Benefits and potentials of a praxeological political analysis

The chapters in this book denote central starting points for a praxeological analysis of the political. They look in different ways at the three elementary aspects of such a perspective; namely, the direct focus on praxis, its foundations in practice theory and an elaborated understanding of what is meant by policy and the political. In doing so, they draw attention – implicitly or explicitly – to a further aspect of praxeological political analysis, which concerns the methodological foundations of such research. A reflexive anchoring of methodology that recognises the political implications of the research itself thus constitutes the fourth central aspect of a praxeological analysis of the political. Against this background, the following synopsis of the chapters in this book allows us to conclude by outlining some further central characteristics of a praxeological political analysis. First of all, the chapters illustrate how social praxis in its many shapes and forms is currently being studied. These descriptions can be found not only in the empirically-based chapters in Part II of the book but also – albeit mostly for purposes of illustration – in some of the articles that focus on the theory. In Chapter 4, for example, Andreas Reckwitz, discusses the relevance of the sensory perceptions that are inherent in every practice. Social praxis is thus always sensory (Merleau-Ponty 2012). Seeing, hearing, touching or smelling are constituent parts of all bodily behaviour. Sensory perceptions and affects precede conscious and even rational action; when it comes to action, they are not just negligible peripheral phenomena – they are in fact what facilitates it. While sensory perceptions might be executed by actor-specific bodily organs, how and to what extent actors are affected by them in their reciprocal relationships with other entities in social praxes can by no means be attributed solely to the individual actor. Thomas Alkemeyer, Nikolaus Buschmann and Matthias Michaeler (Chapter 5) refer to the negotiation processes that actors conduct with one another when they engage in everyday practices and use these processes as a starting point for their theory-based reflection on the relationship between practices and actors. In Chapter 6, Christian Bueger and Frank Gadinger provide an overview of current research in international relations which is influenced by praxeological approaches. They also look at the different forms this influence can take. In

doing so, they focus not on the actual social praxes themselves but on the academic research which studies them. ‘How does governing work in practice?’ is the praxis-related opening question in research in international relations, which sees governance as an activity or ‘practice of “governing” ’ (Bueger and Gadinger, Chapter 6) that is ‘neither clearly “local” nor “global” ’ (ibid.). Their overview of this field of research boldly illustrates the central relevance of the everyday practices of the different actors, e.g. ‘diplomats, terrorists, environmentalists, pirates, bureaucrats, and financial brokers’ (ibid.), involved in international relations. Angela Wroblewski (Chapter 9) looks at the persistence of practices that discriminate against women in science and research. Using a case study of appointment procedures for professors at Austrian universities, she demonstrates that formal changes such as the introduction of female quotas, female advancement plans or amendments to appointment procedures do not automatically bring about a significant rise in the share of female professors. There are in fact considerable differences between individual universities, which are the result of a clash between faculty/disciplinary and organisational practices. If women are to have better chances of success when applying for a professorship, the practices that dominate in the individual disciplines – and which generally also dominate organisational practices in application procedures – first need to change. According to Wroblewski, this will require significant efforts, especially on the part of university professors who must reflect not only on their own doings and actions, but also on how greater gender equality can be achieved by changing their own behavioural routines and the disciplinary practices that lie behind them. Michael Jonas (Chapter 8) focuses on very different fields of praxis, namely – using the case study of a German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) report – the scientific advisory and legitimation praxis in the sphere of politics, the corresponding lack of (adequate) inclusion of sustainability aspects in government policy and the non-sustainable everyday practices of people, whose negative repercussions can only be halted by radical transformations both of the respective socio-material spaces and of the practices involved. Protest practices are the primary focus of Chapter 10. Following Judith Butler (2015), Tanja Pritzlaff-Scheele sees protest practices as expressions of how things should be. These can be enacted by the actors involved in very different ways. On the one hand, the performance of such practices can be seen to a certain extent as a microphenomenon, i.e. a phenomenon that is enacted by a specific constellation of actors in a situation-specific setting. On the other hand, it can also be said that the multiplicity of these enactments serves as a carrier for a generalised image of the respective practices, which have the potential to diffuse from local to global – especially as visualisations. According to Pritzlaff-Scheele, the Internet as well as the rapid spread of smartphones and other devices have contributed in particular to protest practices now being diffused primarily in visual form. The documentation and diffusion of such practices in this form transports practice-specific images which can convey their normative aspects. Whether this will lead to the genesis and strengthening of a global public sphere or will be

halted by commercial interests (such as those of Internet providers) remains, however, to be seen. Last, but by no means least, Stefanie Mayer (Chapter 11) looks at white feminist activism in Vienna and focuses on practices of creating meaning (which are central for dealings with ethnicisation), the construction of other women and white self-construction, as well as on the question of representation. In doing so, she looks both at text-related (such as writing articles or petitions) and at decision practices (e.g. choosing which female speakers to invite to speak at a demonstration). With regard to the construction of other women and white self-construction, Mayer explains that modern-day white feminism is called upon ‘to consider the profound inequality that results from the specificity of white supremacy with its ability to mask its own particularity as unmarked and therefore universal’ (Mayer, Chapter 11) as well as to keep a critical and global perspective. With regard to the representation aspect, her analysis stresses that ‘white feminists need to listen, to learn, and to seek active engagement with different voices’ (ibid.) and that the question of representation is inseparably linked to the question of agency. Second, the chapters in Part I all address themes that are current, related and relevant to the practice theory discourse and which are also of relevance for a praxeological political analysis. In Chapter 2, Theodore Schatzki points to two praxis theory variants which are dominant in the discourse, namely, those approaches where the interest lies in the praxis and those in which an elaborated concept of the practices is central to a meaningful investigation of this praxis. For Schatzki, the latter constitute ‘amalgams of ontologies and accounts that combine a specification of the basic nature, components, and dynamics of social phenomena with accounts of how things work in some domain such as consumer behaviour’ (Schatzki, Chapter 2). The goal of such approaches is to describe the world correctly, with the principle contribution coming from the development of the concept. Here, ‘theory is responsible to the world: far from swinging free from reality, sensible theories reflect how the world is’ (ibid.). Schatzki’s practice theory is a practice ontology, or more precisely a site ontology (Schatzki 2002). He considers practice ontologies – i.e. concepts of how the world is – to have a strong theoretical character. They are abstract, general thought and ignore both particulars and ties to experience. And this is precisely why they have to be combined with and integrate concepts and arguments from other approaches. In contrast to the view that the strength of practice theories lies, above all, in the notion that everything can be combined with everything else – a view supported by Bueger and Gadinger (Chapter 6) – Schatzki stresses that practice ontologies can only be meaningfully and plausibly combined with non-practice approaches when the latter are compatible with the ontological premises of the former. If this is successfully achieved, it speaks for the quality of the approach. It also requires a ‘rational sensible’ moment. ‘ “Rational sensible” means that convincing arguments and interpretations can be provided, that elaboration does not reveal deficiencies, and that the ontology chimes with, or at least is not contravened by, experience and knowledge’ (Schatzki, Chapter 2). Schatzki holds

here to the orientation on truth attributed to science (Luhmann 1992) as well as to the orientation on usefulness, whereby the former refers to the theory itself and the latter to its application in empirical research – and also in political practices. Craig Browne (Chapter 3) offers a particularly good illustration of why many of the current practice theory approaches find the political so hard to deal with. His comparison of the philosophy of praxis and current approaches in practice theory underscores that the latter, in contrast to the former, have to explain their political implications, because their basic assumptions are not aimed per se at transforming society. ‘The philosophy of praxis was always a critical social theory, in the sense that its sociological disclosure of the conditions of subordination and oppression was intended to inform the social and political practices that sought to transform these conditions’ (Browne, Chapter 3). The empirical description of the existing social orders and practices serves then as a moment of reflective insight into the ‘false’ topicality of the heteronomous (Bourdieu 2014). While the philosophy of praxis has thus always been a political project, practice theory approaches must, in many cases, first be combined with other approaches – such as the pragmatic sociology of critique (Boltanski 2010) – in order to be able to put forward a case that is critical of society. The relationship between the potential and the actual is, in particular, constitutive of the political dimension of the philosophy of praxis. Browne calls for a reintegration of the socio-critical impetus of philosophy of praxis into practice theory based research. Only then, he maintains, will the latter have the chance to make a distinct contribution to the analysis of the political, e.g. by ‘revealing aspects of power and domination that are implicit rather than explicit, or revealing the power and domination implicit within the explicit forms of communication’ (Browne, Chapter 3). The starting point for Andreas Reckwitz (Chapter 4) is his observation of a multifaceted mobilisation of the senses and affects in modern and late-modern cultures. He calls therefore from a cultural studies perspective for a praxeology of sensory perceptions. He aligns himself – against mainstream strands in the sociological discourse which totally exclude the aspect of sensory perceptions and against practice theory based research which does not accord central significance to the sensory – with those social scientists who have turned their attention to affects, senses, how they work and their relevance in society. Sociology, and certainly the sociology of practice, starts logically from the assumption that every social order contains sensory orders. Reckwitz refers to these orders, which form ‘a component part and a necessary prerequisite of any social order’ (Reckwitz, Chapter 4), as sense regimes. Like the three organising aspects in Schatzki’s concept of practices, a sense regime is an inherent component of a practice. From a praxeological perspective, this means, according to Reckwitz, not being taken in by the terminological differentiation between perception and action as separate phenomena, but rather understanding both as elements which relate to one another. ‘A praxeological understanding of the body does not presuppose an autonomous agent, but rather regards the body as the necessary field of operation for a practice’ (ibid.). Sensory perceptions are always linked with

certain feelings and moods, with a specific mobilisation of affects. Social orders are genuinely affectively charged, because each ‘practice has its own affective attitude towards subjects, things and the world in general’ (ibid.). In Chapter 5, Thomas Alkemeyer, Nikolaus Buschmann and Matthias Michaeler discuss the relationship between practices and actors alongside the associated research perspectives. Building on the common differentiation between practices as entities and practices as bundles of performances (Schatzki 1996), they stress that two analytically distinct views prevail in current praxeological discourse, each of which opposes and excludes the other. One such view sets the focus from the practices to the subjects who perform them – Shove et al.’s practice sociology (2012) is one example of this – as pure carriers of practices. The other focuses from the subjects to the practices, viewing the latter as the result of situation-specific and contingent negotiation processes – a view favoured above all by interaction-based approaches with an ethnomethodological background (Nicolini 2012). In order to be able to apply the strengths of both these views, the authors suggest basing praxeological research on a method that systematically changes the perspective. Using these strengths allows us to grasp both the structures of the actors’ doings and sayings as well as the contingent development of the praxis through situationspecific accomplishments by the subjects who are involved (and who are themselves also developing). It also establishes a viable access to the political, because it helps to emphasise that the situation-specific negotiation and performance of practices is linked to certain normative expectations whose validity needs to be repeatedly balanced between the subjects. ‘These are political processes insofar as addressings occur from different positions (of power)’ (Alkemeyer et al., Chapter 5). Like Browne, the authors follow the pragmatic sociology of critique (Boltanski 2010) and call for a praxeological sociology of critique to ‘inquire under which conditions, due to which forms of en-ablement, and, more generally, how participants transformatively intervene in the course of a practice, position themselves and behave self-reflectedly with regard to the relations at hand’ (ibid.). Third, the chapters in Part II demonstrate that the aspects discussed in their theory-based counterparts are clearly relevant to the empirical analysis of the political and that the expansion of the political to further social fields is in itself productive and provides valuable ideas for praxeological empirical research. There is no need to follow Theodor W. Adorno’s resigned diagnosis that the sphere of the political – robbed of its independent, autonomous and spontaneous formation of will – is now nothing more than a mere illusion or reflex action and no longer constitutes, in any way, something substantial (Adorno 2008: 109). Power, control and hegemony, which are primarily addressed in the political field by the political sciences, can then be targeted as phenomena which form a fundamental component of all social practice. This, by necessity, requires a delimitation of the political from politics, i.e. of aspects of the political from those of policy or even politics, which are, for the most part, of no interest in the political sciences or may appear at first glance to be self-evident. This is clearly demonstrated by Bueger and Gadinger (Chapter 6), who identify diplomacy, the production of (un)certainty, transnational governance

and state building, and intervention as the focal praxes in the discourse on practice theory in international relations research, that is in international practice theory (IPT). ‘As such IPT is driven by the motivation to take seriously the practices of the rich set of actors on the world political stage and to go beyond reductionist perspectives which anthropomorphise the state or international organisations’ (Bueger and Gadinger, Chapter 6). They view diplomacy, for instance, ‘as a practical field; that is, a political sphere in which new diplomatic practices are negotiated and established’ (ibid.). They do so, however, without clarifying what constitutes the political and how it can be delineated from the concept of policy making. Bueger and Gadinger introduce Peter Galison’s (1999) term ‘trading zone’ into the discussion in relation to what they refer to as international practice theory: ‘The notion of a trading zone stresses that practice theory is pivotally an intellectual space bound together by a shared understanding of the value of studying “practice” ’ (Bueger and Gadinger, Chapter 6). They call for a pluralism that would allow praxis to be targeted from different directions. Indeed, they see this multiplicity of approaches as central to the analysis of praxis. They also replace the term ‘family resemblance’ (Wittgenstein 1958), which serves in the practice theory debate as a metaphor for ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing’ (ibid.: 32), with that of the trading zone, which is defined as a space in which different groups ‘can agree on rules of exchange even if they ascribe utterly different significance to the objects being exchanged’ (Galison 1997: 783) and even if they ‘disagree on the meaning of the exchange process itself ’ (ibid.). Bueger and Gadinger’s deliberations on a distinct international relations practice theory can thus, without doubt, be subsumed under the already mentioned broad variant of practice theory approaches which target the praxis – in this case in an extremely different and not always compatible manner – but forego an elaborated understanding of the concept of practices. Only in this way does it make sense to subsume under this trading zone alongside practice theory approaches – such as communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991), Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990) praxis theory and actor-network theory (Latour 1992, 2005) – the assemblage approaches of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) and the pragmatic sociology of critique (Boltanski 2010); this is against the observed trend towards viewing praxis not as a field of activities but as specific nexuses of doings and sayings in the narrower sense, i.e. as practices (Bueger and Gadinger, Chapter 6). Both Browne (Chapter 3) and Kai Koddenbrock (Chapter 7) can be read in this context as critiques of many practice theory approaches and the empirical research that builds on them. Both authors criticise the fact that these no longer address social totalities like ‘society’ or ‘class’, but instead view these in abstract terms as complexes of practices/orders. It is not just the socio-critical potential of practice theory approaches that is lost as a result. Rather, it also implies either an ontologisation or an empiricalisation of reality (Koddenbrock, Chapter 7) and leads to the focus on long-term historical processes being lost, although it is constitutive of philosophy of praxis approaches (Browne, Chapter 3). Given these

criticisms, it is more than questionable whether praxeological research into the political should only make tacit, practical knowledge the real object of the analysis, as recently proposed, for instance, by Jörn Knobloch (Knobloch 2016: 7). According to Browne, as well as to Jonas and Pritzlaff-Scheele, a praxeological analysis of the political can thus logically only succeed when it seeks ‘to understand how practices construct the distinction between the potential and the actual, such as in relation to environmental degradation at the collective level’ (Browne, Chapter 3). Mayer also does not see the political as a feature of specific practices, but rather as a component of all societal processes: ‘feminist research has always been defined as political in the sense of following critical and transformative goals’ (Mayer, Chapter 11). The political has, in this regard, a dual role in political ethnography in that it does not focus, for instance, solely on relationships of power, but sees the ethnographic research process itself as a political undertaking. This view ties in with Annemarie Mol’s proposal that praxeological research should address the question: ‘Is the practice good for the subjects (human or otherwise) involved in it?’ (Mol 2002: 165). Political practices, or practices in which the political forms a key component, as Pritzlaff-Scheele stresses, can then be understood as ‘practices of creativity and critique’ (Pritzlaff-Scheele, Chapter 10). Reckwitz’s proposed heuristic distinction between the perceptual and sensory organisation of every practice, sensory practices which centre on specific perceptions and aesthetic practices which take place ‘for the sake of their affective effects on the subject’ (Reckwitz, Chapter 4), not only facilitates further discussion with representatives of social psychology who regard sensory perceptions and affects as praxis phenomena (Burkitt 2014; Wetherell 2012); it is also particularly useful in praxeological research into the political (Pritzlaff-Scheele, Chapter 10). At the level of theory, Pritzlaff-Scheele criticises thereby the use of too narrow a concept of what constitutes a practice. In such a concept, the performance (and performability) of a practice depends on a specifically organised context, which in turn make its transferability impossible. Pritzlaff-Scheele counters this position, which has its followers in the practice theory discourse, with the possibilities for spreading practices, which have grown enormously above all through the rapid spread of information and communication technologies. Given the rising number of visual communication opportunities now available, the visualisation and documentation of enacted practices in the form of images is also gaining relevance. Such images can easily be seen as genuine components of Reckwitz’s sense regimes, which can communicate, for instance, the normative content of the respective practices in addition to their situation-specific contexts. This also provides a plausible suggestion as to how practices might be circulated (Shove et al. 2012). The chapters in the book also make it clear that a praxeological analysis of the political would do well to look at the question of how social change occurs, i.e. how changes in practices can be explained from a praxeological perspective. This question is particularly important not least because a number of practice theory approaches are attested to be able to conceptually capture consistency in social praxes but not their change. These begin with Bourdieu’s theory of praxis

(1990), whose concepts – developed in a period of relative social stability in France – address precisely this consistency and stability in social praxes and are little suited to studying their change and indeed their possibilities for change. Reckwitz’s concept of practices as routinised doings (Reckwitz 2002, 2003), which is broadly encountered in the practice theory discourse, is criticised for underexposing the change aspect (e.g. Schatzki, Chapter 2). And Shove et al. (2012) ultimately by and large neglect, in their actor-less approach, to convincingly explain how to capture the change and changeability of practices in theory, even if their differentiation between weakly developed, broadly established and dwindling practices – or their reference to the practices-specific relationship between their organising ‘elements’ – do offer points of reference for further elaboration. We also question the benefit of the reference to mechanisms of change (Schatzki 2013), since mechanisms usually imply more or less causal relations which largely take place independently of the activities of the actors involved. All in all, the criticisms encountered both within and outside the practice theory based research discourse should not be treated lightly, but seen rather as indications that there are still some gaps in practice theory approaches which merit being filled. The chapters in this book by Alkemeyer et al., Jonas and Wroblewski in particular present different views with respect to the change and changeability of practices. Emphasising the central role of actor-related doings and sayings in the performance of practices, the concept of critical competences (Boltanski 2010) and the reference to future options for interactive and intersubjective situation-specific negotiation processes offers productive potential explanations regarding both the stability as well as the change of practices. All three chapters concur that a change in practices is always also a matter of power. Generally speaking, only those actors who have or can mobilise sufficient influence and power to act in their social sites are in a position to exercise influence through their activities on the reproduction, transformation or even suppression of specific practices. Such processes can be conceptualised in a change in perspectives: it is then, on the one hand, about analysing the nature and the reciprocal relationship (fit) of the organising aspects of the practices involved and pursuing the question of how social transformation can be brought about through changes to these organising aspects (i.e. the understandings, the rules and, above all, the teleoaffective structures). However, it is also, on the other hand, about taking a look at the relationship and power constellations between the actors who act and react in the respective practices/order complexes. This, in turn, expands the view to resistance practices, ‘including resistance to hegemonic practices of subjectivation, and it also points to the importance of collective experience in resistant practices’ (Mayer, Chapter 11), which should also be addressed by a praxeological political analysis. Fourth, as already mentioned, the chapters in this book only address methodological and method questions to a limited extent. These, after all, were not the primary subject of the book and have been reserved for further publications. Nonetheless, some of the chapters do deliver important points of reference for an

outline of a methodology of praxeological political analysis. According to Koddenbrock, international relations researchers in particular – but also practice theorists such as Schatzki and Reckwitz – neglect to look at ‘totalising non-observables like capital and capitalism’ (Koddenbrock, Chapter 7). In the case of the former, he sees their methodological approach, which grasps practice theory principally as an empirical research programme, to be the main obstacle here. According to Koddenbrock, practice in international relations research is made up of those activities and entities which can be observed using empirical methods. However, since structural aspects that cannot be observed are characteristic of social orders, they consequently fade from view not only in empirical research but also in theory. Koddenbrock implicitly adopts a broad view in his interpretation of the term ‘observing’. Indeed, he uses the term, it would seem, to refer both to all data construction processes as well as to the analysis processes applied in empirical research. While such broad observations could capture activities, they could not focus on totalising entities like capitalism, whose social whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Koddenbrock sees practice theory in its emancipatory form as a research strategy or research methodology (Schatzki, Chapter 2) that is critical of capitalism. The object of such research is thus not praxis alone, which – as Koddenbrock concedes – can indeed be studied using practice theory approaches, but also those aforementioned totalising non-observables which can be named by the actors studied and/or force themselves upon reflective researchers in interpretative processes. However, why such entities cannot be observed and studied empirically and only allow themselves to be experienced through processes of real abstraction (Sohn-Rethel 1978), remains a mystery. Koddenbrock rightly refers here to the issue of methodological reflection, without, however, consequently seeking a solution. A praxeological political analysis – like all scientific research – is, however, well advised to take account in its choice of methodology of its object, its theory building and its specific focus on the political.