The Plural Actor

The individual that the social sciences take as an object is most often studied in a particular context or from a single dimension. The actor is analysed as a student, worker, consumer, spouse, reader, sportsperson, a voter etc. However, in societies where individuals live often through simultaneously and successively heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory social experiences, each person inevitably carries a plurality of roles, ways of seeing, feeling and acting. The aim of this study is to consider the ways in which this plurality of worlds and experiences are incorporated into the being of each individual and to observe the individual's actions in a variety of settings. In addition to his sociological viewpoint, the author engages with psychology, history, anthropology and philosophy. His reflections lead him to embark on a program of psychological sociology to highlight the complexities of this plural view of the social.

Bernard Lahire is Professor of Sociology at the cole Normale Suprieure, Lyon.

Preface to the English edition	p. viii
Acknowledgements	p. xx
Prologue	p. 1
Outline of a Theory of the Plural Actor
The Plural Actor	p. 11
On Singleness	p. 11
The single self: a commonplace illusion, but socially well founded	p. 15
The socio-historical conditions of singleness and plurality	p. 18
The plurality of social contexts and repertoires of habits	p. 26
The Proustian model of the plural actor	p. 32
Splitting of the self and mental conflict: crossings of social space	p. 36
The Wellsprings of Action	p. 42
Presence of the past, present of action	p. 42
The many occasions for maladjustment and crisis	p. 45
The plurality of the actor and the openings of the present	p. 47
Conditional dispositions	p. 50
The negative power of the context: inhibition and latency	p. 56
'Code switching' and 'code mixing' within the same context	p. 60
Actors uncertainly swinging	p. 62
Analogy and Transfer	p. 66
Practical analogy and the triggers of action and memory	p. 66
Involuntary action and memory	p. 69
The role of habits	p. 72
From analytic transfer to the interview relationship	p. 74
A relative transferability	p. 77
From general to partial schemes	p. 82
From generalized transfer to limited and conditional transfer	p. 86
Literary Experience: Reading, Daydreams and Parapraxes	p. 89
Reflexivities and Logics of Action
School, Action and Language	p. 101
The scholastic break with practical sense	p. 101
Saussure, or the pure theory of scholastic practices on language	p. 108
The social conditions of departure from practical sense	p. 110
The Everyday Practices of Writing in Action	p. 115
Embodied memory, objectified memory	p. 117
Everyday breaks with practical sense	p. 120
'Doing it like that'	p. 123
Memory for the unusual	p. 124
The longer term and preparing the future	p. 126
Managing complex practices	p. 128
The official, the formal and tense situations	p. 129
The presence of the absent	p. 132
Temporary disturbances of practical sense	p. 134
The use of plans: lists of all kinds	p. 136
The relative pertinence of practical sense	p. 139
The Plural Logics of Action	p. 143
The ambiguity of a singular practice	p. 143
The sporting model of practical sense and its limitations	p. 147
Intentionality and the levels of context	p. 154
Plurality of times and logics of action	p. 156
Forms of Embodiment
The Place of Language	p. 163
The world of silence	p. 163
The punctuation of action and its theorization	p. 169
Language and the forms of social life	p. 172
The mysterious inside	p. 173
What Exactly is Embodied?	p. 175
Processes of embodiment-internalization	p. 175
The polymorphic embodiment of written culture in the world of the family	p. 183
Negative identifications and the force of implicit injunctions	p. 189
Workshops and Debates
Psychological Sociology	p. 195
An exit from sociology?	p. 197
The objectivity of the 'subjective'	p. 201
The singular folds of the social	p. 203
Multi-determinism and the sense of freedom	p. 206
New methodological requirements	p. 207
Pertinent Fields	p. 211
On excessive generalization	p. 211
The varying scale of context in the social sciences	p. 213
Experimental variation and loss of illusions	p. 214
The historicizing of universal theories and fields of pertinence	p. 217
Notes	p. 223
References	p. 253
Index	p. 264
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