Trapped Futures And Potential Alternatives ——An Investigation Of Bourdieu's Practical Anticipation

Futurity has always been one of the latent concerns of sociological theory,and this tradition has not really been absent.In turning to future temporality,we find that anticipation has a fertile theoretical connotation.This study focuses on Bourdieu's practical anticipation,clarifying its intellectual origins and detailing its place in Bourdieu's theoretical system.Practical anticipation is an embodied way of orientating towards the future.It works as an important link between habitus and field,bringing the actor's future into the present along with the past.This paper argues that the direct intellectual source of Bourdieu's practical anticipation is Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body.Only by recognising this phenomenological body can we appreciate the significance of this concept.The intentionality of the body analysed by Merleau-Ponty as being-towardsthe-world is inherited by Bourdieu's notion of practical anticipation as conveyed in the habitus of the body.Anticipation is thus the competence of agents to respond skillfully to the situational tasks or ends of practice.The agent is not a stranger to what-to-do and how-to-do in practice,because they are already potentially present in bodily habitus.The field as a social space in which opportunities and power are unequally distributed and in which the future is not equally open to all.Inequality directly governs the anticipation of the actor's practice and thus his or her relationship to the future.Due to Bourdieu's structuralist theoretical tendencies,the future in practical anticipation is in a constrained situation.Anticipation always works when the habitus fits the field,and the future always tends to reproduce the past and is confined to the unconscious.In order to develop anticipation as an analytical concept,this study introduces the phenomenological framework of the Theme-Horizon.Within this framework,the paper presents an alternative approach to the future,namely Schutz's Project.Project,as reflective anticipation,treats future actions as completed acts and thus unifies action as a unity of meaning.With the lens of this theoretical framework,we can grasp anew Bourdieu's and Schutz's idea of anticipation: the agent in his or her subjective experience can either project a future,far or near,in thematic awareness or immerse himself or herself non-reflectively in the present anticipations of the action stream.