All animals have a deeply rooted emotional drive; a natural inclination for expressing needs for certain fundamental biological activities. While most animals act purely out of response to biological and emotional stimuli, human behavior is much more complex. Because humans are dependent on coordinated action that is not based on biological principles, our behavior is always somewhat faulted by the limitations of human language as a medium for representing this animal agency. Some other animals have social organization, but the relational nucleus of a certain hive of bees, for instance, is an agent for the reproduction and recreation of the agency of life. Their actions are coordinated by nature, while human interaction’s ability for coordination depends on structural coupling. Therefore action is coordinated only to the extent that the participants can fully express their nature within a particular linguistic system. The natural world is not a static thing. It is in a constant flux, always being created in a new way every moment. Evolution is in itself, creation.
If we, as a species, are to continue to evolve and express this creative potential, we need to free ourselves from the burden of habit. The problem is that these conventions are how we coordinate our actions. A balance must be actively produced by coordinating our actions with the habitus and with our natural emotional drives. “The habitus-embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history- is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product of”, Bourdieu explains. I consider the habitus to be something that is never personal because it only exists when people come together in action, which requires a relational nucleus. Therefore it is always the sum of all the structural couplings of all agents present. For example, I will talk with my parents in a different way than I will with my girlfriend. I will even talk differently to my girlfriend depending on if we are alone or with other people. The structural couplings I have made are relational. They are the ways I have learned to express myself in different situations and with different people. I would have never made these couplings without first learning by trial and error, expressing myself, and adjusting my actions accordingly. People have a tendency to learn a particular way of communicating and stop there. A by -product of this is ideology.
Ideology is the result of people thinking their interpretation system is something final or absolute. Since they have gotten used to a certain role in the relational nucleus they have identified with, they think their identity is something absolute. On a conscious level all people are ego- centric to varying degrees of control. In an extreme case, the person is so controlled by their own self-importance that their actions stem totally from their own conceptions, beliefs, and self-centered rational intentions. This person has an emotional nature that is filtered through the habitus that only lets through emotions that this individual has learned how to express symbolically in the foreign system through experience in it. It then has to make it passed the person’s social identity before it becomes an action.
If this person places great importance on their ideology and identifies with their social identity more than their feelings, they end up performing the same kinds of acts, repeating the same patterns of controlled behavior. While this allows them to express themselves within their chosen system, it doesn’t allow for much growth or mobility because they are never forced to make new structural couplings.A person who places less importance on their social selves and ideology, and acts more often from their feeling than their judgments, is experiencing more random events in the cultural world, and by doing so enriching their lived experience. The problem this person faces is, although they make more connections by frequent structural coupling, they are always at the mercy of the other type of people, who are conscious of the ideology in any relational nucleus, and use language in the sometimes hidden struggle over the symbolic power of a particular way of communicating. This can be correlated to the male and female principal that nature is dependent on. As a big generalization, women are the more crazy emotional people, who traditionally had no world of their own but are incorporated into the man’s relational nucleus.
People in well-defined social groups represent the male principal, where the participants guard their own relational nucleus. They value their social identities and existing power relations over their growth as a being learning a system that, extends far beyond the first relational nuclei they find to latch on to. Since every collection of agents at one level is a singular agent at a higher level, I don’t see an end to the heights and depths that structure physical and cultural reality. You can even think about it in terms of ethnography . Anthropologists study the other because they know it is a valuable teacher. The anthropologist comes into a society and is sometimes forced to make many new structural couplings in order to express himself in the new system. At that time he as at the mercy of the more experienced actors in the system. If he is lucky, the informant will try to bridge the gap himself, and they can both coordinate their actions together.These two extreme cases of people are representative of the same dualistic principle that any reality is based on. Any kind of order whether it be the rhythm of nature or the many different rhythms of people is a structure based on the duality of relations. By balancing out these complementary opposites, an agent can squeeze through the traps of dependence and immobility. Every person is not only an agent for reproducing physical reality and whatever social reality they are experienced in, but by virtue of controlled mobility of one’s personal relational nucleus, one can create reality. By this I mean we get to express ourselves in a system we are constantly redefining and creating by adjusting our actions to coordinate with the system that is always changing as new structural couplings enter the habitus.
If this is possible, then one’s words could be an agent of the relational nucleus of one’s self, but it would be mobile enough to coincide with the habitus. The habitus depends on the relational nucleus of the sum of all participants life experiences and structural couplings, as they exist in action. This not only makes any interaction an act of coordinating a common relational nucleus, but it makes power relations depend on the habitus of all involved, the general agent that is the group of all individual agents present, not on certain agents whose power depends just on their social identity, or their experience with a particular way of communicating. In this paradigm leadership would emerge naturally individuals expressing themselves unimpeded within the system, and action would be coordinated around a natural evolving relational nucleus.
