ABSTRACT
Practices have been a highly productive addition to recent research endeavours in the social sciences. In this research, practices are promoted as new constitutive parts of social ontology or they allow for more meticulous, empiricallyinclined approaches. The problem with this prolific research strand, however, lies in the empiricist thrust entailed by the work of some of the most influential practice theorists. Building on a pragmatist approach to research adopting a ‘logic of reconstruction’, I will make the case that research becomes convincing during the research process because of the questions it raises and the controversies it generates. Yet, totalising non-observables like capital and capitalism continue to come up when engaging with social life empirically. They are mentioned by the actors investigated or impose themselves on the thinking researcher. This, in turn, legitimises the use and investigation of these non-observables despite the fact that ultraempiricist practice theory argues that they should be dropped. In this chapter, I will thus defend ‘staging totality’ (Toscano 2012) as a genuine and important task for the ‘sociological imagination’ (Wright Mills 1959) which should not be left to art and politics if social science aims to respond to real life concerns. For current debates in international relations (IR) practice theory in its radically empiricist actor-network theory (ANT) variant (Barry 2013), as well as the more static Bourdieusian variety (Schlichte 1998; Adler-Nissen 2012), this call for staging totality is a crucial challenge. The authors of Chapter 6, Frank Gadinger and Christian Bueger, have argued in the past that practice theory aims to ‘avoid ontological claims which are not found empirically’ (Bueger and Gadinger 2015: 12). Like anthropologists, students of world politics should go out and experience the processes they aim to analyse. There is nothing wrong with that; real world exposure is crucial. Yet, an exclusive focus on practices elicits one crucial question: Does this mean that nothing exists that cannot be grasped empirically or does it imply that non-observables might exist but should be disregarded for the purposes of practice-based research? In this chapter I will suggest that the empiricism implicit in statements such as the above is ultimately an expression of what Alex Wendt called the ‘hegemony of empiricist discourse’ in IR (Wendt 1987: 270; Herborth 2010: 274). In order to counteract this hegemony, non-observables need to be restored to their
rightful place in IR. In a world so obviously shaped by the contradictions of global capitalism, which is not directly observable and a systemic relation, world politics can only be studied if IR does not exclude these phenomena a priori before the research process, contrary to what some variants of practice theory suggest.
