It’s been more than 10 years since I finished my dissertation and published my first book. Both centered on the notion of practices. Hitting that round number pushed me to think back to that work and its significance to me – both to my intellectual development and my personal life.

Like much of the work I’ve done as an activist or in my career, it was all pretty heterodox for its time and place. I got my education at a very traditional analytic philosophy department, while my work cut across the lesser appreciated analytic and even continental (!) traditions.

But I bear no grudges there. I’ve never minded heterodoxy. And I’ve greatly appreciated my education both then and now.

Practices

So, practices. What’s the deal there?

In short, appeals to practices started becoming very common in the humanities and social sciences by the mid to late 20th century. Why? Because these appeals seemed to do a lot of philosophical work. They settled a wide range of disputes.

In the social sciences, practices hold potential as a central object of investigation that has all the benefits – and none of the problems – of either individual agents or social groups. Social scientific theory that begins from individual agents has difficulty explaining the apparent reality of social groups like races, genders, and so on. Meanwhile, theories that begin from social groups have difficulty explaining their lack of coherence and consistency, as well as the autonomy of the individual.

Practices, then, are quite attractive as an intermediary. They nod to the role of the individual while also explaining the ‘shared stuff’ that binds us together into groups.

In other words, philosophers and social theorists face a choice. They can describe the world as made up of a bunch of people. Or they can describe it as made up of groups. Most philosophers choose the former route. But so do psychologists, psychiatrists, and so on. By contrast, early sociologists and anthropologists chose the latter.

Neither route quite worked. Practice theorists, by contrast, see the world as made up of overlapping practices. This artfully combines the two routes into a whole that also coheres nicely with how we experience the world. In our daily activities, we see social and material situations that afford to us various opportunities to do things.

The Details

However, theories that begin from practices often founder against the details. What kind of thing, exactly, is a practice? Is it just a set of activities or habits? Is it a set of presuppositions that stand behind our actions? Or is it something like a shared, collective object that resides in a group consciousness?

Each option runs into fatal problems. If a practice is just a bunch of habits, how does it really explain anything? How do the habits hold together? How do they ‘glue’ together social groups? But if it’s a tacit presupposition or a shared object, how could we even know or infer this? Where are such things located?

Without answering these questions, practices run the risk not of bringing together the best of the individual and the social, but rather the worst of them.

Uniting the World and the Activity

In my early work, I tried to navigate these issues by proposing a better account of practices. That account relied on beginning from our personal experience of the world. How do places, people, and activities show up in our daily lives?

The short answer is that all these things show up as already having meaning. A park or a playground doesn’t appear to us as a bunch of inert objects, but rather as things we might use. A person doesn’t appear to us as an isolated unit, but rather as a friend or family member with a history. And an activity isn’t just some habit or unit we might perform or not perform, but rather a thing embedded in a social and material context.

That is to say, in a context of people, groups, and things.

And it’s that last notion that guided my account of practices. My account of practices called them activities people carry out at a site. It’s the site itself – the world as it appears to us – that guides the practice. Indeed, it forms a part of the practice. It does so by laying out various ranges and norms for what we can and can’t do – and these ranges and norms are part of the practice itself.

To put it together, then, a practice is an activity plus the ranges of things we can do with that activity at a social and material site.

Consider, again, the playground. This is a site made up of the other people at the playground, how we might interact with them, what sorts of things the equipment allows us to do, and so on. The practice of playing at the playground incorporates all of this.

Moral Implications?

While that’s the overview, I’ll close with a note about possible moral implications. Certain philosophers take a broadly similar route to mine. However, unlike me, they think the norms at social sites are binding upon us. That is to say, they think that in carrying out practices, we accept the norms. When we engage in the practice of playing a game, for instance, we accept the rules and norms of that game.

In some cases, that’s fair enough. But I think that point has sharp limits. In fact, we can and should question the norms of our practices in many cases.

This is a leftist blog. And, as any leftist knows, at times working people participate in practices that, upon reflection, they wouldn’t endorse. But they do it to survive in the world that was given to them.

It’s important to question our practices. And in doing so, we can create new, liberatory practices.

So, where does that leave us? It leaves us with the idea of ‘practices’ as a useful theoretical object for the humanities and social sciences. Practices are a glue that holds people together in a way that notions of ‘habits’ don’t. And they’re a glue that doesn’t bind people too strongly in a way that notions of ‘social groups’ do.

Finally, putting our focus on practices allows for better liberatory work that doesn’t run into the many problems of putting too much focus on groups or individuals.