De nuevo, sobre las capacidades especiales

‘What is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying’ - Bourdieu, 1977:18

In the first section of his Outline of a theory of practice (1977), Bourdieu offers a critique of the ‘objective’ techniques dominant in the social sciences. Arguing that

‘the “impartial spectator” [is]... condemned to see all practice as spectacle’ (1977:

1), Bourdieu criticises the tendency for researchers to reduce social life to a set of rules. These rules, he claims, are presented in academic texts as the perception schemes of social actors, generating an understanding of practice as fixed and pre-existing an individual’s engagement with the world (1977: 3).

To Bourdieu, traditional research techniques leave ‘unsaid all that goes without saying’ as social agents do not recognise those implicit structures that govern their practice, and we do not have the tools with which to access them (1977:18). As Bourdieu explains, ‘simply because he [sic] is questioned, and questions himself, about the reasons and the raison d ’etre of his practice, he [sic] cannot

communicate the essential point, which is that the very nature of practice is that it excludes this question’ (1990a: 91). He argues that we need to escape the

assumption that practice can be told and turn to a consideration of bodily communication - that which is unsaid (1977:15). As explained, the bodily

dispositions of the habitus show themselves in bodily hexis - how we look, walk, eat, talk and so on, and their connotations provide insight into lived practice, beyond the reification of reflexive talk (1990a: 79).

Bourdieu’s theory, then, poses two connected problems for empirical researchers.

First, we must avoid the tendency, particularly common in participant observation, to allow the rigid logic of theory to eclipse the ambiguous logic of practice and cease ‘substituting the observer’s relation to practice for the practical relationship to practice’ (1990a: 34). Second, and relatedly, we must not lose sight of the embodied knowledge that pre-reflexively co-constitutes practice.18 The first of

18 It is perhaps important to say that Bourdieu’s own empirical research is criticised for reproducing the very positivism he tries to overcome (Hamel, 1997; Griller, 1996). While he adopted

ethnographic methods for his early work - such as his study of the Kabyle that fed into his theory of

these is now widely recognised as in the time since Bourdieu (1977) published his theory of practice, anthropology and the wider social sciences has undergone a

‘crisis of representation’. Feminist literature has been fundamental to these critical discussions of the politics surrounding what counts as ‘valid’ knowledge. Drawing on and generating anti-foundationalist and postmodern philosophies feminists have - much like Bourdieu (1990a: 36) albeit through a different framework - disrupted the notion that methods can access essential objective truths by

emphasising that all knowledge is situated (in particular bodies and social space) and partial (Moss, 2002; Rose, 1997; Haraway, 1988). In response to this, there have been attempts to incorporate the researching body into findings as a way of writing reflexively (Longhurst et al, 2008; Sharp, 2005; Bondi, 2003; Nast, 1998).

In geography, the question of how we capture embodied knowledge has come increasingly into focus as the influence of non-representational theory gains momentum (Simpson, 2011: 343; Latham, 2003; Thrift, 2000). As I have

explained, this approach emphasises affect and the significance of the sensuous body in everyday practice, and claims such dimensions of social life have been inadequately explored by ‘dead, dead, dead geographies’ incapable of engaging the lived-ness of life (Thrift, 2008:138). Thrift (2008) advocates the use of

performative methodologies, most famously advocating engagement with dance, arguing that performance has long engaged the pre-cognitive capacity of bodies to affect and be affected. Although by no means all led by engagement with non­

practice (1977,1990a) - his prominent studies, such as Distinction (1984), were based on large- scale survey research, a quantitative method which some argue is out of synch with his practical ontology. Later, however, he announced himself free of his positivist shackles when he returned to an understanding of research as ‘provoked and accompanied self analysis,’ reinforcing the central role of reflexivity in research (Wacquant, 2004; Hamel, 1997; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 227).

representational theory, embodied knowledge is now a well-established concern of geographers and social scientists more broadly, and the challenge of broadening our methodological toolbox has been the focus of a fair few ‘innovations’ aimed at overcoming the difficulty of capturing such information. These include (sensory) video methodologies (Simpson, 2011; Lorimer, 2010; Pink, 2009); embodied auto­

ethnography (Wacquant, 2004a), participant observation (Longhurst et al., 2008;

Bain and Nash, 2006) and interviewing (Turner, 2000); mobile methodologies (Buscher et al., 2011; Fincham et al., 2010; Hein et al., 2008); performance-based methods including music (Morton, 2005) theatre (Kaptani and Yuval-Davis, 2008), and dance (McCormack, 2003); as well as the extension of interview prompts beyond the verbal to the visual (Mason and Davies, 2009; Murray, 2009) and musical (Anderson, 2004b).

It is in this context that the go-along, as a newly formulated set of research

techniques, took a formalised shape in methodology literature. As I hope to show, the research sensibility offered by this literature talks to many of the problematics raised by Bourdieu’s ontology and, as such, I am keen to use my experience of adopting the method to consider its contribution to the challenge of how we might empirically study practice. Literature on the go-along attends directly to two of the key themes explored in this thesis: embodiment and spatialities, predominantly engaged through discussions of place. It does not directly attend to film but a spatial understanding of embodiment is key to the understanding of representation generated in this thesis. Further, the third core thematic strand drawn out in go- along literature - that of mobility - offers a way of thinking through what Bruno (2002) and Friedberg (1993) term the Virtual mobility’ of film, to explore the

medium’s sensual spatiality in situ. Doing so can also extend uses for the method beyond existing discussions.

1.3. The go-along as a hybrid of qualitative interviewing and in situ