Retooling for the Next Century: Sober Methods for Studying the Subconscious

Abstract

Introduction In the last few years of this century, a number of sociologists have, in one way or another, theorized about and investigated connections between people's conscious behavior and socially learned habits, preferences, or cognitions that are subconscious or semiconscious: Bourdieu's (1984) concept of habilus; Bourdieu's (1984) praxis or Giddens's practical consciousness (1984: 375); Goffman's (1963) careful study of the subconscious part of the conscious norm Don't make a scene in public places; Garfinkel's (1967) field-experimental work on what sorts of violations of unconscious or semiconscious norms will make people suspect one is crazy; the conversational analysts, like Schegloff (1968, 1996), studying such topics as what makes it a norm that the person being called on the telephone starts the conversation; and the work of feminist researchers such as West, Fenstermaker, and Zimmerman on doing gender (West and Zimmerman 1987) and doing difference (West and Fenstermaker 1995) . Foucault ([1975]1979: 162-69) teaches us to consider the latent dehumanization in theories, for example, of military drill where soldiers are treated as boxes occupying moving spaces. More ancient work is Dewey's ([1922] 1998) discussion of habit. Most of the methods used in the examples above are informal, although Bourdieu does use a variety of factor analysis of conscious choices (1984) for example, preferences for music and art objects-to locate components of the habitus of well-off French intellectuals, as opposed to simply well-off French business and engineering