Agency Outside of the Habitus?

The first time I engaged with Bourdieu’s work was during my Language & Culture course last semester, where we applied his notion of the “habitus” in his text Language and Symbolic Power to our study on sociolinguistics. Bourdieu defines the habitus as the structure of an individual’s mind, which influences his or her behavior, sensibilities, disposition, and most interestingly, taste. Furthermore, institutions in our society, especially educational institutions, are largely responsible for the construction of the habitus. What I found so interesting, however, was that each individual, overpowered by his or her habitus, becomes complicit in the maintenance and perpetuation of social structures, traditions, and ideologies; hence Bourdieu refers to the habituses as “structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.” What makes the habitus so powerful is that it is so well-hidden to the extent that an individual is totally unaware he or she is not really practicing free-will when it comes to such things as taste. We our programmed to find tasteful only what our conditions determines us to find tasteful as well as to finding other things distasteful and unworthy of examination because our conditions determine us to find them distasteful. I think that this is very scary.
What I have been dwelling on so far is the question of whether the individual has the agency and power to escape his or her habitus. I think there is a lot at stake here when it comes to finding the answer to this question. Why? Because there are various practices we should not allow our habituses to generate and regulate, with one of the most negative practices, in my opinion, being the judgment of taste. I strongly believe that the judgment of taste leads to harmful generalizations and stereotypes about groups of people. Quantifying a human being by their taste can be detrimental, especially when one considers past experiences of one group judging the other by their skin color, heritage, or religion. I’m not saying that everyone who gets caught reading Twilight, watching Jersey Shore, listening to rap music, or eating fried chicken might be subjected to physical harm, but I do think this judgment of taste needs to be taken seriously and its ramifications should be studied to the fullest extent. For example, on several occasions I have refused to be caught eating fried chicken and watermelon in public. Why? Because I have been programmed by society to link this taste in food to the stereotypical black individual who is uneducated and unsophisticated. As funny as this might sound, this is the type of judgment of taste that I consider harmful and dehumanizing, and, unfortunately, this preposterous notion that taste ultimately dictates intelligence still exists.
This leads me into the subject of educational institutions and their involvement in the construction of the habitus. Bourdieu states in Distinction, “…we must first stop to consider what is perhaps the best-hidden effect of the educational system, the one it produces by imposing ‘titles’, a particular case of the attribution by status, whether positive (ennobling) or negative (stigmatizing), which every group produces by assigning individuals to hierarchically ordered classes” (23). I believe that there must be a dramatic cultural shift within educational institutions, with the result being that no student is programmed to believe that their culture and taste is inferior to another’s. I fully support African-American pragmatist Dr. Cornel West’s suggestion that blacks in particular (I believe this can apply to everyone) become “cultural workers” in their fields by practicing “demystification,” in which the complex inner-workings of institutions and other related power structures are exposed. Once these dynamics are exposed and their affect on the individual examined can there be any move toward transformative praxis within these institutions. Essentially, West does believe in agency outside of the habitus. However, the first, (and probably most difficult) step is the acknowledgement of the habitus and realizing the role institutions play in instilling certain dispositions and preferences.