THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION

Transcription

1 THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION INTRODUCTION In this chapter I want to focus on the concept of practice itself, which is arguably at the heart of various other questions and concerns. What is professional practice? What does it mean to refer to professional practice? What is entailed in formulations such as practising a profession and practising professionalism? To what extent and in what fashion is the work of professionals to be understood in terms of social practice, or as a form of practising the social? Most commonly, such questions are approached through an attempt to engage the adjective in each instance the profession(al) and the social which takes one down the relatively well-trodden path of exploring the literatures of history and sociology, or social theory. Here, though, I want to ask, following Pierre Bourdieu, how do we understand this strange thing that practice is? That is, what is practice? How best to think about practice, as a distinctive concept in itself? Why? Why is this worth doing? To engage such questions, and to respond at all adequately to this last query, requires that I first make several framing observations. I begin therefore by introducing the notion of practice theory, and also look briefly at what has been called the practice turn in contemporary theory (Schatzki et al, 2001). I follow this with an equally brief comment on the question of knowledge in accounts of practice, perhaps particularly those concerned with professional education per se. While practice theory is itself a somewhat awkward formulation, it is one that is nonetheless useful in cutting across potentially misleading expectations and assumptions, and also in calling forth what are indeed necessary moves towards theorization and problematisation. Used interchangeably with formulations such as practice thinking, it reminds us of the role and significance of theory and theorizing in attempts to understand matters such as professional practice, while nonetheless encouraging us to keep in B. Green (Ed.) Understanding and Researching Professional Practice (39-54) Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

2 mind the risks and dangers of such activity, and of the need to be suspicious of theories that deliver general explanations of social life as it is (Schatzki, 2001, p.4). It is also appropriate to say that theory is similarly being understood somewhat differently here not as referring to law-like or authoritative generalisations in the traditional scientific manner but, rather, as any abstract and general account of the phenomenon in question (Schatzki, 2001, p.3). What follows needs to be seen, accordingly, as an attempt to provide a philosophical and conceptual contextualisation for understanding professional practice. Moreover, this account operates within what I have previously identified as a distinctive post- Cartesian strand of thinking about practice, one that is skeptical about and seeks to problematise modernist views of both representation and subjectivity, linked in turn to received notions of knowledge and identity. At the same time, this does not mean refusing such notions altogether, or simply jettisoning them. Rather, what is called for, I want to argue, is their reconceptualisation in accordance with new social principles and logics, which for the moment I shall simply associate with the emergence of postmodernity as a broadly defined frame of reference. A further preliminary consideration to be addressed here is the relationship between practice and knowledge. To arrive at an adequate and appropriate understanding of practice might seem to involve its realisation as knowledge or rather, as an object of knowledge. Taking up such a stance however would be to see this whole issue as fundamentally one of epistemology, whereas the position taken here is that it is better conceived as a matter of praxis, in something like Marx s sense when he observes that, while philosophy seeks only to understand the world, the point is to change it Kemmis (2005) has argued that more is needed with regard to professional practice and education than the idea of simply changing what is in practitioners heads, a view that is symptomatic of the pervasive rationalism that characterizes the modern world, and manifests itself as popular notions such as professional practice knowledge. He sets in counterpoint to this what he describes as how we think in the course of doing a practice (Kemmis, 2005, p.392). This latter point is precisely what is at issue here. Distinctions that circulate in the professional development literature 2

3 THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION between knowledge about, in and for practice, across a range of professional practice fields, need to be scrutinized very carefully in this regard. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999, p.250) for instance refer to knowledge-about-practice, knowledge-in-practice and knowledge-of-practice respectively. Their argument is certainly useful and illuminating. However what emerges in such accounts, I suggest, is in the end a focus on knowledge rather than practice, and thus ultimately a re-affirmation of what I present here as a deeply problematical worldview. I turn now to what has been called the primacy of practice i. THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE THESIS In what could well be seen as a programmatic statement on this body of work, Theodore Schatzki posits practice as the prior term in any consideration of the social the primary generic social thing (Schatzki, 2001, p.1), as he put it, with practice theory constituting moreover one horizon of present social thought (Schatzki, 2001, p.13). For another commentator, Andreas Reckwitz, practice theories or theories of social practices have formed a conceptual alternative that seems attractive to an audience dissatisfied with both classically modern or high-modern types of social theories (Reckwitz, 2002,p.243). Reckwitz observes further that [t]he turn to practices seems to be tied to an interest in the everyday and lifeworld, with those identified with practice theory being influenced by the interpretative or cultural turn in social theory, and points to late Wittgenstein and, to a lesser degree, early Heidegger as commonly philosophical points of reference (Reckwitz, 2002, p.244). This is consistent with accounts such as that of Charles Taylor (1995) who observes in both of these 20 th century philosophers a strong reaction to the Cartesian legacy, which he identifies in terms of rationalism, as a distinct feature of modernity. For Taylor (1995, p.61), both Heidegger and Wittgenstein are crucial thinkers who have helped us emerge, painfully and with difficulty, from the grip of modern rationalism, which he further glosses as a certain conception of reason. This would seem to have an affinity with what Schön (1995) describes in his work as technocratic rationality or 3

4 technical reason, something he in turn sees as a central feature of the dominant epistemology of the modern ( research ) university. Taylor sees this hegemonic rationality as a kind of ontologizing of rational procedure (Taylor, 1995, p.61), and suggests that this has been generalised to the point where it becomes identified, as it were ideologically, with the proper procedures of rational thought and subsequently read into the very constitution of the mind, made part of its very structure (Taylor, 1995, p.61). The reach of this particular worldview arguably extends beyond the academy, however, entering into various forms of commonsense and indeed variously institutionalised including in much professional education. Hence Reckwitz (2002, p.250) draws attention to the philosophical background of practice theory, which he locates in above all Ludwig Wittgenstein s late works [ ] and Martin Heidegger s early philosophy [ ] and their radical attempts to reverse common philosophical and everyday vocabularies, going on to suggest that in their work in fact, we find everything that is original in practice theory already. Whatever the virtue or the validity of that later point, there is clearly much of value in seeing this particular philosophical line of argument as an important and productive reference-point for our present undertaking. What did this radical attempt to reverse common philosophical and everyday vocabularies consist of? What did it look like? Something of this can be grasped in the account provided by Dreyfus and Hall (1992), where they emphasize the importance of everyday practices and more generally what might be called a practice ontology. They suggest that this is something shared by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, notwithstanding their differences, observing of the latter that he ground[ed] his thinking in what people do, not in what they say they do their everyday practices, rather than their conceptualisations or their thinking (Dreyfus and Hall, 1992, p.2). As they write: [l]ike Ludwig Wittgenstein, Heidegger finds that the only ground for the intelligibility of thought and action that we have or need is in the everyday practices themselves, not in some hidden process of thinking or of history (Dreyfus and Hall, 199, p.2). 4

5 THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION Heidegger s central insight, as Dreyfus and Hall (1992, p.3) observe, was that everyday practices are the source of intelligibility a characteristic of Wittgenstein s thinking as well. In such a worldview, practice comes first, very clearly. Moreover, what must be emphasised in this regard is, firstly, the need for a careful elaboration of the distinction between the singular term practice and the plural practices, and secondly, the implied focus here on what might be called the vernacular. Reckwitz (2002) provides one gloss on the former point. As he writes, whereas [a] practice in the singular represents merely an emphatic term to describe the whole of human action (in contrast to theory and mere thinking), the plural term practices in the sense of social practices is something else (Reckwitz, 2002, p.249). He continues: A practice is a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, things and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understandings, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge (Reckwitz, 2002, p.249). This is not altogether satisfactory, for various reasons, and I shall come back to it. Schatzki seems to work with a somewhat different sense, with the singular term ( practice ) referring more or less organically to the range of practices, and practice theory being a collection of accounts that promote social practices as the fundamental social phenomenon (Schatzki, 1996, p.11). However, both Reckwitz and Schatzki refer to a similar grouping of theorists and scholars, ranging from philosophy (Taylor, Dreyfus) through social and cultural theory (Bourdieu, Giddens, Foucault, Lyotard) to science and technology studies (Bloor, Latour), and arguably taking in fields such as feminism (Butler) and psychology (Shotter) as well. While it is certainly not the case that there is anything like a unified practice approach (Schatzki, 2001, p.2) across this grouping, it needs to be understood rather as a loose, but nevertheless definable movement of thought that is unified around the idea that the field of practices is the place to investigate such phenomena as agency, knowledge, language, ethics, power and science (Schatzki, 2001, pp.13-14). 5

6 A focus on the vernacular is an important consideration here. Reckwitz s reference to the everyday and to the life-world has already been noted, terms that point not only to the significance of both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, in their respective philosophical anthropologies, but more prosaically, to the realm of the mundane and the ordinary, the ongoingness of everyday life. With regard to professional practice, this suggests that attention needs to be given more to the mundane, naturalistic aspects and dimensions of professional life and work, rather than to isolating and decontextualising particular features and operations, as in conventional forms of scientific research. Again we are brought back to a lifeworld of practices the world as practice. Understanding Practice At this point I want to focus on various formulations of practice, mainly within the distinctive tradition I am concerned with here. Schatzki (1996) usefully isolates three such understandings, namely, practice as: learning how or improving one s ability to do something by repeatedly working at it and carrying it out (ie practising ); a temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings ; and performing an action or carrying out a practice of the second sort (Schatzki, 1996, p. 89). Elsewhere he presents practice as involvement in political and/or economic affairs ; as spatio-temporally extended manifolds of actions; and as the carrying-out of actions (Schatzki, 1997, p.285). These latter two senses clearly relate closely to the latter two of the first series. Practising (or practice-ing ) as invoked here involves features such as repetition, discipline, training, habituation, etc, and is familiar enough. The remaining formulation can perhaps be glossed as referring to worldliness, or worldly engagement, and thereby includes immersion in the everyday business of professional practice. What we have, then, is four distinct but related formulations of the practice concept, and obviously some combination or other of them is appropriate for our concerns here. The key notion however is activity, or what might be phrased as doing-ness energeia. Schatzki points in particular to the 6

7 THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION significance of what he calls doings and sayings, as perhaps the base features of practice, with the latter term ( saying ) presented as a form of activity in itself. Professional practice in this light consists of speech (what people say) plus the activity of the body, or bodies, in interaction (what people do, more often than not together) a play of voices and bodies. In this view, practice is inherently dialogical, an orchestrated interplay, and indeed a matter of co-production. Among other things, this allows a better, sharper sense of practice as alwaysalready social. Professional practice is, right from the outset, a distinctive form of social practice, with all its attendant complexity. This is consistent with Reckwitz s understanding of practice, already introduced here, which brings together bodily and mental activity, things and their use, knowledges of various kinds, and emotionality (or affect ). It is the mixture that is important here, an interconnectedness of disparate realms and states. The idea of a nexus, a bringing-together, is also important, as is what makes this happen in the way it does. Schatzki writes: To say that the doings and sayings forming a practice constitute a nexus is to say that they are linked in certain ways. Three major avenues of linkage are involved: (1) through understandings, for example, of what to say or do; (2) through explicit rules, principles, precepts, and instructions; and (3) through what I will call teleoaffective structures embracing ends, projects, tasks, purposes, beliefs, emotions and moods (Schatzki, 1996, p.89). That is, he points to understandings, rules and what he calls teleoaffectivity as the articulated features organising practice. Each of these needs to be explored further, albeit in a summary fashion. For instance, understanding refers to the role and significance of particular knowledges, whether they are tacit or explicit, propositional or procedural, etc. Rules similarly range from the explicit to the implicit, and should be understood flexibly, as implied above. The main point here is that practice, while not being rulegoverned, at least in any strong sense, might yet be appropriately seen as rule-referenced. Teleoaffectivity relates to purpose and brings together directionality or orientation with values, investments, interests and commitments broadly, what Reckwitz calls 7

8 motivational knowledge. This enables us to say that practice is always purposive. But it is also always both embodied and situated that is to say, practice is characterised by embodiment and what might be called emplacement: account must be taken not only of the body, and the body in interaction with other bodies, but also of where it is located, in terms of social and material space/time. Space (and place) is therefore a vital consideration, and concomitantly, matters of scale. Moreover, as well as spatially, practice is to be understood as situated both socially and historically (Soja, 1996), which open up further rich critical-contextual lines of inquiry (see also Schatzki, 2002). One consequence of this is that it becomes quite difficult to isolate one moment or instantiation of practice, or to see it simply in individual(ist) terms, as somehow a thing in itself. This is, in part, what Kemmis (forthcoming/2008, p.27) is pointing to in his assertion of the illimitability of practice, which as he says makes a mockery of most measures of practice that observe only particular behaviours or acts without attention to the wider conditions which form and inform them. Hence it becomes a complex and difficult matter to fix upon a unit of analysis, other than (as it were) arbitrarily or perhaps pragmatically, in accordance with one s research purpose. The challenge remains: How best to characterise practice? How best to understand it? What is involved in making of practice an object of scrutiny and of inquiry? For instance, what does it look like? On Bourdieu s Practice Among recognised proponents of practice theory, Bourdieu s work stands out as a sustained and particularly creative engagement with the problematics and aporias that are involved in seeking to understand practice. The following, while perhaps being more of an informal observation than anything else, gives a good sense of where he stands in this regard: [T]here is a sort of incompatibility between our scholarly thinking and this strange thing that practice is. To apply to practice a mode of thinking which presupposes the bracketing of practical necessity and the use of instruments of thought 8

9 THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION constructed against practice is to forbid ourselves from understanding practice as such (cited Wacquant, 1992, p.40). One issue that I shall come back to later is the very nature of research and scholarly inquiry, in such an account, and to consider this, further, in terms of the problem of representation. However, first of all, for all the risks of essentialism, it is the notion of understanding practice as such that is worth focusing on here. As the author of two books explicitly entitled Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) and The Logic of Practice (1990), it might be assumed that Bourdieu has provided us with a detailed, informed account of this strange thing that practice is ; and indeed he has with the caveat that it is extremely difficult to draw out of his work any singular, clear exposition, since what he provides in the end is not so much information as a demonstration, a particular practice of writing and research. What that consists of, or perhaps gestures towards is something I shall resume in a later moment. Here, I want to tease out something of what he seems to understand as practice, notwithstanding the violence I may be doing to the subtlety and complexity of his work in this regard. Bourdieu s key organising concepts are, on most accounts, habitus, field and capital. Practice arguably a further and absolutely central principle of his thought is rather less explicitly thematised, and indeed might be said to occur in the operational interplay between these concepts, interstitially, rather than being distinctive and substantive in its own right. People negotiate social life across its various spheres; indeed they practise social life, whether it is in the context of the family or the workplace, or whatever. There are various points to consider here. I shall, to begin with, posit a crucial distinction: between what Bourdieu himself describes as practice in itself and what he elsewhere calls the logic of practice. These are to be grasped as two distinct orders of understanding and operation. The former ( practice in itself ) can be linked with and perhaps rendered as practical sense, practical logic or even practical knowledge : that form of action-knowledge, or rather knowing (savoir faire), which is immanent to the practice in question. The latter ( the logic of practice ) is that which is discernible in observing practice from the outside, as it were, reconstructed, 9

10 derived, realised synoptically and more often than not textually. For Bourdieu, a break is to be observed between practice in itself and the work of scholarship ( scholarly thinking ), as we have already noted, as a mode of thinking which presupposes the bracketing of practical necessity and the use of instruments of thought constructed against practice. Moreover, to deploy such a mode of thinking, in its usual forms, is to risk forbid[ding] ourselves from understanding practice as such. There is a profound and disturbing paradox in this being so. As he writes elsewhere (Bourdieu, 1990, p.11), the logic of practice can only be grasped through constructs which destroy it as such. These constructs are necessary, then, as is the work of objectivisation that surrounds them, but also invariably, inevitably disruptive and interruptive, violent. The work of (re)construction destroys the immanent logic of practice. A gap opens up, is forced, between that immanent logic and the (re)constructed logic of practice, after the (f)act, as it were. We are confronted with different logics here, different forms of sense, of knowledge, of knowing. Practice has a logic which is not that of the logician (Bourdieu, 1990, p.86). The distinction is between logical logic the logic of logic and what he describes as the universally pre-logical logic of practice (Bourdieu, 1990, p.19). Moreover: The idea of practical logic, a logic in itself, without conscious reflection or logical control, is a contradiction in terms, which defies logical logic. This practical logic is that of all practice, or rather of all practical sense (Bourdieu, 1990, p.92). And yet it is clear that, for Bourdieu, this is a necessary paradox indeed, a measure of the productivity of practice. What is at issue are different logics, with that associated with practice in itself being characteristically fuzzy, indeterminate, dynamic. A sort of trade-off exists between rigour and clarity, on the one hand, and on the other, generativity and effectivity. Practice is to be grasped as a complex social activity. As Polkinghorne (1997, p.5) writes, [p]ractice is characteristically fluid and indeterminate, and yet it has its own dynamic coherence, its own active logic. What distinguishes this practical logic is indeed its complexity, its polysemy. It is, as Bourdieu (1990, p.86) puts it, 10

11 THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION able to organize all thoughts, perceptions and actions by means of a few generative principles, which are closely interrelated and constitute a practically integrated whole, only because its whole economy, based on the principle of the economy of logic, presupposes a sacrifice of rigour for the sake of simplicity and generality and because it finds in polythesis the conditions required for successful use of polysemy. Multiplicity is thereby managed, manageable. In Robbins (1991, p.112) terms: The defining characteristic of practical logic is that it is polythetic that is to say that practical logic is capable of sustaining simultaneously a multiplicity of confused and logically (in terms of formal logic) contradictory meanings or theses because the overriding context of its operation is practical. How best to understand practice, then? How does it work? What does it do? How does it deal with this complexity? In Polkinghorne s (1997, p.10) summation, practice for Bourdieu consists of three features it occurs in space and time, it is guided by tacit understanding which is neither wholly conscious nor wholly unconscious, and it is purposeful and strategic. I want to focus here on the manner in which agency is being realised, bearing in mind that this is not to be conceived as a matter of modernist ( humanist ) rationality. Polkinghorne points to Bourdieu s (1977, p.8) notion of the art of the necessary improvisation which defines excellence. This formulation suggests that practice needs to be understood first and foremost as a form of invention, within limits, and as such, hence an interplay (literally) of freedom and constraint (Polkinghorne, 1997, p.10). As improvisation, it works within and against structures, making do with whatever is at hand, drawing on all available resources in seeking to move on, to get things done. Improvisation as a characteristic feature of ( artful ) practice is always knowledgeable, though never fully or totally so never, that is, wholly rational. Time (and also timing) becomes important here. The depiction of practice as an improvisatory performance brings us back to time, as Jenkins (1992, p.71) writes; improvisation is the 11

12 exploitation of pause, interval and indecision though arguably a far more appropriate term in this latter regard is decision. Here too the emphasis on tacit understandings shaping or guiding practice needs to be noted, as incomplete knowledge that is neither wholly conscious nor wholly unconscious. What enables one to go on, and in a manner that makes sense, that works? In this regard it is better to think in terms of what Taylor (1995) calls engaged agency, understanding the human agent as engaged, as embedded in a culture, a form of life, a world of involvements, which ultimately [is] to understand the agent as embodied (Taylor, 1995, pp.61-62), as inextricably implicated in the lifeworld. The links back to Schatzki s arguments concerning practice, mobilised earlier, are clear. But it is Schatzki s third understanding of practice, his reference to performing an action or carrying out a practice (Schazki, 1996, p.89), which I want to pick up on at this point. As he writes: this third notion of practice is central to any analysis of human existence. This is because it designates the continuous happening at the core of human life qua stream of activity and reminds us that existence is a happening taking the form of ceaselessly performing and carrying out (Schatzki, 1996, p.90). The focus here is on what was expressed earlier as the doingness of practice, as activity, indeed as sensuous human activity, in Marx s classic formulation. Schatzki goes on to stress the way [t]his notion of practice closely connects to the second, that is, as a temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings. As he writes: Each of the linked doings and sayings constituting a practice is only in being performed. Practice in the sense of do-ing, as a result, actualises and sustains practices in the sense of nexuses of doings (Schatzki, 1996, p.90). Three terms line up here practice, activity, action to be understood as embedded within each other, in descending order. That is, practice consists of activities, carried in and realised through the flow of action. Once again this is to draw attention to the notion of energia as a key organising principle, in seeking to understand practice. 12

13 Beyond Routine? THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION Finally I want to consider here Reckwitz s stress on the idea of routine. Having isolated a number of what he describes as elements, operating across a range of registers, and in describing a practice as a a routinized type of [interconected ] behaviour, he asserts the following: A practice a way of cooking, of consuming, of working, of investigating, of taking care of oneself or of others, etc forms so to speak a block whose existence necessarily depends on the existence and specific interconnectedness of these elements, and which cannot be reduced to any one of these single elements. He concludes: A practice is thus a routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood (Reckwitz, 2002, p.250). Individuals are conceptualised as carriers of a practice, indeed possibly a plurality of practices. Agency in such a view is to be located in the practice, it would seem, not in the human individual (the practitioner ) at best it may well be a local, restricted agency that marks the human individual. Moreover: the practice as a nexus of doings and sayings (Schatzki) is not only understandable to the agent or the agents who carry it out, it is likewise understandable to potential observers (at least within the same culture) (Reckwitz, 2002, p.250). This would seem to suggest that, at least within a common or shared culture, a practice is widely intelligible, and certainly beyond the particular individual(s) it is associated with. What is not clear in this account is just what it is that is recognizable and intelligible: what makes the practice in question meaningful not just to those immediately involved on the inside, as it were but also to those outside that particular practice, in its current enactment? The answer lies partly in the likelihood that the latter are presumably, in this instance at least, otherwise immersed in the same culture, or form of life. Whether on the basis of experience or similar kinds of history, these others share a way of seeing and thinking, and also doing, which make it easier for them to make sense of and to identify (with) that particular practice-enactment. A potential exists here, moreover, for a productive exchange between 13

14 these parties, a dialogue, on the basis of not only what they share but also what differs in their respective senses of what is going on in this instance. Part of what makes for intelligibility here is the fact that there are manifest regularities that characterise the practice ii. These make for a certain measure of predictability, and indeed for a sense of routine of the activities being of a routine nature, and therefore basically habituated, if not habitual, or perhaps automatic. Routine makes for predictability, clearly, and arguably a form of active mindlessness, or rather a state of being wherein the practice being practised operates, as it were, on autopilot iii. This makes sense to do in these circumstances I know that is the case because it s what I ve done previously, on many other similar occasions Two points can be made here, briefly. The first has to do with what has been called background, within the philosophical tradition associated with Wittgenstein and Heidegger, for whom our social practices embody an ontology (Dreyfus, 1995, p.16). At issue here is the question of explicitness: how explicit is it possible to be with regard to our practice knowledge, particularly that concerning the context ( the ultimate foundation of intelligibility Dreyfus, 1995, p.7)? As Dreyfus (1995, p.4) notes: Heidegger questions both the possibility and the desirability of making our everyday understandings totally explicit ; while for Taylor (1995: 69), the idea of making the background completely explicit, of undoing its status as background, is incoherent in principle. Some things are inarticulatable in our practices, in a sense unknowable which is not to say that they don t exist or aren t significant in and for the practices of our practices. Rather, they must be seen as the unsaid, the unspoken, or perhaps the unspeakable. Practices go on, they happen. Here Taylor s notion of engaged agency is pertinent: 14 [T]he background is what arises with engaged agency. It is the context of intelligibility of experience for this kind of agent. If a given kind of agency is engaged in this sense, then its experience is not intelligible outside this context (Taylor, 1995, p.69). Practices happen in excess of the subject. Practice is prior to the subject, to subjectivity and to agency alike. This doesn t mean there

15 THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION isn t a reflexive aspect to the relationship between practice and agency, with the practitioner attending to practice in its unfolding and learning how to go on. Rather, it is a case of, in Dreyfus (1995, p.17) terms, being socialized into practices that contain an interpretation not exhaustively contained in the mental states of individuals. The second point has to do with the so-called routine nature of practice. This is partly to be understood, I suggest, with reference to the significance of the taken-for-granted, which to some extent constitutes the background. But what it also raises is the question of how to break into, and out of, routine how to interrupt or disrupt the routinization of practice? This is perhaps especially important when it is a matter of professional practice. Routine here involves habits and patterns that, by their very nature, are both selfperpetuating and (relatively speaking) unmonitored; they operate below the radar of consciousness or awareness. Yet there are patently some circumstances in which this might be unwise, or even dangerous, perhaps especially in the case of professional practice. What is needed is something that jolts one out of the routine, that interrupts or even disrupts the normal flow of things that acts to defamiliarize the performance of the practice in question. Here, Heidegger s notion of breakdown is useful, it seems to me, which Dreyfus (1995, p.70) glosses thus: The experience we have when ongoing coping runs into trouble. I will take up this point again, later, in the context of considering how representation relates to what I have been naming, here, as the primacy of practice. Hopefully I have provided an adequate account of that thesis, at least in what can be called its positive aspects. Yet something has been shadowing this account all along, and it is to an explicit engagement with this that I now want to turn. As we shall see, doing so will further our understanding of (professional) practice AND THE PERSISTENCE OF THE REPRESENTATION PROBLEM Something that is immediately striking in the work on practice theory available to date is a somewhat curious ambivalence, to say the least, towards the notion of representation. Why should this matter? Indeed, what is it that at issue here? What is the problem? Seeking to 15

16 move my account of the primacy of practice towards a conclusion, in this section I want to look now more closely at the relationship between practice and representation. This is because, as I see it, the primacy of practice thesis is haunted by the spectre of representation, both as an object of understanding and as a challenge for research and inquiry. Reference has already been made to Bourdieu s distinction between this strange thing that practice is, as he puts it, and the various technologies whereby one seeks to know practice as such. At issue here is the question of knowledge, or perhaps better, the will to knowledge. What relationship exists between knowledge and practice? How to think (about) that relationship? In what sense might we speak of knowing practice of the knowingness in practice, as well as the activity of knowing itself, regarding practice? How do we know practice? This suggests that the issue is one of epistemology. Further, there is a sense here that knowledge links up with various other notions, specifically those of representation and theory, and perhaps also experience, to form what might be called an affinity set, a family of concepts, of resemblances. But, as Kemmis (2005) notes, it may be that what is important in this context, is not so much a matter of epistemology as one of praxiology, or pragmatics: what is to be done, rather than what is to be known. Resisting the lures of rationalism is, as he further suggests, a crucial consideration; more specifically, what he describes as a rationalistic theory of action may lead into a misunderstanding of practice (Kemmis, 2005, p.392). Practice then, properly understood, might well be set against, or at least in tension with, the affinity set I have just referred to. There is much in the literature, in fact, that supports that point, realised as a consistent concern about representationalism, which is again to evoke a key argument in what I have previously described as a distinctive post-cartesian strand in 20 th century social thought. As Schatzki (1997, p.293) writes: Much social theory today operates with a representational theory of action, with action conceived as caused by representational entities. Representationalism is that view of the world predicated on a spectator view of knowledge for which the primary reference-point is the authorial subject of rationality and realism, a stance burdened by lingering, if not overtly, neo-cartesian conceptions of representation 16

17 THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION (Schatzki, 1997, p.295). What is privileged here are mental states, with [p]erhaps the most widespread version of this approach cit[ing] belief, desires, needs, goals, and the like as the causes of action (Schatzki, 1997, p.293). In such a representationalist view, knowledge precedes and predetermines action. Knowledge is distinct from practice, as mind is from activity in and of the world. And both mind and knowledge are privileged vis-à-vis practice and the body. This is sharply at odds with the arguments associated with Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and the primacy of practice thesis more generally. At issue here is the problem of cognitivism, as one (albeit major) manifestation of the Cartesian legacy. This can be linked with the programmatic abstraction that is associated with the scholastic disposition, a sense of [intellectual] distance (Thrift, 2004), which Bourdieu (1998) describes as the scholastic point of view. Hence Thrift argues for the strategic value of what he calls nonrepresentational theory, as an approach and an attitude that tries to recognize and work with those kinds of thinking that do not fit the scholastic model, that live inexpertly (Thrift, 2004, p.89). Central to Thrift s project is a deliberate challenge to cognitivism, as a singular perspective on thinking and a hegemonic form of rationality, which he looks to extend and to supplement by problematis[ing] what cognitive thought might consist of, what thinking might be by extending intelligibility out into the world, and to look more carefully at what the connections between the cognitive and the non-cognitive might be (Thrift, 2004, p.90). Non-representational work such as this is certainly congruent with, if indeed not integral to, practice theory as elaborated here. It sets up a fundamental opposition between practice and representation, and closes off any possibility of bringing the two together, in a new formulation. Representation is reduced to a form of mentalism, and a compromised view of knowledge is produced as a result, as something basically located in people s heads and/or out there, in the irrefutable Real. Representation is clearly a problem, in such an account. But is it necessary simply to jettison it, to let it go? Perhaps the problem lies in how representation itself is understood. Is it necessarily mentalistic, or contemplative, a cognitive phenomenon, 17

18 part of what for Hacking (1983: 130) is a larger spectator theory of knowledge? Or is there value in reformulating representation within, and as part of, an adequate theory of practice? I want to argue that this is indeed the case. To do so, I must retrace some of the steps I have already taken here, in this chapter. For Bourdieu, as we have seen, there is an important sense in which a properly conceived understanding of practice is one that is, in a sense, beyond representation. This is a view that Bourdieu shares with Giddens, in their respective versions of practice theory. As Shatzki (1997, p.294) writes: 18 Giddens and Bourdieu contest the adequacy of representationalism as a complete or even partial account of human activity and seek to do justice to the practical nature of action by rooting human activity in a nonrepresentational stratum, which also undergirds the resultingly limited role that representation can play in determining action. The point to take from this is that it refers to both those representations that are more formal in nature, or more formalised, as in scholarly inquiry, and those that are less so, indeed more anecdotal or less articulated. It also refers to those representations that are produced both from the outside and from the inside by the observer, standing outside of practice and observing it, and by the practitioner, located within the practice and otherwise immersed in it. In Bourdieu s uncompromising terms: All practical logics irrevocably destroy the real principles immanent in action by substituting inert abstract formulations for a bodily, involved, and situationally attuned mastery (cited Schatzki, 1997, p.297). Less formally, this injunction could be extended to the various programmatic efforts to realise notions such as reflective practice, or reflection more generally. Schatzki attempts to overcome the problem that such a position presents, at least in its strong version, by drawing on Wittgenstein (and, to a lesser extent, on Heidegger). He puts forward an alternative structuring of practice and action, which he describes as a Wittgensteinian-inspired multicomponential account (Schatzki, 1997, p.300), comprising (as we have seen) understandings, rules, and teleoaffectivity. The question remains, however: Does this overcome the problem of representation,

19 THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION or merely sidestep it? It depends to some extent on how these three aspects are understood, and how they work in with each other, in practice. Perhaps the issue arises only if one assumes that representation must be in some sort of mimetic relation to practice? Moreover, something that comes not only after and before practice, but also somehow above it? That is, the problem arises from the fact that representation is being privileged, as endorsed by tradition, and also taken as truth. What if it was the case, in sharp contrast, that the relationship is necessarily non-mimetic, and moreover at once dialogical and dialectical? In such a view, representation is part of practice, within it, implicated in it, rather than being set against it. This is certainly a humbler, less grandiose sense of representation than has traditionally been the case, one that sees it as a resource, a tool that emphasises its use-value iv. How then is representation useful, in such a case? It become a resource one among several, or many, at least potentially in and for how to go on, the ongoingness of practice. This would range from those knowledges that are associated with experience and reflection, both in the course of practice and outside of it, through to what Kemmis (2005, p.402) identifies in curriculum-theoretical terms as a substantial representation problem, that is, how to select what to teach in the way of professional practice knowledge. It may well be, too, that what Heidegger points to as moments or manifestations of breakdown, or interruptions, similarly provoke or otherwise bring about representations, which in their turn become resources in and for repairing and coping, and moving on. CONCLUSION Understanding (professional) practice is an important move in the task of developing informed programs in professional education. In this chapter, what I have sought to do is to lay out a series of arguments regarding the nature of practice itself, as a distinctive concept. This has involved, in particular, engaging and elaborating on what I have described as a post-cartesian strand of thinking, a tradition of thought for whom the work of the late Wittgenstein and the early Heidegger are important reference-points. This line of what 19

20 can be called practice theory and philosophy is, for me, a useful complement and supplement to that rich strand of thought commonly seen as reaching back to antiquity and to Aristotle, which has proved so important and so generative in professional education and professional renewal. I have also sought to introduce a case, somewhat against the grain, for retaining a certain notion of representation in this regard. Indeed I suggest that this is a matter that warrants further investigation. That is, there is a case to be made, in subsequent work, for developing a stronger and more elaborated account of the relationship between practice and representation, as concepts, which almost certainly will lead to their ongoing exploration and interrogation, and doubtless to their reconceptualisation. That is exactly how it should be. In the meantime, however, I am hopeful that the (postmodern) account offered here, in this chapter, is helpful in providing and inviting a richer, more sophisticated understanding of professional practice, as such. i See, for instance, Janik s (2005) reference to Wittgenstein s insistence upon the primacy of practice over theory in epistemology, as well as the self-sufficiency of practice matters to be taken up later in this chapter. See also Toulmin (2001). ii Note that Reckwitz refers to the notion of pattern. See Rouse (2002) for an account of what he describes as two concepts of practice, with one emphasizing regularity while the other emphasizes normativity. This is an important and pertinent discussion, consideration of which however I leave for another occasion. iii I want to stress the active nature of such a state, so as to avoid a judgemental connotation. This is to be understood, rather, with reference to notions such as habit (in Dewey) or habit(us) (see Burkitt, 2002). iv This is akin to Hacking s (1983) emphasis on intervening, along with action and experiment, as opposed to representing. 20 REFERENCES Bourdieu, Pierre (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1990). The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press (Orig. pub. 1980). Bourdieu, Pierre and Waquant, Loic J. D. (1992). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1998). The Scholastic Point of View, in Practical Reason, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp

21 THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION Burkitt, Ian (2002). Technologies of the Self: Habitus and Capacities, Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour, Vol 32, No 2, pp Cochran-Smith, Marilyn and Lytle, Susan L. (1999). Relationships of Knowledge and Practice: Teacher Learning In Communities, Review of Research in Education, Vol 24, pp Dreyfus, Hubert (1995). Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger s Being and Time, Division 1, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press (6 th printing org. pub. 1991). Dreyfus, Hubert and Hall, Harrison (1992). Introduction, in Hubert L. Dreyfus & Harrison Hall (Eds.), Heidegger: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp Hacking, Ian (1983). Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Janik, Alan (2005). Rationality, Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Science, an extract from Impure Reason Vindicated, in A. Pichler and S. Säätelä (Eds.), Wittgenstein: The Philosopher and the Works, Working Papers from the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, No 17, pp available from the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen website (WAB downloaded 02/05/2007) Jenkins, Richard (1992). Pierre Bourdieu, London and New York: Routledge. Kemmis, Stephen (2005). Knowing Practice: Searching for Saliences, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, Vol 13, No 3, pp Kemmis, Stephen (forthcoming/2008) What is Professional Practice? In Clive Kanes (Ed.), Developing Professional Practice. New York: Springer. Also available at: - Retrieved February 9, Polkinghorne, Donald E (1997). Reporting Qualitative Research as Practice, in William G. Tierney & Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds), Representation and the Text: Re-Framing the Narrative Voice, Albany: State University of New York Press. Reckwitz, Andreas (2002). Towards a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol 5, No 2, pp Robbins, Derek (1991). The Work of Pierre Bourdieu, Milton Keynes: The Open University Press. Rouse Joseph (2001). Two Concepts of Practices, in T. R. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Cetina and E. von Savigny (Eds.), The Practice Turn In Contemporary Theory, London and New York: Routledge, pp Schatzki, Theodore R. (1996). Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schatzki, Theodore R. (1997). Practices and Actions: A Wittgensteinian Critique of Bourdieu and Giddens, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol 27, No 3, Septemebr, pp Schatzki, Theodore R. (2001). Practice Theory, in T. R. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Cetina and E. von Savigny (Eds.), The Practice Turn In Contemporary Theory, London and New York: Routledge, pp

22 Schatzki, Theodore R. (2002). The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change, University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania University Press. Schatzki, Theodore R., Knorr-Cetina, Karin and von Savigny, Eike [Eds.] (2001). The Practice Turn In Contemporary Theory, London and New York: Routledge. Schön, Donald (1995). The New Scholarship Requires a New Epistemology, Change, Vol 26, No 6, pp Soja, Edward (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Real-and- Imagined Places, Oxford: Blackwell. Taylor, Charles (1995). Lichtung or Lebensform: Parallels between Heidegger and Wittgenstein, in Philosophical Arguments, London: Harvard University Press, pp Thrift, Nigel (1996). Strange Country : Meaning, Use and Style in Non- Representational Theories, in Spatial Formations, London: Sage Publications, pp Thrift, Nigel (1999). Steps to an Ecology of Place, in Doreen Massey, John Allen and Philip Sarre (Eds.), Human Geography Today, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp Thrift, Nigel (2004) Summoning Life, in Paul Cloke, Mark Goodwin and Philip Crang (eds), Envisioning Human Geographies, London: Edward Arnold, pp Toulmin, Stephen (2001). The Recovery of Practical Philosophy, The American Scholar, Vol 57, No 3, pp Wacquant, Loic J. D. (1992). 'Toward a Social Praxeology: The Structure and Logic of Bourdieu's Sociology, in Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp Professor Bill Green Faculty of Education Charles Sturt University AFFILIATION 22