From doxic breach to cleft habitus: affect, reflexivity and dispositional disjunctures

Abstract Previous research has examined how mismatched dispositions within a divided or ‘cleft’ habitus are subjectively experienced but has not adequately explored nor theorized the variety of ways in which the dispositional disjunctures that progressively give rise to a cleft habitus are initially generated. Combining recent sociological work on ontological ruptures with an affective reading of Bourdieu’s social theory, we use an empirical case to illustrate how subtle processes of social influence set in motion by affective ties can come to sever the ontological bond between the habitus and the social space that initially shaped it, setting an affectively driven and reflexively negotiated process of habitus change in motion. By shedding light upon some of the sufficient conditions underpinning the development of dispositional disjunctures and the psychosocial forces that mediate this process, we extend the literature on habitus change and conflict in several ways.


Introduction
Research on the subjective experiences of social mobility has shown how substantial movement across social space can generate what Bourdieu (2008) called a 'cleft habitus' , where conflicting social dispositions acquired throughout such trajectories can result in psychological tension and affective turmoil (Friedman 2014(Friedman , 2016. A large portion of this work has focused on the subjective experiences of first-generation students, showing how the college experience can elicit or amplify their dispositional conflict (Lehmann 2014;Lee and Kramer 2013) how it can result in various types of adjustment challenges (Jack 2016;Ivemark and Ambrose 2021) but sometimes also pointing to some of the advantages disparate dispositions can provide (Ingram et al. 2015;Abrahams and Ingram 2013). Despite some efforts to explore the causes underlying the variation in these dispositional outcomes, these have mainly consisted in emphasizing differentials in capital among these students (Patfield, Gore, and Fray 2022;Roksa and Robinson 2017;but see Reay 2013;Mallman 2017). Despite the many insights these studies have provided into the various subjective experiences that characterise the cleft habitus and the dispositional conflict associated with various stages of social mobility, much less work has focused on exploring, circumscribing, and theorizing the processes whereby the habitus is initially led to bifurcate from its environment of origin and cultivate new social dispositions.
These bifurcations can be thought of as a disjuncture in the dispositional matrix of an individual that reorients the habitus towards the cultivation of new sets of dispositions to which the habitus may be less well-attuned. These disjunctures are likely to take a variety of forms, but at a very general level, they all involve some degree of dissociation from the social space of origin and some degree of association with another. These two processes can theoretically be more or less gradual, more or less overlapping, and more or less consequential for the habitus that experiences them.
The most common pattern is found among working-class pupils enrolled in middle-class schooling contexts who come to experience educational success. For these youth, the symbolic violence experienced in school often leads to some degree of distancing from the social space that shaped their habitus (which often becomes associated with feelings of shame or inadequacy), while they simultaneously come to cultivate the more 'dominant' dispositions rewarded in the school system over time (see e.g . Ernaux 1990;Lahire 2011;Trondman 1994;Ingram 2011;Stahl 2013;Reay 2001). However, dispositional disjunctures have also been shown to result from symbolic violence in the confines of the social environment of origin itself, typically as a result of occupying a dominated or vulnerable individual position within it (such as a sexual minority status) which eventually results in a psychological distancing from the social space of origin and the cultivation of a desire to 'escape' from it through social mobility (see e.g. Eribon 2013; Lane 2012; Louis 2017Louis , 2021.
What both of these disjuncture patterns have in common is that they derive from an embeddedness in social spaces that exert some form of imposed domination on the subject-seemingly often at an early age-which gradually cuts away at the ontological tie that tethers their habitus to the social world that shaped it. We believe this durable structural domination or constraint risks conveying an excessively mechanical view of the form these dispositional disjunctures can take, thereby overshadowing some of the more subtle social mechanisms that can trigger and mediate them. We attempt to show here how these disjunctures can occur in the absence of such durable structural constraint, an issue that to our knowledge has not been adequately explored in the sociological literature.
This article thus aims to identify some of the mechanisms underpinning dispositional disjunctures and deduce their theoretical significance for the internal dynamics of the habitus. To this effect, we use a theoretically sampled case study of a working-class student who underwent a relatively sudden and drastic shift in educational aspirations during his early twenties, independently of any early exposure to more dominant social spaces that could potentially have predisposed him for such an aspirational change. Combining recent sociological work on ontological ruptures with an affective reading of Bourdieu, we demonstrate how subtle day-to-day experiences of symbolic violence and the mediating role of affective ties can be sufficient conditions for severing the ontological link between the habitus and the social space that initially shaped it. We also show how this decoupling can set reflexive and affective processes in motion that open the path towards the development of a cleft habitus. We conclude by discussing the implications of the findings and their relevance for the broader literature.

Habitus and the field of possibles
In Bourdieu's theory of practice, social dispositions-i.e. distinct ways of perceiving, assessing and acting in the social world-are inherited from the early social environment and crystallized into the habitus, which is the locus of a largely pre-conscious social practice that guides the actor towards homologous fields or social spaces (see Wacquant and Akçaoğlu 2017) to which its dispositions are well-attuned (Wacquant 2016;Bourdieu 1990b). This sense of 'fit' between habitus and the social spaces or fields in which habitus acts has proved useful for explaining both mechanisms of social reproduction (e.g. Passeron 1977, 1979) as well as processes of disjuncture between habitus and field where agents struggle to adjust to new social contexts (Bourdieu 2000;Friedman 2016). While habitus has a creative and adaptive tendency that makes it amenable to adjust to new social contexts, its foundational dispositions also give it a strong inertia, which can result in difficulties adjusting to social spaces that diverge excessively from those that originally shaped the habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992;Wacquant 2016).
As the habitus gradually adapts to new social spaces, it also 'adjusts itself to a probable future' (Bourdieu 1990b, 64). Conditions of early socialization set inherent limits to the subjective field of possibles that individuals eventually come to consider, leading them to naturally orient themselves towards fields that they have reasonable chances of accessing and have the appropriate dispositions to navigate comfortably (Atkinson 2010). As Bourdieu made clear, this is not necessarily a conscious process, as the habitus is wedded to the social world by 'a real ontological complicity, ' which is 'the source of cognition without consciousness, intentionality without intention, and a practical mastery of the world's regularities which allows one to anticipate the future without even needing to posit it as such' (Bourdieu 1990a, 10-11).
Despite this emphasis on pre-conscious practice, Bourdieu argues that when 'the routine adjustment of subjective and objective structures is brutally disrupted' (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 131), the habitus can be overridden (within certain bounds) by more reflexive drives. This can lead to a questioning of taken-for-granted assumptions that tie the habitus to a field or social space, also known as doxa: 'action, routine, things that are done, and that are done because they are things that one does and that have always been done that way' (Bourdieu 2000, 102). This is illustrated by Figure 1, where the habitus is faced with a bounded field of possibles attuned to its dispositions. The habitus is most likely to gravitate towards the most homologous field A (a limited spectrum of socially similar fields and social spaces described here as a single field for the sake of simplicity), as this is where it is most likely to experience the best sense of 'fit' . More unusually, aspects of early socialization or later life experiences may lead the habitus to consider field B, where the 'fit' might not be as ideal, but where the dispositions required within the field are sufficiently similar to those in the habitus that it will adjust over time, despite some adaptation difficulties. The choice of field B would be less 'automatic' and would require more conscious deliberation over whether it is a worthwhile pursuit, as it may involve rewards, such as social mobility. Further removed, we find field Y, which the individual rules out because of an acute awareness of a lack of 'fit' . While some reflexivity is involved in ruling out field Y, in field Z the mismatch is so stark that it is not even consciously considered, and is instinctively discounted by the habitus (Mead 2016). What we consider in this paper are the set of factors that can bring the subject to extend the boundary of the field of possibles by coming to consider the novel field C as an option. This field is further removed from inherited dispositions than field B, and the sense of fit would most likely be poor-which is why it is prone to generate most reflexivity-but is nevertheless considered worthwhile.
To analyse this boundary expansion, drawing upon the work of Akram and Hogan (2015), we propose the concept doxic breach to describe the inception point of a process where the habitus begins dissociating from aspects of its largely instinctive practice and instead starts adopting new schemes of perception that are highly mismatched with embodied dispositions. Taking stock of Bourdieu's (1990a, 108) claim that 'situations of crisis which disrupt the immediate adjustment of habitus to field' are prone to generate reflexivity (see also Ingram et al. 2015), we aim to understand not only how 'reflexivity comes into play when the taken-for-granted… nature of everyday living stops working effectively for someone' (Akram and Hogan 2015, 620), but also how the habitus navigates these 'situations of crisis' and the loss of ontological complicity it entails.
This effort nevertheless requires drawing upon a more explicit understanding of affect, as dispositional disjunctures and the reflexivity they give rise to are not affectively neutral processes (cf. Holmes 2010; Burkitt 2012). While Bourdieu only came to address affect more explicitly in his late work, several scholars have pointed out that it pervades his social theory (Probyn 2004;Wetherell 2012;Reed-Danahay 2004;Reay 2015). Wacquant (2014b) in fact suggests that the habitus is tripartite, constituted by a cognitive, conative (bodily) as well as an affective, libidinal or cathectic component. Following Wacquant (2014a, 123), we conceptualise individuals as 'suffering and desiring beings at the intersection between historical structures and situated interaction' . We also draw on Threadgold's (2020) elaboration of the affective dimension of many of Bourdieu's concepts. Of particular interest here is the concept of illusio, which Bourdieu understood as a form of social libido that leads the agent to invest in a social space or field, to perceive its activities and rewards as valuable, and to simply believe that 'it is worth the trouble to play the game' (Bourdieu 2019, 84). As Threadgold (2018, 39-40) points out, the concept of illusio not only reflects 'how meaning is created, maintained and transformed' but it also encapsulates 'affective elements… where one's trajectory meets moments of desire that do not match expectations or even possibilities' (see also Aarseth, Layton, and Nielsen 2016). As such the concept of illusio is very well attuned to studying educational aspirations, and has previously been used to this effect (Patfield, Gore, and Fray 2021). Furthermore, the concept provides an affective valence to the habitus that viscerally attaches it to specific segments of the social world, explains how it comes to be propelled along various trajectories, and provides it with a theoretical propensity for change.
In summary, we use the term doxic breach to conceptualise the ontological decoupling of the habitus from its social space of origin, explored here through aspirational shifts within the subjective field of possibles. The reflexive and affective processes this involves will be explored both in their tendency to reassert established practice and in pulling the subject towards change. The concept of illusio will be particularly useful for conceptualising the process whereby the subject is driven to 'cathect' to new aspirations and dispositions.

A case study of 'Marcus'
This article uses the life history of a working-class college student drawn from a sample of 34 first-generation students who were interviewed for a broader mixed-methods project on educational inequalities at a Swedish university in 2019. 1 In a previous analysis of these interviews (Ivemark and Ambrose 2021) we showed how gradual adaptation to middle-class dispositions in early life facilitated adjustment to higher education among many of these students, whereas a smaller subset had more complex trajectories and greater adjustment difficulties in college. A subsequent analysis using life history diagrams (Söderström 2020) found that the trajectories of four students stood out as particularly distinct. All four came from more distinct working-class backgrounds and started working immediately after high school without considering higher education as an option. After a few years, they had nevertheless all come to a stage where they faced a 'crisis situation' that made them reconsider their life choices, leading them to eventually decide to transition to higher education, often after going through a protracted and emotionally straining process of inner conflict.
To undertake a proper analysis of the statistically rare phenomenon that interests us here, we broadly inscribe this study in a sociology at the individual level (Lahire 2019(Lahire , 2020 by analysing the life history of one of these four students. Carefully selected case studies have previously been used for studying the intricate subjective aspects involved in educational trajectories (e.g. Reay 2002), and have furthermore been showcased as useful for clarifying, elaborating, and specifying theoretical constructs and their conditions of validity (Mitchell 1983).
The 27-year-old psychology student that we have called 'Marcus' is in many ways an ideal-typical case concentrating several tendencies found in the trajectories of the other three respondents, and we decided to focus on his specific case for four main reasons. First, this allows us to explore in greater depth the rich biographical experiences involved in the processes we seek to untangle. Second, the life histories of the other respondents were muddled by additional factors (such as dysfunctional family relationships and difficult schooling experiences). Third, Marcus enrolled in a more competitive university program where first-generation students are among the least represented, and his trajectory thus covers the greatest distance in social space within the sample. Finally, he had the most distinct and durable subjective experience of crisis in gravitating towards higher education, thus making him the most theoretically fruitful case for the examination of the role of affect and reflexivity in dispositional disjunctures.
Marcus responded to an ad we had put on campus seeking to recruit students who were the first in their family to study at university. The interview was conducted in the university premises by one of the researchers and lasted over three hours. The questions focused on expectations and taken-for-granted assumptions in the early family environment, educational aspirations and trajectory, and adjustment experiences at university. At the time of the interview, Marcus has completed three years of the five-year program and is satisfied with his educational choice, but also struggles with durable conflicts in his habitus.

Before the breach: immersion in the taken-for-granted
Marcus grew up with his parents in a rental apartment in an ethnically mixed working-class area in a smaller Swedish town. He only retains warm memories from his childhood and has no recollection of ever lacking anything during his upbringing. His father started working in the maritime industry at the age of 16 after finishing middle school. His mother completed high school and later worked as a care assistant alongside her responsibilities for the children and the home.
Marcus had always thought of himself as a likeable and outgoing person, a 'very popular guy, a leader' and thinks others saw him as 'quite funny' . Growing up, he 'never really reflected over… any class perspectives' , and only had a general awareness that there were 'people who lived in houses' and 'people who lived in apartments' .
He has fond memories of the nearest public school he attended, although most of these relate to his social life in school, as he remembers not caring much for schoolwork. Marcus thought of himself as 'fairly bright' , given that he never had to do anything in particular to get passing grades. His parents were also fully satisfied with his average grades and Marcus doesn't remember being encouraged to do better in school: 'the important thing is to pass and to get a job after high school' was a phrase he remembers hearing often at home. This was the baseline expectation that he modelled himself after, illustrating how 'embodied structures of expectation encounter structures of objective chances in harmony with these expectations' (Bourdieu 1990a, 116).
Like all Swedish middle school students, Marcus was expected to do a two-week internship with an employer of his choice in preparation for his selection of high school track. He 'had no idea' of what to do but instinctively ended up asking the local electrician-which he just remembers assessing as 'a good job' . While this practical sense similarly made him primarily consider a vocational track in high school, in the end he decided against it because of a good friend that he looked up to. When he heard that this friend was choosing an academic social science track preparing for university studies, Marcus remembers thinking: 'I'll just choose that too, it doesn't really matter anyway' .
In high school he started working as a janitor to earn some extra money, and after graduation he decided to continue working in the same job full-time. At the time, he didn't give much thought to his future working life. He was aware that some of his friends had started studying at university after high school, but he 'didn't reflect much over what they were doing' since he thought that 'it's something I'm never going to do anyway'; instinctively knowing that university 'isn't a place for people like me' .
Similarly, he instinctively knew he was supposed to work. He had a long string of unqualified jobs after high school, but 'did not care much about what type of job it was' seeing it mainly as a way to 'make money to pay the rent and be able to travel' . He lived his life in the present moment and took the fundamental assumptions of his outlook for granted.

The doxic breach: ontological crisis and the emergence of a new illusio
At the age of 22, when Marcus was backpacking with some friends, he was joined during the trip by his new girlfriend, who came from a more advantaged background. During the days they spent together, he remembers them having what would turn out to be a very decisive conversation: we were just hanging out, and one day she said: 'today is the last day for applying to college' … and I said: 'yeah, but… I've got no plans to do that. I'm a janitor, ' or whatever I was at the time. 'I don't have any interest in that' . And then she said: "but don't you want to like-do something else? Don't you ever want to study something?' … And then it just struck me, like 'what the hell, maybe I should do it then!' At that time, my ex-girlfriend… had started studying medicine, and [two] friends had started studying industrial economics and architecture… I thought 'should I apply?' Psychology was a lot of fun during high school… so I was like, 'yeah, I'll just apply for that then. ' 2 Reflecting back on how decisive this exchange was for him, Marcus explains: 'It was really at that moment, something just happened. It almost happened over a minute… over a conversation. ' Over the course of this exchange, the taken-for-granted framework in which Marcus had constructed his social existence was thrown into question as new vistas that he had instinctively excluded now suddenly had come to consciousness as distinct possibilities. 'Within the windows of critical moments' Akram and Hogan (2015, 614) argue, 'events unfold in such a fashion that a discontinuity arises in awareness between how one saw the world then, versus now' . A breach had now suddenly appeared in the foundational assumptions that tied Marcus to his social world, and was about to change his life in fundamental ways.
While he did apply for the psychology program, he was not admitted because of his unremarkable high school grades. This was a crushing blow for Marcus, and generated a strong determination to succeed in getting admitted: 'Hell, now I want to get into that program, now I have to do it' . He visited the psychology department in his city's university to find out what prospects he had to get accepted into the program and how he best should go about it. The administrator he spoke to explained that the university entrance exam was his only option, and encouraged him by saying 'if you really want to get admitted, you will eventually' .
In the two years that followed, Marcus took the university entrance exams (which is organized nationally twice a year) at four consecutive occasions while continuing his fulltime job, as getting into the psychology program 'suddenly became the only thing I actually wanted' . In sharp contrast to his studying habits in school, Marcus prepared for the exam at every possible occasion by studying during his breaks at work, by going straight to the municipal library to continue studying after finishing his work day, and by taking special evening classes to prepare for the university entrance exam. This illustrates how a new illusio gradually began taking hold of Marcus that profoundly reoriented his priorities.
In addition to investing all his available time in this newfound aspiration, he was thrown into a profound crisis. Everything he earlier took for granted and considered perfectly normal and ordinary suddenly seemed unfulfilling, meaningless, and existentially unbearable to him: Everything just felt pointless… I'm doing something that doesn't mean anything to me and for someone who I don't know, and they're making money off of it or something. My only motivation to work is to make money. To compare with others that maybe… say, may ex-girlfriend who is studying to become a doctor, she is going to do something that means something to her. It will mean something for others. And she will have this status, maybe. She's going to have so much more… a valuable context. While my life is about getting up at five, be at work at six, be at home again at three, and doing this five times a week until it's Friday again and then live for two days before it starts again… [I]t didn't feel meaningful at all. This shows how Marcus begins questioning the doxic assumptions that his life had been structured around, now seeing these as a deceptive mirage which he has detached himself from affectively. His comments about the meaningfulness experienced by those who had chosen a higher education also shows how he instead has affectively invested in a new set of doxic assumptions. His view of the future 'status' of these peers is also indicative of an awareness of his current position in the social hierarchy, which contrasts with the innocent attitude he had towards class differences at an earlier stage of his life.
As a result of this doxic breach, he could not fathom remaining in his old life, but at the same time, he had not yet been able to construct any alternative to it, foreshadowing that his heightened reflexivity may not provide him with any new choice, but 'just a painful awareness of the lack of it' (Adams 2006, 525; see also Jin and Ball 2020a). As Akram and Hogan (2015, 615) point out: 'While the taken-for-granted can be ruptured in a moment, the crises into which one is thrust can… last a lifetime' and the 'only way out of such ano-mie… is to go through a change process' . To better understand the change process that Marcus went through, we first return to some determining social experiences that took place before this crisis.

Priming for the breach: cracks in the taken-for-granted
While Marcus' conversation with his girlfriend had a definite impact on him, it did not take place in a social vacuum. He may not have been as receptive towards this conversation if he had not had a certain number of prior experiences. These experiences may not even have left any conscious imprint, as the habitus 'affectively delineates what is focused upon and what is written out as background excess, or noise' (Threadgold 2020, 59), but he mentions several experiences in the interview that primed him for experiencing the doxic breach described above. For example, Marcus remembers when he by chance happened to meet some of his girlfriends' family members for the first time, and was asked about his future plans: I ran into her family and they just asked 'ok, so what do you do Marcus?' … 'Well, right now I'm working as a janitor' -'alright, yes… that's great, but what are you going to do afterwards?' Something that I personally never ever would ask anyone in that situation, because I think it's despicable. I think it instils so much shame… there's something so contemptuous in it. So many people forget that… it's not self-evident that everybody should study.
Most likely, Marcus' emotional reaction to experiences such as this became stronger over time and especially after he began considering how different his outlook was compared to people for whom the prospect of university studies was closer at hand. It nevertheless seems clear that such experiences of symbolic violence may have introduced a small fissure in Marcus' taken-for-granted field of possibles, leaving 'permanent impressions and traces, which then mark one's immanent wellspring of dispositions accordingly' (Threadgold 2020, 103).
Furthermore, Marcus also remembers a similar experience he had when visiting his ex-girlfriend who at the time was studying to become a doctor. On that occasion, he was also exposed to what could be described as subtle but very real 'emotional cuts and bruises' (Threadgold 2020, 103): I was there and visited a couple of times during the time I was working… I could feel a little bit embarrassed even back then… over these people who seem to know so much… and seemed to be part of something exciting. I think I was a bit jealous over the whole thing they were part of… that I wasn't part of. Then it was also like 'what are you planning to study towards?' -'well, I'm not planning to study towards anything' . She was hanging out with people who were studying to be doctors and lawyers and stuff, so they weren't a bunch of nobodies. There probably weren't many like me there. I guess I felt quite lonely in that setting.
These prior experiences did not lead Marcus to embark upon any ambition to pursue a higher education, nor did it result in him questioning his social being in any fundamental way. Yet this symbolic violence made the deep symbolic divide that separated him from the type of people who gravitated towards higher education very palpable. His acute awareness of not 'fitting in' and not being able to take part in the obvious affinities that they sharedwhich also seemed alluring and fascinating to him to some extent-represent anecdotal but intense experiences that are likely to have 'primed' him to become emotionally receptive towards experiencing a doxic breach.

After the breach: liminality, doubt and shame
The two years when Marcus was studying to get a sufficiently high grade on his university entrance exam were a challenging liminal period where he felt trapped in his old world, while aspiring to gravitate towards new prospects without knowing if they would ever materialize. He was haunted by periods of doubt, and for instance remembers how his parents reacted when he first told them about his ambition to become a clinical psychologist: When I told mum and dad that I would start studying, they were very sceptical. They didn't understand really. They thought there will be student loans and stuff, ' Are there any jobs in that field? And how long time will this take? What happens if you don't… finish up? Shouldn't you rather work instead?' They thought like that a lot… I guess I sometimes became a bit discouraged, like 'hell, what if they are right?' By insisting on principles such as financial viability and employment prospects, which were also deeply ingrained in his habitus, Marcus was at times led to question his newfound sense of direction. These feelings of doubt illustrate the role of emotions as a 'memory jogger' which is prone to lead the subject to snap back into established practice (Bourdieu 1984, 474). However, the new illusio that took hold of him proved to be far more enduring than these calls to 'realism' and the episodes of doubt that they generated, and Marcus obstinately pursued his ambition.
However, being unsure that he would ever succeed made it difficult to disclose his ambitions too freely and made him particularly vulnerable to judgment from friends who were studying. Marcus remembers the taunting comments that some of them made one evening, not knowing that he had begun studying intensely for the university entrance exam: Oh God, it's a quite painful memory really… they were so cold-hearted… At the time they were on their way to do something really big, getting really well-paid high-status jobs and stuff: 'But Marcus, he isn't doing anything with his life, ' and then they laughed a bit… I guess they didn't mean to be hurtful, They're my friends. But it was very painful for me… It made me really sad. I just said, 'come on, don't mess with me. I'm going to do something. ' As Threadgold (2020, 56) explains, the 'relationality of an affective encounter where one receives judgement, positive or negative, leaves an emotional imprint' , and Marcus already had a well-established sense of shame wedded to his social being at the time. Despite the probable off-hand nature of these comments, the symbolic violence they convey are all the more pernicious given Marcus' sense of doubt over the outcome of his ambitions and his feeling of illegitimacy over striving to fulfill them.
Marcus' dedication nevertheless eventually paid off. He had gradually improved his results on the three first entrance exams. After the fourth attempt he finally got accepted to the psychology program at a mid-ranked university in another part of the country, two years after he had submitted his first application. He experienced this as a liberation, especially with regard to the shame he had struggled with: I'm never going to forget that day… I can't even describe that feeling… [It was] something that was so out of reach in a way-or that I at least had imagined was out of reach, and all this shame that I had built up over these years, it just ran off my body. I told everybody… I just wanted to tell it to people. I wanted to tell the whole world. It was just incredible.
His girlfriend knew how important this was for him and accepted to resign from her job and relocate to the new city with him. Marcus made sure to send an email to the psychology program administrator he had visited two years earlier to thank her for encouraging him to persevere, confessing that 'I really lived on those words… it changed everything' .

Towards a cleft habitus: self-loathing, guilt, and pride
Marcus' habitus strongly guided his choice of university, as he consciously avoided applying to the higher-ranked universities in the country because of a strong intuition that he would feel out of place: 'I just felt that I wouldn't fit in there… I felt an anger towards them some-how… I didn't want to have anything to do with them. I can't explain' . Judging by the initial adjustment difficulties he faced adapting to his university, this intuition may have been correct. While his sociability helped him adjust in many ways, he was often made aware of the fact that he had a very different social background than his fellow students in the program. He also realises that he has changed in some ways, for instance in the way he speaks.
At the time of the interview, Marcus has been a student for nearly four years, but remains clear about his class position and where he belongs: 'I feel that I belong to the working class… it's my people in a way… I think we share the same language; we share this kind of understanding and background' .
At the same time, he has also grown more ambivalent about his student peers, and since he has gradually adjusted to his new social environment over the past few years, the new dispositions he has acquired have made part of him into an 'other' that he has conflicting feelings about: Now I feel like part of the gang here, but at the same time, the more I am here, and the more I hang out with university students, the more I despise them. And there's obviously some self-loathing there as well.
This pattern is typical of the cleft habitus: a 'coincidence of contraries' (Bourdieu 2008, 100) where conflicting dispositions awkwardly intermingle. By adjusting to his new environment and cultivating this divided habitus, a deep sense of class-laden shame that Marcus thought he had rid himself of came back to haunt him. Reflecting on this shame has in turn gradually given rise to feelings of guilt and anger: In retrospect I tend to think how horrible it was to be ashamed of this [i.e. his social environment of origin]. It's nothing to be ashamed of. My mum has been a worker her whole life, and my dad too. My siblings, my friends, and everything. Many are workers. But there was something [in that environment] that I really began to loathe. And now it's like, now I think it was terrible of me to think that way really… I do think there is a sort of disgust among academics towards people who work with something ordinary-' quote-unquote' as I'm apparently saying now.
Marcus' guilt is understandable, as his family and most of his friends are deeply entrenched in a social universe which he had come to experience as lacking. He has therefore not only begun despising himself for harbouring these feelings, but also feels contempt for his fellow students who he can sense instinctively look down on this social world, which, despite his ambivalence towards it, has ultimately made him who he is. The anger he feels towards the implicit class-based prejudices of his peers at university, however unconsciously they may be expressed, in combination with this sense of guilt, has in turn kindled a feeling of pride in his background. This can for instance express itself when he speaks with his peers about their professional futures: When we talk about what we are going to do later… a sort of working-class pride comes back: 'Hell… I'm going to work in the public health system, I'm going to do that the rest of my life' , which can maybe be seen as the psychologist's graft… it is what pays the least and maybe has the lowest status in a way. Beyond a reactive desire of self-affirmation, this quote also illustrates how Marcus' habitus is instinctively drawn to areas within his future profession where he senses the 'fit' will be best given his circumstances, reflecting the structural homology that Bourdieu saw social trajectories such as this as typically resulting in.
While Marcus claims his shame was washed off from him when he was accepted in the program, it remains intrinsically wedded to him in many respects. He could for instance never consider inviting his college friends home to his parents, but cannot explain why. He thinks everybody would 'be polite' and 'do well' but he recoils at the idea: 'it wouldn't feel right' . As Bourdieu explains, 'it is quite illusory to believe that symbolic violence can be overcome with the weapons of consciousness and will alone… because the effect and conditions of its efficacy are durably and deeply embedded in the body in the form of dispositions. ' (Bourdieu 2001, 39).

Discussion and conclusion
Drawing upon the life history of a working-class student whose educational aspirations underwent a drastic change, this article has explored how habitus changes can be socially and affectively prompted and navigated. The analysis revealed two distinct but interrelated social processes. First, we showed how exposure to mismatched environments and the social influence of affective ties can erode the ontological complicity that connects the habitus to its social space of origin, culminating in what we called a 'doxic breach' . Second, we explored how this breach can give rise to an ontological crisis and how it is conducive to dispositional changes that set the subject on the path toward developing a cleft habitus. Both of these are illustrated in Figure 2.
Turning to the first of these processes, our case study showed how affective ties from more advantaged backgrounds (such as Marcus' girlfriend) can be instrumental in giving rise to a doxic breach through a combination of social exposure and affective mediation. Affective ties can regularly expose the habitus to social spaces and settings with which it is ultimately mismatched (such as the student gatherings Marcus attended, but also his girlfriend's social environment more generally). While the capital disparities in these settings are conducive to symbolic violence and feelings of inadequacy and shame (Sayer 2005), affective ties are well-positioned to broker this affective response and minimise the rejection or avoidance behaviour it would typically result in. These ties thus help maintain this exposure, which also familiarises the habitus with new dispositions over time. A similar pattern of exposure and mediation occurs with regard to aspirations and other schemes of perception. Affective ties can increase awareness of and appeal for alternative life trajectories that may challenge taken-for-granted assumptions in the habitus, and affectively mediate resistance to them, making these trajectories seem more conceivable. While Marcus was very defensive when otherwise questioned about his future plans, his girlfriend's gentle inquiries about university applications were prone to be seen not only as a belief in his ability, but as an implicit validation of his legitimacy of aspiring to a university education-bringing to mind Bourdieu's (2001, 109) important (if perhaps idealistic) comment about intimate relationships potentially embodying a 'suspension of symbolic violence' .
As Figure 2 illustrates, affectively mediated experiences of symbolic violence and prospects of a widened field of possibles gradually cut away at the ontological complicity that ties the habitus to the social world that shaped it. At root, Bourdieu (2000, 240) saw the need for recognition by others as foundational for the human condition, and argued that it is the social world that provides 'what is rarest, recognition, consideration, in other words, quite simply, reasons for being' (see also Atkinson 2020, 46-57). When committed to a social environment where fundamental assumptions that structure the habitus not only fail to elicit this recognition but are even belittled, a strong affective incentive is built up to discard these assumptions in favour of new assumptions, as long as these also provide means of recognition and consecration that seem within reach. Aspiring to recognition and to the alleviation of negative affect, but also encouraged to consider trajectories that may offer this prospect, the habitus is 'primed' for an innocuous event giving rise to a doxic breach.
The second social process analysed in this study is the impact of the doxic breach on the dispositions of the habitus and on subjective experience. As Figure 2 illustrates, when doxic beliefs anchored in foundational dispositional layers of the habitus are rejected and superseded by new ones, a distinct divide emerges. On the one hand, inherited ways of seeing and being in the world continue to structure experience but are tainted by shame and therefore simultaneously devalued as a guide for behaviour, which results in a psychosocial distancing from parts of the habitus, and by extension, from the environment of origin as well. This ontological decoupling results in strong feelings of anomie and meaninglessness. On the other hand, the habitus also becomes 'reoriented' towards new perceptual schemes and alternative forms of recognition, which can result in the cultivation of new dispositions. In Marcus' case, this cultivation was delayed by his initial failure to get admitted to the psychology program. This most likely reinforced his ontological crisis but may also have strengthened his investment in a new illusio that pulled his habitus in a new direction. This illusio takes on such affective significance because it comes to represent the only means to reconquer a sense of self-worth and meaningfulness. As Jin and Ball (2020b, 69) reasoned regarding the first-generation students they studied: '[b]eing working class, but no longer wanting to be working class, they have no alternative but to rely on academic performance for the pursuit of self-worth and recognition' .
When Marcus secures his admission to university, he comes to acquire new dispositions while remaining structured those he inherited, resulting in the characteristic internal 'tug' between contradictory schemes identified in prior research (Ingram 2018). While he gradually adapts over time, he also comes to resent the latent class prejudice in this new environment. His shame over his origin thus gradually turns into guilt, his achievements into self-loathing, and he comes to develop a compensatory working-class pride (cf. Granfield 1991), which is illustrative of the emotional conflict that characterises the cleft habitus.
The study has clearly highlighted the heightened reflexivity that is generated by the doxic breach and the process of change it triggers. Marcus for instance makes clear strategic choices in light of his newfound ambitions and develops an acute awareness of his symbolic inheritance and the gulf between his dispositions and the social spaces to which he eventually gravitates. While some conceptualisations of reflexivity see in it a potential for emancipation from social determinisms (e.g. Archer 2000;McNay 1999;Decoteau 2016), and some scholars have identified patterns along these lines among some first-generation students (Jin and Ball 2020a), reflexivity in this case study remains largely subordinated to the strictures of the habitus and the affective currents released by the conflicting social context it finds itself in. As Adams (2006) suggests, even if reflexivity in principle can raise awareness of conditionings and propel the habitus in new directions, the subject remains conditioned by inherited social dispositions that set concrete limitations on available choices. This is well-illustrated in the bounds that Marcus' dispositions set upon his choice of university and his occupational horizon. Moreover, our results suggest that the limitations that habitus sets on reflexivity are far more affectively mediated than earlier research seemingly acknowledges. Strong undercurrents of shame, guilt, pride and a desire for recognition channel the choices that seem palatable to Marcus. These emotional expressions have often been identified in studies on working-class students (e.g. Granfield 1991;Reay, Crozier, and Clayton 2009), and have been claimed to be particularly salient in specific types of class relations (Reay 2005;Sayer 2005;Probyn 2004), but rarely figure prominently in discussions of how reflexivity and the pre-conscious practice of habitus are articulated.
This article extends previous work on the cleft habitus by circumscribing some of the sufficient conditions for its emergence and development. We have shown how a cleft habitus can emerge despite a maintenance throughout the formative years of a strong ontological complicity between the habitus and the social space that shaped it. In contrast to most other empirical studies of dispositional disjunctures, the one analysed here occurred in the absence of any major early-stage disruptions to taken-for-granted assumptions-through schooling experiences or other major forms of cultural capital accumulation before early adulthood. This suggests the relatively potent influence that largely overlooked social factors such as affective ties and day-to-day social relations can have upon doxic beliefs and the dispositional architecture underpinning them. Further targeted research on similar types of disjunctures could help identify more precisely the necessary conditions for their emergence.
We believe that our analytical 'unbundling' of some key components of the habitus and our specification of some of the micro-sociological mechanisms that elicit dispositional disjunctures could be useful in providing more clarity and nuance to future research efforts along these lines. In addition to avoiding an analytical blackboxing of some of the important psychosocial and affective forces delineated here, this attention to lower-level processes may also be useful for developing a more fine-grained understanding of the variation in first-generation students' trajectories and adjustment outcomes beyond mere capital disparities. The approach used here can also be useful for bolstering emerging work on the micro-sociological underpinnings of aspirational changes (e.g. Baillergeau and Duyvendak 2022).
While the case study format has allowed for an intricate analysis of these processes, it also has some limitations that need mentioning. While the analysis has focused on the combined effects of symbolic violence and affective mediation, the social mechanisms triggering doxic breaches can most likely take a variety of forms. Importantly, other characteristics of the case than those already mentioned may have made these mechanisms particularly salient, such as an extraverted personality type, and a propensity to enter into socially mismatched affective relations (a pattern the respondent recognized but was unable to explain). Another aspect that has been underexplored here is the role affective ties play in terms of enduring social support in the striving towards social mobility, which may have been important in this case throughout the long period where higher education aspirations could not be materialized. Important questions remain regarding the varying forms of genesis and manifestation of doxic breaches, and the extent to which they are likely to result in social mobility. Questions also remain as to whether doxic breaches can be responded to by seeking to return to established practice or whether they set reflexive and affective processes in motion that make habitus changes ineluctable. More research into the specific mechanisms that elicit these breaches, the variety of forms they take, and outcomes they lead to, would help further advance sociological knowledge about the wellsprings and psychic costs of social mobility.

Notes
1. This project was approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (no. 2019-00519). All respondents gave their informed consent prior to participating, and adequate steps were taken to protect their confidentiality. 2. All quotes have been translated from Swedish by the authors.

Disclosure statement
The authors have no conflicting interests to report that may have impacted the results of this study.