ABSTRACT
Practice theorists have a vested interest in studying how social order emerges via the interplay of things, artefacts and bodies. However, they rarely reflect upon how the people involved in order-making come to be or, indeed, put themselves in the position to be able to participate as competent ‘players’.1 One reason for this oversight, from our perspective, is that practice theoretical discussions still mostly operate within the framework of familiar alternatives, namely, whether social structures constitute social action and its actors, or whether the structures are constituted by activities within the bounds of preformed agency. Accordingly, two – oversimplified – perspectives can be differentiated by the relationship they propose between praxis2 and participants. If praxis is seen as pre-structured, i.e. as practice, then participants are mere dependent variables keeping routinised action ‘going’. If, on the other hand, praxis is conceived as a contingent accomplishment, then participants become autonomous actors with stores of practical knowledge that enable them to deal with the contingency of practice in a skilful and creative manner. These differences notwithstanding, the perspectives both pay very little attention to how playability3 arises. Furthermore, within the framework of their respective conceptions of praxis, the participants are conceived of in one way or another as pretty much ‘play-able’ out of the box, so to speak. In contrast, we understand play-ability not to be an always given property of individuals, but rather to be formed within the framework of ‘distributed agency’ (Rammert and Schulz-Schaeffer, 2002): things, artefacts and bodies mutually enable one another in their play-ability and, by doing so, bring forth a specific reflexivity of praxis.
