Todd May, in his book ‘Our practices, our selves – or, what it means to be human’ (OPOS), argues that this question is best understood through the concept of practices and as such one of the first things he does is provide us with a definition of what a practice is. His definition goes as follows:
“a regularity (or regularities) of behavior, usually goal-directed, that is socially normatively governed.” (OPOS: 8).
May then cashes out this definition by discussing the three elements of the definition, viz. goal-directedness, socially normative governance and regularities of behaviour. The first of these is discussed briefly and is a vague criteria since it is not a universal but is presented as important nonetheless. May phrases the discussion in terms of ‘most practices’ but allows that some practices will be exceptions to this rule, using Zen meditation as an example since it rests on the paradoxical ‘goal of goal-lessness’. The second aspect of the definition, that of socially normative governance, is distinguished from ‘rule-following’ again through a criteria of vagueness, with the argument that the type of norms involved are not known through explicit thematisation into propositions but rather are known through the mode of skill, or ‘know-how’. This is articulated in the form of the argument that those involved in a practice might not be able to articulate the norms of the practice but they know it when they see it – a practice has ‘norms’ in the form of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways of being done and those who can most clearly distinguish these and show others how to distinguish these are classed as experts. In addition to being normative a practice is also social in that there are roles within a practice, what May describes as “normatively governed places in which people engage in the practice” (OPOS: 10).
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages). 2. Open the book to page 123. 3. Find the fifth sentence 4. Post the next three sentences. 5. Tag five bloggers.
Last time I hit this meme I was reading through the Collapse journal, this time it’s the Continuum edition of Nietzsche and Philosophy by Deleuze, which I’m currently teaching to my third years (though not today as I’ve been off sick with a dose of gastroenteritis, so the seminar was canceled today…)
"Bad conscience suggests to him that he must look for this cause ‘in himself, in some guilt, in a piece of the past, he must understand his suffering as a punishment (GM III 20 p. 140). And the priest appears a second time in order to preside over this change of direction: ‘Quite so, my sheep! someone must be to blame for it – you alone are to blame for yourself!’ (GM III 15 p. 128). The priest invents the notion of sin."
[NOTE TO ANY READER: this post is a classic example of pinball thought, ricochet rather than writing, a 'thinking out loud'. Beware of any apparent seriousness and discussion.]
In a recent post on his blog Poetix discusses the ‘object oriented’ philosophy of Graham Harman. I have only recently come across Harmans’ work, primarily because I have only recently returned to work on Heidegger and his various books began appearing in 2002, when I was deeply immersed in Deleuziana. His approach looks fascinating and is one I hope to more familiar with by the end of the year.
Poetix begins his post with the claim that an object cannot be fully understood through relationality because it must maintain an unrelatable element. It must maintain this ‘occult’ aspect of an unrelated element because if it did not then "there would be no object as such, but only the differential field of appearances itself". The use of the phrase ‘differential field’ here immediately enables a connection to Deleuze’s philosophy (amongst others perhaps), not least because of his Nietzschean inspired claim that an object is nothing but a conjunction of forces (cf NP). For Deleuze, then, an object is nothing but that which is produced by a differential field of forces. It looks like we might have two very different answers to the problem of object-ness at work here, two different answers to a question such as ‘is an object nothing but the relations which constitute it?’ When you can get two clearly different solution vectors to a specific question then there is an opportunity to think a problem (in this case that of the object-ness of objects) through conceptual confrontation, through the tensions of thought.
a new film from my partner morrigan, made on a mobile phone when we were in London together last week – we went to the ‘from Russia’ exhibition and then Morrigan came to one of my Heidegger lectures before we have a meal and trundled off home…
Recent Comments