In the information society we interact with a large number of stories, composed of images and words, about what it means to have a proper body, that is, desirable, healthy and, given that we have to earn a living, profitable, valuable to those who employs us or interesting to the people we need to contact to progress.
The source of these stories is found in algorithms produced by artificial intelligence that assign us what we like, suit us and interest us.
As Massimo Airoldi ( Machine Habitus: Toward a Sociology of Algorithms
, 2021) has shown
, machines seem to have a
habitus
, a concept linked to Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of taste.
We all have certain dispositions to act in a certain way in certain situations.
In those moments it is possible to withdraw or expose oneself and do so with different styles, with a masculine or feminine touch, typical of prosaic people or people who presume to be sophisticated, putting all their effort into the situation or with ironic distance and disdain.
It is a way of being of which we are almost unaware and controlling it costs us horrors.
In fact, to avoid these propensities we must be very alert and activate very tense attention.
That is the
habitus
: the result of building a second cultural body based on our experience, especially that coming from our first core of relationships.
In this, criteria are incubated that incline us to like or dislike something.
These first tendencies can be corrected, although it is not easy, since they establish a tone with which we face the world.
It is true that the tastes with which our body was formed can change after contact with different contexts and other people from other realities;
Unfortunately, it is not simple and one could think that these tastes are analogous to the first programming of artificial intelligence.
Our intimate body as sexual people, linked to images of what should be appreciated and what should not, can be trained for change, just as platforms collect data in the interaction with users that validate what is offered to them as beautiful, healthy or socially appropriate.
The bodies with which we come into contact, formed in their peculiar journeys, generate new tastes but always based on initial classification guidelines.
Let's think about an algorithm that provides us with health or beauty advice.
This algorithm comes from the culture that the programmers had, who are usually people from certain social groups and who consider certain criteria of like or dislike, of what is healthy and what is not, to be evident.
Users can modify these criteria, but always within the programming codes, although the most advanced devices are aware of the emergence of unpredictable joints for programmers.
In these cases, basic programming plays a role, but new dynamics emerge.
Although these unpredictable developments exist, programming plays a strategic role.
A basic problem that we face is whether the criteria of health or beauty, of how to eat, play sports or dress, obey the assumptions of a biased social experience that tends to classify as unhealthy or ugly what they believed to be such. people of a certain social class, with their corresponding levels of culture and models of relationships with others.
The body of programming, like the intimate dimension of
habitus
, tends to be welcoming to certain bodies and derogatory to others, and therefore to orient us according to highly debatable social models.
Bourdieu proposed thinking about social space based on three dimensions: economic, cultural and sociability differences.
He also insisted on the importance of the sexual dimension at the basis of the first socialization.
Conceiving ourselves as a woman and as a man completely colors our way of experiencing social interactions.
Bourdieu gave a convincing example: the prototypical position of men in the sexual act—active—is transmitted in insults as a practice of domination: the one who gives—masculine—imposes, the one who receives—feminine—is humiliated;
To fuck is to impose yourself, to be fucked is to submit.
Through these sexed bodies, linked to work, cultural and leisure practices, we must interrogate the culture deposited in the algorithm, as well as that resulting from the users who provide it with data, and which generates new learning processes.
After all, the first body of the algorithm, its programming, marks a certain propensity, in its stories of images and words, to consider certain bodies visible or abject, useful for certain jobs and positions, endowed with sophistication or not and susceptible or not to become our partners.
Let's think about the insults that women in political positions receive when their bodies clash with what people are trained to consider a correct model.
The sexual division of labor means that, as women, their physical appearance is judged more.
They are reproached, for example, if they are fat, as if there were a parameter of how corpulent a person must be to represent citizens.
Without a doubt, those who act in this way have received judgment guidelines, from a very early age, through images on Instagram, TikTok videos, Facebook advice or waves of comments on X. These guidelines cause satisfaction or anxiety depending on whether they whether or not they are close to the body prototypes that are offered to them and they tend to project them into the evaluation of their body and that of others.
Normally these prototypes come from certain people with more or less time to take care of themselves and with a criterion about how to do it.
It is not clear that these criteria are the best, also knowing that certain algorithms encourage attention to singling out due to expressive violence.
Continuing with the example, it would be good to have political representatives who were less handsome and more capable of tolerating divergence, making sense of it through democratic channels, and discussing truly important problems.
The criteria of beauty, health and correctness that program the algorithms stabilize an enormous social violence that teaches those who lose that they must hide and accept that others determine how they look and what destinies correspond to them.
With a fundamental difference: programming does not know pain, the human body does.
That pain, when a body is mistreated, derives from denying our genetic disposition, the marks that work leaves on our morphology and the social destinations we frequent.
That pain, and in this Bourdieu followed Freud, never disappears no matter how much we accept the ruling that excludes us.
Humiliation remains charging a battery of resentment susceptible to being directed by hate speech and simplification that strengthen the darkest dispositions of our
habitus
.
José Luis Moreno Pestaña
is a professor of Moral Philosophy and director of the Extraordinary Chair on Social Philosophy of Corporal Discrimination at the Women's Institute-University of Granada
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