POST-TEXTUAL THINKING?
5.3. Practice theory and theoretical practice: the art of ‘objectification’?
Intelligent practice is not a step-child of theory. On the contrary, theorising is one practice amongst others and is itself intelligently or stupidly conducted.586
It is, we feel, only through a praxelogical approach, that we can avoid overlooking the importance of the human situationin relation to all philosophical and theological enquiries. And it is only from this perspective, it seems, that we can see the problem with those philosophical and theological pictures that might be described as ‘metaphysical’. If we wish to describe the ‘reality’ of the human situation, then it is not particularly helpful to start
with a description of an ideal entity or principle – including Derrida’sdifféranceor Marion’s “unthinkable” or “unconditioned condition”. Merleau-Ponty’s work has been one of the major inspirations for what has been labelled the ‘practice turn’ in contemporary theory, and it is not difficult to see why. As Theodor Schatzki claims, the contemporary turn to practices has been caused by impulses to move a number of academic disciplines beyond current problematic metaphysical (and especially dualistic) ways of thinking.587 Those
584Ibid., p. 85.
585Phenomenology of Perception, p. 117. Rawnsley feels that we need to follow in the direction of
someone like Merleau-Ponty, in order to develop what he calls an ‘heir to metaphysics’. He characterises this ‘heir’ as a “strange new type of ‘metaphysics’, in which considerations of ‘space’, ‘location’ and the ‘where’ of events is emphasized. Such an ‘heir’ to metaphysics takes up critical and structural positions from previous versions into itself and transforms and twists them into new shapes, attempting, as it were, to obtain anÜbersichtof the human situation.” This ‘heir’ might perform the samefunctionas metaphysics, says Rawnsley, but goes about this in a totally differentway. It is this ‘heir’ that he feels would “rival other traditional metaphysical accounts in both structural and
organizational power.”(Roots to Rites, p. 151).
586Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), p. 26.
587Schatzki, Theodor (Ed.). “Introduction” to The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London:
scholars adopting the ‘practice approach’ do so, according to Schatzki, in order to understand, amongst other things: the philosophical and social scientific significance of human activity; the nature of subjectivity, embodiment, rationality, meaning, and normativity; the character of language, science, and power; and the organization, reproduction, and transformation of social life.588 Despite the diversity of interests,
however, Schatzki notes that practice approaches are united in the belief that such phenomena as knowledge, meaning, human activity, science, power, language, social institutions, and historical transformation, amongst a range of other things, occur within and are aspects or components of our practical involvement in the world, and it is this that is the linchpin of the theories and studies that could be seen as offering a ‘practice approach’ to the problems at hand. It is clear from the essays in Schatzki’s volume, however, that the articles included are concerned with defining a sort of ‘social ontology’, and Schatzki himself claims in the introduction that: “practice approaches promulgate a distinct social ontology: the social is a field of embodied, materially interwoven practices centrally organized around shared practical understandings.”589 It seems, however, that
the ‘practice approach’ is not necessarily limited to an emphasis on the social nature of practices. Of course, the social is one important aspect of practices that needs to be taken into account; however, it seems that the practice approach could have positive implications in a range of different disciplines or fields of academic enquiry. The practice approach could be employed, we feel, anywhere we find certain things or practices described according to a rather ‘metaphysical’ picture of reality. And, in fact, because we find these ‘metaphysical’ descriptions in a number of different places, it seems that there are a number of different ‘practice approaches’ that have been (or need to be) employed.
We could, in fact, refer to afamily of ‘practice approaches’ in order to describe those studies or theories determined to problematise some very strange metaphysical pictures that we find in a number of disciplines, in the humanities, social sciences, and even the physical sciences. The move to a more praxeological perspective is hence also an inherently inter-disciplinary phenomenon: it can be found, for example, in phenomenology (Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty), ‘ordinary language’ philosophy (Austin and Ryle), sociology (Bourdieu), anthropology (Ingold) and even the philosophy of science (Polanyi).
representationalism, individualism (e.g., rational choice theory, methodological individualism, network analysis), structuralism, structure-functionalism, systems theory, semiotics, and many strains of humanism and poststructuralism, as prime candidates for a ‘practice-based’ investigation (p. 2).
588The Concept of Mind, p. 1. 589Ibid., p. 3.
If, according to Schatzki’s list, the ‘practice turn’ is a reaction against such metaphysical tendencies as ‘intellectualism, representationalism, individualism, and structuralism’ (amongst many others), then there will certainly be more thanonediscipline or intellectual tradition faced with the problem of ‘metaphysics’, and which would therefore benefit from adoption of a practice (or, we might say, a praxeological) approach.
There have also been a number of contemporary thinkers who seem to be articulating a more general ontological description of ‘reality’, than that provided by Schatzki’s focus on ‘social ontology’. Tim Ingold, for example, is an anthropologist who has become aware of the metaphysical (and especially the dualistic) pictures that have been produced in order to describe or explain human existence, and, as a counter to these strange pictures, his anthropological approach “takes as its ontological starting point the inescapable condition of human beings’ engagement in the world.”590 Although Ingold has
contributed, amongst other things, to some important questions in evolutionary anthropology, he admits to having spent a large amount of time trying to solve evolutionary problems such as when man acquired ‘language’, or when man became ‘technological’, before realising that perhaps the problem was not lack of archaeological evidence, but that words like ‘language’ and ‘technology’ were being wrongly used (and conceived). Ingold found that even the field of evolutionary anthropology was plagued by what Ryle might call ‘category mistakes’: “It is the Western tradition of thought whose penchant for constructing dichotomies is one of its main defining characteristics,” says Ingold, “that has given us a distinction between intellect (as a property of mind) and behaviour (as bodily execution), along with the idea that all purposive or intentional action is preceded by an intentional act of cognition, involving the construction of representations, the consideration of alternatives, and the formulation of plans.”591
Rather than using the word ‘technology’ in order to produce a picture of a human being with an ‘innate’ technological capacity, then, Ingold suggests that we could challenge this picture by asking exactly what it means to use a tool skilfully.592 Using a tool skillfully
does not mean having ‘knowledge’ in our heads that we then express externally; rather, according to Ingold, tool-use is the “skilled practitioner’s acting in the world, his way of
590Ingold, Tim, and Gibson, Kathleen (Eds.) Tools, Language, and Cognition in Human Evolution
(Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 463.
591Ibid., p. 340.
592We can see the difference here from Derrida’s deconstruction of dualistic metaphysical distinctions
in that, while Derrida refers todifféranceas that which precedes metaphysics, Ingold, who is also influenced by the phenomenological tradition, looks at our involvement in the world through our practices, as a way of challenging these problematic metaphysical pictures
knowing it – in direct contact with materials, whether or not mediated by tools, in the attentive touching, feeling, handling, looking and listening that is entailed in the very process of creative work.”593 Skilled practice, then, is at once a “practical knowledge and
knowledgeable practice.”594 A skill is not something passed on through the transmission of
formulae, but through practice, and ‘hands-on’ experience; skills are developmentally incorporated into the modus operandi of the body, through practice and experience in the environment. It is perhaps helpful to think of theoretical skills in the same way: hence, more than providing a better picture of how people of different times and places use tools, we could also gain a better understanding of how we use theoretical tools. This is something that a number of the thinkers whose work we have examined above, have set out to show. Hence Ryle, for example, highlights the fact that what distinguishes sensible from silly operations in scholarly work is ‘not their parentage but their procedure’, while Michael Polanyi, whose work we will examine below, explains how we ‘indwell’ theories, the same way we ‘indwell’ other tools through our skilful mastery of certain techniques.
The cause of overcoming the division between body and mind is ill-served by emphasising one term to the exclusion of the other, says Ingold, and it needs to be emphasised that one could in principle speak just as well of enmindment as of
embodiment. Body and mind, after all, he says, “are not two separate things but two ways of describing the same thing – or better, the same process – namely the environmentally situated activity of the human organism-person… Mind… is not ‘in the head’ rather than ‘out there in the world’, but immanent in the active, perceptual engagement of organism and environment.”595 It is important to recognise, then, that such processes as thinking,
perceiving, remembering and learning have to be studied within the ecological contexts of people’s interrelations with their environments. The mind and its properties are not given in advance of the individual’s entry into the social world, but are rather fashioned through a lifelong history of involvement in relationships with others. Skilled practice is not an attribute of the individual body in isolation, but of the whole system of relations constituted by the presence of the artisan in his or her environment (and this would include the ‘academic artisan’). Understanding skilled organism-persons in this way then calls for a sort of ‘relational thinking’, because if every organism is not so much a discrete
593Ibid., p. 433. 594Ibid., p. 440.
595Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London:
entity as a node in a field of relationships, then we have to think in a new way not only about the interdependence of organisms and their environments but also about their evolution. With this in mind we come to see that the identities and characteristics of persons are not bestowed upon them in advance of their involvement with others but are the condensations of histories of growth and maturation within fields of social relationships, and we can conceive the human being, not as a composite entity made up of separable but complementary parts, such as body, mind and culture, but rather as “a locus of creative growth within a continually unfolding field of relationships.”596
Not only is skilled practice inherentlyrelational, it is also inherentlysituated. Practical enskilment, according to Ingold, is the embodiment of capacities of awareness and response by environmentally situated agents. Ingold is very concerned to understand what it means for human beings – at once organismsand persons – toinhabit an environment. The study of skill demands a perspective which situates the practitioner, right from the start, in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of his or her surroundings. Our skilled practices are always situated, and our involvement in the places
where we find ourselves plays a huge role in who we are and what we can do. If we are to study the skills of a certain practitioner or group of practitioners, we should adopt what Ingold calls a ‘dwelling perspective’, which treats the immersion of the organism-person in an environment or lifeworld as an inescapable condition of existence. Drawing on the phenomenological tradition, and especially the work of Heidegger,597 Ingold argues that
“the world emerges with its properties alongside the emergence of the perceiver in person, against the background of involved activity. Since the person is a being-in-the-world, the coming-into-being of the person is part and parcel of the process of coming-into-being of
596Ibid, pp 3-4.
597Ingold turns mainly to Heidegger’s essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language,
Thought (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971). In this essay, Heidegger asks about the relation betweenbuildinganddwelling. Heidegger reverses the priority of the idea that we firstbuild, in order to thendwellin these buildings, by arguing that,as human beings, we are ‘dwellers’ before we are builders. This is thewaythat human beingsare: “We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is because we are dwellers…Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build” (p. 8 and p. 160). Ingold explains that he takes this to be “the founding statement of the dwelling perspective. What it means is that the forms people build, whether in the imagination or on the ground, arise within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings. Building, then, cannot be understood as a simple process of transcription, of a pre-existing design of the final product onto a raw material substrate. It is true that human beings – perhaps uniquely among animals – have the capacity to envision forms in advance of their implementation, but this envisioning is itself an activity carried on by real people in a real-world environment, rather than by a disembodied intellect moving in a subjective space in which are represented the problems it seeks to solve…. In short, people do not import their ideas, plans or mental representations into the world, since that very world, to borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty (1962:24), is the homeland of their thoughts. Only because they already dwell therein can they think the thoughts they do.” (Perception of the Environment, p. 168).
the world.”598 From this ‘dwelling perspective’ we see that “the world continually comes
into being around the inhabitant, and its manifest constituents take on significance through their incorporation into a regular pattern of life activity.”599 It is from this
perspective, too, thatplacebecomes important, which is different to ‘space’ in that it owes its character to the experiences it affords to those who spend their time there. It is from this relational context of people's engagement with the world, in the business of dwelling, says Ingold, that each place draws its unique significance. In contrast to those theorists who draw (sometimes metaphysical) distinctions between different types of environments, Ingold emphasises that: “life is given in engagement, not in disengagement, and in that very engagement the real world at once ceases to be ‘nature’ and is revealed to us as an environment for people. Environments are constituted in life, not just in thought, and it is only because we live in an environment that we are able to think at all.”600
This means that even things such as building, as something thathuman beings do, is not something that can be traced to a ‘genetic capacity’. Human children, like the young of many other species, Ingold explains, grow up in environments furnished by the work of previous generations, and as they do so they come literally to carry the forms of their dwelling in their bodies – in specific skills, sensibilities and dispositions. Skills are the capabilities of action and perception of the whole organic being (indissolubly mind and body) situated in a richly structured environment. Becoming skilled in the practice of a certain form of life, then, is not a matter of furnishing a set of generalised capacities, given from the start as compartments of a universal human nature, with specific cultural content. Skills are not transmitted from generation to generation, says Ingold, but are “regrown in each, incorporated into the modus operandi of the developing human organism through training and experience in the performance of particular tasks.”601
Human beings – including the beings who might be characterised as ‘homo academicus’ – are situated in environments, and ‘indwell’ these environments through their practical involvements with things and people, and their mastery of certain techniques.
One of the features of the ‘praxeological turn’, in whatever field or discipline we find it, is that it is, by its very nature, reflective about the practices of the thinker or theorist him or herself. If one of the major concerns of the practice approach is to highlight
598Ibid., p. 168. 599Ibid.
600Ibid., p. 60 601Ibid., p. 5.
those practical elements of human being-in-the-world that metaphysical pictures seem to have overlooked, then it seems only natural to reflect on the practices of the philosopher, or the academic, in order to make sure that he or she has not overlooked the practical elements of his or her own work. For this reason, a number of thinkers have become interested, not only in everyday practices and the use of language, but also in the academic’s practices and uses of language. Practice theorists in general are interested, not only in certain theoreticalpicturesof reality, then, but also in theorising itself as apractice, or process, of producing theoretical pictures. As we have seen, for example, Derrida and Marion are critical of certain metaphysical pictures of reality, although their critique is misguided because they do not investigate the practices that have led to the production of these pictures. They seem to have, as we have seen, a rather ‘metaphysical’ picture, not only of our existential situation, but of the practice of metaphysical ‘picturing’ itself. In both cases, they seem to have overlooked the fact that theoretical pictures are produced for a variety of different reasons, by human beings who exist in a variety of different ways. Gilbert Ryle is one philosopher who has tried to expose philosophical illusions, by pointing to the practices of the philosopher (especially his use of language), as well as to the practices that contradict the strange pictures that philosophers paint through their problematic use of language (as can be seen, for example, in their conception of ‘mind’). In his book The Concept of Mind, Ryle sets out to explore the implications of the “category mistake” that has resulted in a conception of the ‘mind’ as though it is a certain sort of entity, or substance. “The official doctrine, which hails from Descartes,” says Ryle, is that “every human being has both a body and a mind,” and the idea that, while human bodies “are in space and are subject to mechanical laws which govern all other bodies in space,” minds “are not in space, nor are their operations subject to mechanical laws.”602This leads