La creación imprudente del riesgo desaprobado

In introducing his joint edited collection exploring the ‘practice turn’, Schatzki (2001) explains that there is no one coherent theory of practice, nor any universal understanding of the term. Instead, he identifies four disciplines from which

theories have stemmed: philosophy, social theory, cultural theory, and science and technology studies (Schatzki, 2001:10; see also Postill, 2010; Reckwitz, 2002).

While all approaches offer what Schatki (2005, 2003) terms a ‘site ontology’ - an understanding of the social as situated in practice - they do so on quite different terms. Variance exists not just between these four strands but also within them.

There are, however, a few key commonalities that are regularly pointed to in Schatzki’s work (2005, 2003, 2001,1997). Broadly speaking these are: first, practice is understood as the location of the social and, as such, constitutes the phenomena we should study;10 second, both subjectivist and objectivist theories of the social are seen to miss the significance of tacit knowledge; third, the majority of practice theorists think predominantly in terms of human practices;11 fourth, most understand practice as embodied, although the nature of embodiment is differently understood and; finally, objects and things are important because they mediate practice (Schatzki, 2001:10).

This list of tendencies is generally understood to apply to Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory, Bourdieu’s (1977) theory of practice, the later outputs of Foucault’s (1990, 1988) discourse theory, Butler’s (1993, 1990) performativity, Latour’s (1987) studies of scientific practice, de Certeau’s (1984) work on

everyday or ‘ordinary’ practices, and many more besides (Postill, 2010; Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 2001). In locating the social in practice, this diverse group of theorists share a common aim — to overcome the inadequacies generated by the either/or approach inherent to both the objectivist focus on structures and the subjectivist emphasis on individual acts (Postill, 2010: 9; Schatzki, 2005: 467, 2003:175, 1997: 284; Reckwitz, 2002: 245; Bourdieu, 1977: 2).

10 Practice is widely agreed to refer to ‘arrays of activity’, but there is divergence on what

constitutes ‘activity’ and what the relationship between activities and practices is (Schatzki, 2001:

10).

11 This is, of course, with the significant exception of those writing in Science and Technology Studies, or from an Actor Network Theory perspective.

Perhaps the most widely discussed engagement with ideas of practice in contemporary geography is work engaging a non-representational approach.

Importantly, despite its name, non-representational theory is not in fact ‘a new theoretical edifice’ but is instead ‘a means of valuing and working with everyday practical activities as they occur’ (Thrift, 2008:112). It is ‘A mode of thinking which seeks to immerse itself in everyday practice’ (Cadman, 2009:1). This ‘mode of thinking’ is an attempt to challenge what counts as knowledge within contemporary geography, and avoid the ‘deadening’ effect of representational thinking. The aim is to instead generate an approach that emphasises the play, creativity and ‘push’

of the world, which is understood as ‘momentary, as always in the making of now3 (Thrift, 2000: 556). The interest in practice is not the only element of this thinking that resonates with my work — Thrift (2008, 2004, 2000,1996) and others engaging his ideas emphasise the importance of the sensing body to

understanding the ‘event’. The concept of affect is engaged to explore the ways in which we are moved to action without cognition.

Pile (2010) has shown the difficulty of working with, and the inconsistencies in, the understanding of affect put forward in non-representational theory. Key to this is the argument that affect, as a trans- or pre-personal force, is ‘non- or pre-

cognitive, -reflexive, -conscious and -human’ and therefore can neither be spoken about nor captured (2010: 8). Despite this, the main thrust of the approach is that we must pay attention to affect because it is being manipulated and this

manipulation is part of an increasingly mediatised political landscape (Thrift, 2004:

66). What this results in is an approach that claims to be ‘valuing and working with everyday practical activities as they occur’ (2008:112) but which ends up offering quite distanced analyses (Thrift, 2008:112, see also 1996; for a criticism of this

‘distanced’ approach, see Bondi, 2005: 438; Nash, 2000). Indeed, non-

representational theories have paid attention to film as part of understanding this manipulation of affect but despite a shift away from studying representation, the focus remains firmly on the screen — not in the everyday practices of viewing (Carter and McCormack, 2006; Thrift, 2004). This points to what I consider the biggest source criticism: that, in the legitimate rally against the dominance of representational thinking, non-representational theory rejects it in entirety and ends up unable to engage the lived practices it claims to be so concerned with.

Thrift (2008) himself is not against representational thinking as such; he is instead against its dominance in cultural geography. His approach is an attempt to

‘compensate for this deficit’ (2008:113) by offering a different way of thinking the world that emphasises the almost-theres, the non-cognitive, the imperceptible and that which cannot be represented. While this is an important venture, it has been often pointed out that the difficulty with a focus only on the fluidity and openness of affect, and the importance of the ‘creativity’ and ‘potential’ in every ‘event’, is that it doesn’t attend to the different access we have to making such creativity stick, to making the world otherwise. While Thrift (2008:114) is careful to point out that,

‘[t]he potential of events is always constrained’, the body engaged in non-

representational theory is ‘both universal and also prior to its constitution in social relations’ (Pile, 2010:11). As Tolia-Kelly (2006: 213) argues, The literature on affect is particularly inattentive to issues of power; negated is a focus on

geometries of power and historical memory that figure and drive affective flows and rhythms’. It must be acknowledged, for example, that ‘a body that is signified as a source of fear through its markedness cannot be free to affect and be affected similarly to one that is not’ (Tolia-Kelly, 2006: 215).

To this end, in his analysis of the development and ‘codification’ of ballroom dancing culture in Britain in the early twentieth century, Cresswell (2006: 73) argues that although non-representational ‘thinking has clearly opened up

important new avenues for human geography’, its insights would prove even more fertile ‘by thinking of it in tandem with, rather than in opposition to, ideas about representation’. Our understanding of ‘bodily mobility’ must, he suggests, be positioned ‘within larger social, cultural and geographical worlds that continue to ascribe meaning to mobility and to prescribe practice in particular ways,’ anything else risks ignoring the still-powerful impact of representation and ‘inverting the age-old hierarchy of mind (representation, consciousness, culture) over body (the non-representational, practice, nature)’ (Cresswell, 2006: 59). I hope to show that Bourdieu (1977,1990a) enables such an approach by maintaining a sense of the world as constantly being produced - of practice as unstable, determined in the moment and precarious - while also acknowledging the histories and contexts that in different ways place limits on our capacity to practice the world otherwise.