Machine Habitus - Massimo Airoldi

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viewpoint is clearly articulated in Distinction, an extensive empirical study of the social roots and ‘distinctive’ uses of cultural taste in 1960s France (Bourdieu 1984). Linked to pre-conscious bodily feelings and perceptions (such as disgust or pleasure), long considered as a natural and subjective feature of individual personality, taste is first and foremost a social product, resulting from the embodiment of socially located cultural experiences. By studying French consumers’ preferences and styles of aesthetic appreciation, Distinction illustrates how class socialization lies at the root of what and – especially – how people consume. For instance, depending on their social position, research participants had different opinions on what would make a ‘beautiful photograph’: the working classes preferred sunsets or mountain landscapes, while educated bourgeois were likely to privilege more original subjects, having acquired through an early cultural learning process the competences and dispositions necessary to ‘aestheticize’ the world (Bourdieu 1984: 57–63). According to Bourdieu, this statistically observable opus operatum, i.e. socially clustered taste differences, is the consequence of a hidden modus operandi, that is, class-based habitus. In his analysis, French working classes look like they are trapped in a rigged societal game. In fact, the socially distinctive capacity of consuming cultural goods historically considered as ‘legitimate’ – which strategically works as a ‘cultural capital’ convertible into material and symbolic resources, such as social contacts, work opportunities or prestige – was reserved to the educated elites. By practically enacting the ‘vulgar’ aesthetic inclinations and manners of a working-class habitus, subjects with low or no cultural capital were seen as destined to reinforce their dominated condition, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Far from being regarded as outdated, this powerful account of the mechanisms through which social and symbolic hierarchies are reproduced continues to inspire contemporary cultural sociologists (Friedman et al. 2015).

      The theory of habitus has been fruitfully used to shed light on research problematics as diverse as colonial oppression (Bourdieu 1979), linguistic exchanges (Bourdieu 1991), educational inequalities (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990), gender dynamics (Bourdieu 2001), academic life (Bourdieu 1988) and racialized sport practices (Wacquant 2002) – among many others. The explanatory relevance of the concept has been recognized well beyond the disciplinary boundaries of sociology (see Costa and Murphy 2015; Schirato and Roberts 2018). Evidence from psychology and the cognitive sciences has substantially validated the idea – which Bourdieu borrowed from the work of the French developmental psychologist Jean Piaget – that socially conditioned experiences are interiorized by individuals as stable cultural schemas, and that these classifying and perceptual structures generate practical action in pre-reflexive ways (Lizardo 2004; Vaisey 2009; Boutyline and Soter 2020).

      the modes of behaviour created by the habitus do not have the fine regularity of the modes of behaviour deduced from a legislative principle: the habitus goes hand in hand with vagueness and indeterminacy. As a generative spontaneity which asserts itself in an improvised confrontation with ever-renewed situations, it obeys a practical logic, that of vagueness, of the more-or-less, which defines one’s ordinary relation to the world. (Bourdieu 1990b: 77–8, cited in Schirato and Roberts 2018: 138)

      Lizardo describes the habitus (and its ‘vague’ situational outcomes) in probabilistic, quasi-statistical terms as a path-dependent ‘practical reason’ that ‘biases our implicit micro-anticipations of the kind of world that we will encounter at each moment expecting the future to preserve the experiential correlations encountered in the past’ (2013: 406). Because of the inevitable social conditioning of one’s ‘experiential correlations’, our reasoning and practice are culturally biased, and this ‘shapes how we choose careers, how we decide which people are “right” for us to date or marry, and how we raise our children’ (Calhoun et al. 2002: 261).

      Having neither ‘corps’ nor ‘âme’ (Wacquant 2002), machine learning systems encode a peculiar sort of habitus, a machine habitus. These types of algorithms can be practically socialized to recognize an ‘attractive’ human face, a ‘similar’ song, a ‘high-risk’ neighbourhood or a ‘relevant’ news article. Their ‘generative rules’ (Lash 2007: 71) are largely formed based on digital traces of the structurally conditioned actions, evaluations and classifications of consumers and low-paid clickworkers (Mühlhoff 2020). Confronted with new input data, machine learning systems behave in probabilistic, path-dependent and pre-reflexive ways. Rather than resembling the mechanical outputs of an analogue calculator, their practices result from the dynamic encounter between an adaptive computational model and a specific data context – that is, between a machine habitus’ ‘embodied history’ (Bourdieu 1990a) and a given digital situation.

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