National Figurations Under Hysteresis in Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu. From Plural to Cleft National Habitus.

The paper proposes to expand the Elasian concept of national habitus through the Bourdieusian studies of social habitus. It will be argued that the dynamic relationship between the national habitus and the state norms is always characterized by certain hysteresis, the difference across specific national contexts being its range: from small-scale, almost imperceptible forms, to radical, traumatic disjunctures. Inherently plural character of national habitus postulated in this presentation does not presuppose that plural dispositions are incorporated in the we-image of the nationals. On the contrary, the case of inner normative antagonism in national dispositions will be exemplified by cleft national habitus—modelled on cleft habitus described by Bourdieu in a class context, where a quest toward purification of plural habitus becomes ideologically crucial in national identity-building. The latter occurs in response to strong hysteresis in national figuration and is reproduced through Don Quixote effect dislocating the national experience of social time. Further contextualization of quixotic strategies will be made through the reading of two complementary works exploring the drag effects of habitus in community building and restructuring: “The Bachelors’ Ball. The Crisis of Peasant Society in Béarn” by Bourdieu and “The Established and the Outsiders” by Elias and Scotson. The framework introduced in this paper enables to replace the most frequent methodology in the studies of nationalism based on its ‘ideal types’ by focusing on strategies of accommodating inherently plural national habitus. The common spectrum is needed to acknowledge that national norms, although very different in content, are constructed within similar relational process. Thinking in terms of dynamic plural habitus and its various forms of accommodation in discourse and practices enables to grasp Western and Eastern European democratic experiences in the way that would historicize their specificity without essentializing certain national characteristics as par excellence ‘Western’ or ‘Eastern’, civic and ethnic, a division that still persists in many studies and political debates. To demonstrate some directions for future applications of my theoretical findings, I will conclude with a short comparison of three national cases in what concerns the recent conservative political projects of ‘purifying’ the respective national habitus(es): French, Polish and Israeli.