Chapter 9: The Hysteresis Concept in Sociology

Chapter 9: The Hysteresis Concept in Sociology

Pierre Bourdieu develops an original and specific usage of hysteresis pertaining to sociology. Bourdieu develops his notion of the hysteresis effect alongside his other technical concepts including habitus, field, and disposition. Bourdieu’s notion of hysteresis differs somewhat from this book’s aforementioned usage. This chapter organizes points of similarity and difference between these word usages of hysteresis and discusses Bourdieu’s usage. 

Bourdieu associates the complex, circular and coevolutionary relationship between habitus, capital and field as connected by a process of hysteresis: 

Hysteresis, generational change, dislocation of habitus, social crisis and field restructuring are all terms closely related in Bourdieu’s discussion of social phenomena and how they change over time[....] Bourdieu saw that hysteresis was a necessary consequence of his definitions of habitus and field as mutually generating and generated.” (Hardy 2013, p.126, emphasis added). 

Bourdieu’s original notion of hysteresis usually emphasizes a maladaptive role, similar to anomie or alienation. In Bourdieu’s usage, the field grossly changes and displaces, and the habitus is now inertially lagging and outdated. Habitus is slow (or unable) to assimilate change after a disrupted habitus-field coupling. 

The essential features of hysteresis have been shown: the mismatch between habitus and field, and the time dimension associated with it – how habitus is out of synch with field[....] time lag, which is a characteristic of hysteresis, can occur in practical contexts [...] differential responses of organizations and individuals lead to the dislocation and disruption of habitus which occurs with any field change. When hysteresis occurs, new opportunities are created by altered field structures. However, there is a high level of risk associated with hysteresis, since for a time at least, field struggles take place in the context of an unknown future. (Hardy, 2013, p. 144, emphasis added).

Adaptive hysteresis emphasizes the “new opportunities created by altered field structures,” whereas maladaptive hysteresis emphasizes interia, mismatch, disruption and risk. 

With analogy to perception, Di Paolo et al (2017) make a similar point regarding Piaget’s writings. In his theory of perceptual development, Piaget neglects the potentially adaptive role of sensorimotor perturbations, which Di Paolo et al wish to emphasize:

“Piaget describes two kinds of perturbations that may be encountered by an established sensorimotor scheme: obstacles (contradictions or disturbances) and lacunae (gaps in the current organization) (Piaget 1975; Boom 2009). Both types are manifested in the concrete encounter between agent and environment regardless of whether they originate from external causes” [i.e. field changes] “or from internal contradiction.” [i.e. habitus contradiction] “This is important because Piaget’s theory implies, but perhaps does not sufficiently emphasize, that failed encounters with the world” [i.e. maladaptive hysteresis per Bourdieu] “may guide part of the equilibration process.” [i.e. adaptive hysteresis] (p. 86, emphasis and commentary added). 

Applied to the present discussion of Bourdieu: Piagetian lacunae, obstacles and hysteresis are not always maladaptive. These situations often guide and stimulate assimilation, equilibration and instill memory via a process of adaptive hysteresis. Parallel to Di Paolo et al’s commentary on Piaget, Bourdieu’s theory “implies, but perhaps does not sufficiently emphasize,” that failed encounters between field and habitus may guide their re-equilibration. Thus, hysteresis is often adaptive and not necessarily maladaptive. 

Prior to Bourdieu’s reuse of the hysteresis, this process was a concept and mathematical model of memory that originated in physics. Hysteresis was originally formalized to describe a process of how memory is mediated in ferromagnets. After a temporal delay, the remanence of a loaded magnetic field persists by re-disposing an iron substrate’s polarized organization of iron molecules, i.e. its functional units of hysterons. Hysteresis was later applied to many other adaptive systems that involve memory, including sociological systems per Bourdieu. 

Applied to the framework of adaptive hysteresis from Chapter 6: the sociological field loads behavioral challenges upon the (reactively plastic, mediative and governing) substrate of habitus, and posteriori re-disposes the substrate. Habitus and its substrates (such as capital) are thereby re-attuned to past experiential loading. This memory is instantiated via embodied changes in the governing substrate’s re-disposition, coupled with extended coevolutionary changes in the field. This enables an adaptive attuning between the habitus and field, assuming the change is gradual and stable enough.

Bourdieu’s places emphasis on the maladaptive effect of hysteresis, distinct from this book’s emphasis on the adaptive effect of hysteresis. This is partly due to considering differences in time scales, rates of change, and size of change involved in altering the coupling between habitus and field. Adaptive hysteresis emphasizes the more gradual and continuous effect of the field’s behavioral-loading upon the habitus, thereby mediating a redisposition of the habitus substrate (i.e. assimilation or equilibration per Piaget). Maladaptive hysteresis emphasizes the sudden and punctuated effect of gross field displacement. This leads to disruptive effects upon the habitus-field coupling and greater inertia in the assimilation by the habitus. These are situations where breakdowns cannot be equilibrated within a range of adaptive viability and norms are disrupted.

During adaptive hysteresis, the field loads behavioral changes gradually and stably over time. This loading and behavioral solicitation mediates assimilation, re-attunement, memory, training or equilibration (i.e. posteriori redisposedness) of the habitus’ mediative-and-governing substrates. These substrates are constituted by networks of hysterons. Hysterons are abstract functional units for the substrates of hysteresis, and this abstract concept is likewise modality-flexible. Examples of hysterons apply to classes of genetic, neuronal, memetic, sociocultural and linguistic systems and their relevant substrates of habitus. The adaptive hysteresis effect mediates a form of embodied memory. Feedback from past experiential loadings is via remanence over time in rearrangement of complex hysteron networks. Note that memory and skill changes are not merely embodied, but additionally involve extended changes in the field as the habitus-field coupling coevolves. In their paper Extended Skill Learning (2020), Baggs et al. state that that skill learning is relative to coupled organism-environment (O-E) system changes. Skills are not merely internally embodied (something that bodies have) but extended and world-involving (something that organisms do). In the words of Di Paolo et al. (2017): 

“Sensorimotor schemes are not strictly speaking something that the agent possesses, but something that the agent enacts [...] enabled by the right environmental participation. Nevertheless we sometimes refer to schemes as “belonging” to an agent [...] understood as a shorthand way of referring to the agent side of the constituents of a sensorimotor scheme [...] that becomes active when coupled to the right environmental circumstances.”  (p. 82). 

In this way, reference to an organism “possessing” skills, or “embodying” its dispositions and habitus is shorthand for an active process that engages, couples and attunes habitus and field. Attunement leaves remanence as memory (re-dispositions) in the habitus and niche transductions that change the field. Emergence of skill mastery involves the interactive redisposition of the habitus, the field and their coupling. This results in assimilation via habitus, niche-construction via field, and attunement of the habitus-field coupling. Skill mastery is not reductively found within the dis-situated body alone. The full account of skill mastery is world-involving and extended to include the adaptive reorganization of the field (an extended account of memory instantiation). To embody dispositions and skills is to enact a coevolutionary attunement (i.e. equilibration or hysteresis) between the coupled habitus and field. Skill mastery is something that holistic organism-environment and habitus-field systems do via adaptive hysteresis (Piagetian equilibration), and something they may fail to do in cases of maladaptive hysteresis per Bourdieu. 

During maladaptive hysteresis (Bourdieu’s original usage), the field grossly shifts relative to the habitus. This shift disrupts the attuned compatibility between the gross habitus and gross field. This habitus lags behind the field in inertial delay, similar to concepts of alienation, anomie, and Karl Marx’s example of Don Quixote. 

Both are valid examples of hysteresis, but involve different types of events, timescales, rates of change and size of change. In the situation of adaptive hysteresis: relatively stable, continuous and gradual changes of the field mediate a re-attunement of the habitus. This occurs in a stable niche during events of reiterated behavioral solicitations from the field and reiterated experiential loadings. Changes and assimilation between the habitus-field coupling occur gradually and stably. The field’s behavioral solicitations and experiential loading changes the embodied memory and dispositional organization of the habitus’ substrate, and likewise the organism reorganizes the field (extended memory). The organism-environment system and habitus-field coupling are thereby able to re-attune and re-couple adaptively to assimilate changes over time. This mediates posteriori re-disposition, adaptive if in a stable (gradually changing) niche within the viable bounds of normativity. The process of adaptive hysteresis emphasizes the changes in experiential loading and behavioral solicitations (from the field) upon the governing substrate’s dispositional organization (of the habitus). 

In contrast, hysteresis per Bourdieu emphasizes a disruption between the total field and the total habitus, the mismatch between their gross coupling, the breakdown in assimilation, and the risk to viability. The gross changes in the habitus-field mismatch leads to inertia in the readjustment of habitus (as in Marx's example of Don Quixote). In adaptive hysteresis, relatively gradual changes in field leads to reiterated behavioral solicitations and experiential loading, affecting the re-disposition of habitus substrates (assimilation), thereby continuously mediating adaptive re-attunement over stable reiterations. The organism-environment system maintains its structurally coupled precarious closure within a viable range of normativity. 

Conclusions 

Looking forward, the concept of adaptive hysteresis has many helpful uses in science and philosophy. Hysteresis is a process of instantiating memory for a coupled organism-environment or habitus-field system, providing a simultaneously embodied and extended account. 

Processes of hysteresis do not only occur in heteronomous systems (e.g. encoding memory as data within magnetic hard drives). Hysteresis also mediates autonomous memory in complex, self-organizing, autopoietic and living organism-environment systems. The abstract process of adaptive hysteresis is a modality-flexible (“substrate-neutral,” scale invariant) formal cause, with applications to multiscale governing substrates of “autonomous bodies.” These classes span from metabolic-organic substrates to that of sensorimotor, linguistic and sociocultural substrates, including the abstract substrates of an organism’s habitus. 

Hysteresis is also a helpful concept to operationalize Piagetian assimilation, equilibration and Gibsonian attunement. Hysteresis is a useful concept to replace the problematic concept of beliefs in good-old-fashioned-action-theory (GOFAT) with that of dispositions from Bourdieu’s theory of practice. Hysteresis is also helpful in replacing the cognitivist concepts of information processing, memory as data storage and predictive processing. Adaptive hysteresis replaces these concepts with memory as the embodied and extended process of posteriori re-disposedness, assimilation, and niche transduction. Thus, adaptive hysteresis provides an enactive, embodied, world-involving and dispositional account of memory. Hysteresis mediates attunement, assimilation and equilibration of an organism’s governing/mediative substrates to its changing, structurally coupled field and niche construction. As a process that mediates skill mastery, hysteresis is compatible with Baggs et al.’s paper on skills being an extended characteristic of the organism-environment system (skills as something organisms do), not merely an internal embodiment (something bodies have). 

The concept of hysteresis could potentially contribute to developing mathematical models and computer simulations. This would involve usage of the Preisach model of hysteresis and other mathematical tools, along the line of Mayerogoyz’s work. These are all suggested areas for continued development, application, and amendment regarding the concepts of hysteresis.