matching of the subjective and the objective, what we feel spontaneously disposed to do and what our social conditions demand of us, that power secures itself. A social order strives to naturalize its own arbitrariness through this dialectic of subjective aspirations and objective structures, defining each in terms of the other; so that the 'ideal' condition would be one in which the agents' consciousness would have the same limits as the objective system which gives rise to it. The recognition of legitimacy, Bourdieu states, 'is the misrecognition of arbitrariness'.

What Bourdieu calls doxa belongs to the king of stable, traditionbound social order in which power is fully naturalized and unquestionable, so that no social arrangement different from the present could even be imagined. Here, as it were, subject and object merge indistinguishably into each other. What matters in such societies is what 'goes without saying', which is determined by tradition; and tradition is always 'silent', not least about itself as tradition. Any challenge to such doxa is then heterodoxy, against which the given order must assert its claims in a new orthodoxy. Such orthodoxy differs from doxa in that the guardians of tradition, of what goes without saying, are now compelled to speak in their own defence, and thus implicitly to present themselves as simply one possible position, among others.

Social life contains a number of different habitus, each system

-223-