ABSTRACT
The title of this book – Praxeological Political Analysis – speaks for itself: the chapters it contains look at current praxis theory approaches to the analysis of political events and processes. ‘Praxeological political analysis’ essentially describes the three core aspects of the book. The term praxeological (analysis) refers to the research topic itself, namely the social praxis that is shaped through complex and heterogeneous bundles of activities and their sociomaterial contexts in which different actors engage (first aspect). At the same time, it alludes to a specific – i.e. practice theory – perspective from which this praxis, its practices and its materialities can be analysed (second aspect). The term political (analysis) signals that (in this book) this analytical perspective focuses on the political, without reducing it a priori to the field of politics/policy as an institution (third aspect). What might at first glance appear self-evident should thus be accorded sharper contours. First, the reference to social praxis as the topic of research emphasises the fact that the focus lies on the analysis of social processes and situations in which people are embedded on an everyday basis, and also with respect to how people relate to other entities (things, animals etc.). Praxis refers here to what is often denoted as the social, yet both narrows it down to a specific sense and simultaneously expands it. Praxis indicates the sum total of all activities carried out by human and non-human actors in their interactions (Latour 2005). The social is thus – and this is what is meant here by narrowed down – related directly to the doing and saying and, as a consequence, pushes mental aspects, rational preferences or general values into the background in the first instance. Yet this narrowing likewise permits a radical expansion of that which should be regarded as expressions of behaviour: contrary to the bias in favour of verbal, i.e. communicative (Habermas 1984), utterances that still dominates in the social sciences, the use of the term praxis in this book allows not only verbal but also non-verbal activities to be taken into consideration. After all, the social expresses itself through both verbal and non-verbal means. The verbal includes not only speech acts (Searle 1969) but also sounds and tones of all kinds, which form a component of almost all everyday situations. The non-verbal takes in – but is not limited to – all spatial and temporal aspects of everyday human praxes. A broad understanding of praxis further includes all affective and visual aspects of social
contexts, which for the most part are admittedly marginalised in the social sciences yet nonetheless form a natural part of everyday life. Praxis thus encompasses far more than just pure reason or the reality constituted in acts of consciousness; it is rather constituted and made up above all of bodily activities by the actors involved, activities which are carried out in social settings in relation to living and non-living entities. Second, not least since the publication of the book The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (Schatzki et al. 2001), practice theory approaches have sought to adequately conceptualise and analyse social praxes. In contrast to other social science movements like the hegemonic rational choice approach or systems theory – which despite their heterogeneity are characterised by strong theoretical consistency and coherence – we cannot speak in the singular in the case of practice theory approaches, a point which has frequently been emphasised by experts in this field (Schatzki 1996; Reckwitz 2002a; Nicolini 2012). Practice theory approaches are characterised instead by family resemblances (Wittgenstein 1958), i.e. by ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing’ (ibid.: 32). However, practice theory approaches can also be split into two basic – and different – groups. The first, more general, group encompasses those approaches which regard sociality as a praxis in the sense referred to above, e.g. the communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Davies 2005) approach and Andrew Pickering’s ‘mangle of practice’ (1995). A more specific variant – a subset as it were – contains those approaches which assume that praxis consists of the enactment of various complexes of practices in which primarily human yet often also non-human (Mol 2002) actors are involved. Unlike the singular term praxis, which encompasses the whole of human activity and its entanglement with its sociomaterial contexts (Reckwitz 2002a; Jonas 2014b), the term ‘practice’ is generally defined as a specific nexus of doings and sayings (Schatzki 2002). Common to both variants is the focus on both the praxis as well as on the goal of understanding the praxis as praxis (as formulated especially by Pierre Bourdieu; see Bourdieu 1990); in the more specific version, central importance is accorded in theoretical terms to the concept of the practice. A core element in the latter is the concept of practice proposed by Theodore Schatzki (1996), not just because it has been broadly adopted but also because it ultimately serves as a reference for most of the proposed alternatives. In this concept, this nexus of doings and sayings represents an independent social phenomenon, which can be regarded both as an entity and as performance. If a practice is viewed as an independent entity of the social, the aspects that organise it can also be examined. For Schatzki, these are understandings, rules and a socalled teleoaffective structure (or leitmotif ). He understands the latter as a spectrum of normatively charged and hierarchically ordered goals, projects and tasks, which are linked to varying extents to likewise normatively charged emotions and moods. Perceiving a practice as performance, by contrast, directs the attention to the notion that practices are only then realised when actors engage in them. While this second aspect is generally supported, the alternatives proposed in the discourse essentially refer to the first aspect.
