608.2
Beyond Bourdieu: Dialogic Modernity and Social Change
When Wright met working class people who read Joyce, Dostoyevsky and Wolf he said “this confirms that Bourdieu was wrong with his concept of habitus”; ten years before Habermas had engaged with one of these persons in a debate on human rights, while most of the audience had laughed at a non-academic linguistic register. The radicalization of modernity recovers the foundations of the first modernity and transforms the frame of reference on the basis of dialogue. Dialogic modernity includes the social actors in the development of critique by redefining, in dialogue with sociologists, the moral grounds of a plural society in which we can today live together. Habermas stresses the potential of communicative action through the intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims; Wright envisions social change through the analysis of real utopias. The structured and structuring structure that defines “habitus” cannot explain the cultural practices and taste developed by the working class people who attend the dialogic literary gatherings. They transform and create new cultural capital that challenge structuralist determinism and demonstrate possibility in the transformative dialogues of dialogic modernity.