Public Practice
Why "competent" practices?
Like Duvall and Chowdhury, though perhaps for slightly different reasons, I question this. Maybe it's the word choice I dislike: 'competent' implies for me some sort of previously established 'rule' (and hence power) of what 'correct' or 'good' behavior means. And of course there are such rules. We don't go around wearing our underwear on the outside (at least mostly...). But it leaves unquestioned the fact that somebody/ies got to decide and implement said [sartorial] correctness in the first place - that these practices were constructed as 'competent' at some point in the past and probably replaced some other set of 'competent' - now 'incompetent' - practices [i.e. corsets or hoop skirts]. 'Competent' also connotes a certain judgement value as well. Not just in that if you see a man walking around in his underoos you might think he was nuts. But also as the analyst, you are making that judgement (good/bad; right/wrong) in categorizing one set of practices as one or the other. This seems problematic to me.
I mean, I get that we (as analysts) also live within a world of established ways of being, and therefore we partake of the same (or similar) tacit knowledge that we study, and I certainly don't mean to suggest that it is possible to take the analyst out of the equation all together in the mind/world dualist way. And I also get that the authors in this book are calling attention to practices that unfold within established ways of being and doing. But can't there be something else? Duvall and Chowdhury point out that not everyone feels the same way about what's going on, and whether or not a given practice should be considered common. They therefore argue that 'competent' misses the spaces of contestation where 'incompetent' tries to assert itself as the new Background. True. But I think I prefer 'dominant' or something else that softens the normative bite of judgement attached to the scholar as she categorizes. The word irks me.
Also, is there such a thing as 'private' practice? Or is that akin to Wittgenstein's private language games?
And what is a non-discursive practice, anyway?
I have been thinking a lot recently about the relationship between discourse and practice. Without really knowing the answer to the last question, I'm tempted to disagree with Foucault's distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices: in that - as Adler & Pouliot point out in their introduction, practices are inherently social, and it strikes me that all social interactions must have some sort of 'language' (broadly speaking) that necessitates a common understanding of what's going on. Lene Hansen develops this a bit further in her chapter (which, as a poststructuralist, made the most sense to me) - when she distinguishes that specific practices only make sense (or don't make sense) with regard to a general practice (292-294).
Finally, if language and practice are intertwined so that one doesn't make sense without the other, or, more radically, one is the other, how do you design/structure a research project in a way that reads logically (linearly) yet accurately describes this co-constituted, recursive, simultaneous meaning-making?
I have A TON more to say about this book - particularly about Bially Mattern's and Hansen's chapters - as well as Pouliot's previous articles on practice and how this relates to Neumann's own description of practice, so I might post again or save it for class. But these are my initial reactions to the book.
Oh, right. Another comment: Adler & Pouliot say that their aim is to create space in IR for scholars of all paradigmatic/methodological backgrounds to partake in a single conversation, but does this really work? They might all be talking about 'practices', but are they talking to each other or merely over? I haven't made up my mind.
Like Duvall and Chowdhury, though perhaps for slightly different reasons, I question this. Maybe it's the word choice I dislike: 'competent' implies for me some sort of previously established 'rule' (and hence power) of what 'correct' or 'good' behavior means. And of course there are such rules. We don't go around wearing our underwear on the outside (at least mostly...). But it leaves unquestioned the fact that somebody/ies got to decide and implement said [sartorial] correctness in the first place - that these practices were constructed as 'competent' at some point in the past and probably replaced some other set of 'competent' - now 'incompetent' - practices [i.e. corsets or hoop skirts]. 'Competent' also connotes a certain judgement value as well. Not just in that if you see a man walking around in his underoos you might think he was nuts. But also as the analyst, you are making that judgement (good/bad; right/wrong) in categorizing one set of practices as one or the other. This seems problematic to me.
I mean, I get that we (as analysts) also live within a world of established ways of being, and therefore we partake of the same (or similar) tacit knowledge that we study, and I certainly don't mean to suggest that it is possible to take the analyst out of the equation all together in the mind/world dualist way. And I also get that the authors in this book are calling attention to practices that unfold within established ways of being and doing. But can't there be something else? Duvall and Chowdhury point out that not everyone feels the same way about what's going on, and whether or not a given practice should be considered common. They therefore argue that 'competent' misses the spaces of contestation where 'incompetent' tries to assert itself as the new Background. True. But I think I prefer 'dominant' or something else that softens the normative bite of judgement attached to the scholar as she categorizes. The word irks me.
Also, is there such a thing as 'private' practice? Or is that akin to Wittgenstein's private language games?
And what is a non-discursive practice, anyway?
I have been thinking a lot recently about the relationship between discourse and practice. Without really knowing the answer to the last question, I'm tempted to disagree with Foucault's distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices: in that - as Adler & Pouliot point out in their introduction, practices are inherently social, and it strikes me that all social interactions must have some sort of 'language' (broadly speaking) that necessitates a common understanding of what's going on. Lene Hansen develops this a bit further in her chapter (which, as a poststructuralist, made the most sense to me) - when she distinguishes that specific practices only make sense (or don't make sense) with regard to a general practice (292-294).
Finally, if language and practice are intertwined so that one doesn't make sense without the other, or, more radically, one is the other, how do you design/structure a research project in a way that reads logically (linearly) yet accurately describes this co-constituted, recursive, simultaneous meaning-making?
I have A TON more to say about this book - particularly about Bially Mattern's and Hansen's chapters - as well as Pouliot's previous articles on practice and how this relates to Neumann's own description of practice, so I might post again or save it for class. But these are my initial reactions to the book.
Oh, right. Another comment: Adler & Pouliot say that their aim is to create space in IR for scholars of all paradigmatic/methodological backgrounds to partake in a single conversation, but does this really work? They might all be talking about 'practices', but are they talking to each other or merely over? I haven't made up my mind.
posted by adabunny at 5:41 AM
1 Comments:
The timing of readings in this class has been fascinating. PTJ and I both listened to a panel at ISA-NE this weekend regarding pragmatism where Dan Green from Delaware took a sledgehammer to pragmatism, arguing that it is redundantly trying to do what constructivists have already accomplished. Although I thought the panels defense against this claim was on point and tremendously compelling, I wanted to bring this question into the classroom. What are Adler and Pouliot doing here that has not yet been done by constructivists? (A lot, I think, but we can discuss in person).
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