Phänomenologische Forschungen 2017-2

This contribution attempts to define the relation between phenomenology and philosophy of practice by considering their respective conceptions of philosophy and especially the consequences of modern critiques of metaphysics. The two characteristic perspectives of performative metaphysics and of meaning analysis are used for further critical inquiry into the standpoints of phenomenology and philosophy of practice. As a conclusion, this inquiry is continued in a common area of interest of both standpoints, that is, the relation between personality and embodied being.

This essay explores consonant aspects of the relationship between phenomenology and practice theory. It makes three basic claims. The first is really just an observation, namely, that phenomenology makes incisive contributions to the account of action found in practice theory. The second claim is that practice theory updates an important conception of sociality developed in post Heideggerian phenomenology. And the third claim is that phenomenologies and practice theories can combine to form wider accounts of human life that encompass such phenomena as experience, consciousness, emotions, and the body that phenomenology has well analyzed and practice theory has somewhat ignored.

Two forms or rather perspectives of observations appear alongside practice theories: The first perspective can be called the „theatre perspective“: practice here is observed as a regular, spatiotemporally ordered, socially structured, and therefore recognizable historical form of „practical doings and sayings“, in which participants are understood as mere carriers of practices and their bodies as the raw material for processes of formation. In the other perspective, understood as the perspective of the participants themselves, practices come into view as ongoing, conflictual, and contingent accomplishments, in which participants occur as intelligently collaborating contributors with so called „lived bodies“. These bodies are affectable, sites of experience, and media of a sensitivity that allow an embodied self to orientate itself (with)in a practice. This paper proposes a methodological mediation of both perspectives by taking into account both a sociological analysis of discipline, formation, or adjustment, and the reflexive sensing in action, which can be modeled phenomenologically. Thus, a „lived-body-in-accomplishment“ comes into view that serves the material basis of subjectivation procceses, i. e. the (self-)formation of a constitutionally conditioned (political) agency.

The materiality of bodies is crucial for establishing theories of practice. To unfold the ‘black box’ of the performing body some theorists have implemented the difference between the lived body and the material body (Leib/Kçrper) in practice theory. This corporeal difference finds one systematic origin in phenomenology. It has come under attack for naturalising and subjectivising the lived body as a primordial category, and thus being unable to integrate to practice theory. It will be argued that critics can be refuted insofar as the corporeal difference is taken serious as a bodily experienced difference which is never to be reduced to some kind of objectivity.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body has so far been widely neglected in the debate on practice theory. This failure is surprising considering Merleau-Ponty’s early contribution of a number of fundamental insights – including bodily practice as a theoretical basic unit, the priority of “practical sense” and “implicit knowledge” over consciousness, and the collectivity of practice. The article addresses these approaches in detail, examining them relative to corresponding concepts from Bourdieu and Foucault. It turns out that both theorists owe more to their teacher than they were willing to admit. Revisiting Merlau-Ponty also offers the opportunity to both supplement practice theoretical vocabulary with the aspect of implicit perceptual knowledge and refine it with regard to the question of individual deviation from order.

Joseph Rouse is one of the most distinctive and innovative proponents of practice theory today. This article focuses in section I on two extended elaborations with systematic intent from Rouse’s corpus over the last two decades regarding the nature of practices, highlighting in particular the concept of normativity. Toward this end, this article explains why Rouse argues that we need to bring about something like a Copernican revolution in our understanding of the intrinsic normativity of practices as an essentially interactive, temporal, contestable, and open-ended process. In section II, this article then examines some commonalities and apparent divergences of Rouse’s practice theory from the existential phenomenology of the early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The article draws to a close by considering two apparent divergences between Rouse’s conception of practices and existential phenomenology: (1) the degree of compatibility between the claim of existential phenomenology to reveal necessary enabling background conditions of our lived experience and Rouse’s normative conception of practices; and (2) the compatibility of “quasi-transcendental” constitution, as this is at work according to existential phenomenology, and Rouse’s argument that it is wrong to understand practices as exclusively centered on the activities of human beings.

In the contemporary theory of practice, there is an increased awareness about the necessity of focusing on corporeality as a fundamental feature of practice. In this respect, there is a discussion about reflections on the phenomenology of the body, in particular as it is developed in the work of Merleau-Ponty. In the present study, we would like to broaden the discussion and answer some of the criticisms expressed by the theory of practice, such as an exaggerated focus on the first-person‘s perspective, or a too strong concept of consciousness, supposedly marking the ,classical‘ theory of the lived body in Merleau-Ponty. We consider here the later period of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, in particular after he became a professor at the Collége de France in 1952 onto his death in 1961. In this period, he deepens consistently his understanding of the notion of ,body schema‘, which clearly becomes the key to his approach to practice, affectivity, and to the phenomenon of sociality. His focus thereby was to depart from a traditional philosophy of perception and move on to a philosophy of ,expression‘, which would uncover the ambiguity of corporeal practice as the difference between institution and sedimentation of sense. The unconscious in the sense of a social phenomenon surprisingly becomes a field of encounter between the later philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and the schizoanalysis of Guattari and Deleuze.

This empirically oriented contribution focuses on different data- and body-practices in the specific fieldof self-tracking. Based ona phenomenological differentiation between body (Körper in German) and embodiment (Leib in German) following Plessner and Merleau-Ponty, we reflect on the machine-like-body, the cybernetic control loop, the data-like-body and most of all practices of habitualization. In a multi-perspective approach, we do not only examine bodies and body-values, but also the manipulation of the body (e. g. in the field of biohacking), the relation between the body and experiences in epigenetics, as well as the emergence of new bodily perceptions and senses. Thereby, we observe both tendencies towards alienated embodiment and possibilities to gain new accesses to the world by including embodied performances.

The theory of practice is according to its self-conception a poststructuralistic research program. It is proceeding on the assumption of a body, that performs his material arrangement with artefacts on the basis of a social habitus in the sense of Bourdieu. In view of recent diagnosis of an affective turn in the social sciences the article fathoms on the basis of Michel Henry’s phenomenology the possibility to understand the (living) body as a body of mood or what he calls flesh. The body which is always in a special mood thus has an influence on acting. In a further step this assumption will broaden the scope to the entire room of interaction, where the practices take place. This includes next to the body of mood, collective moods of social groups and atmospheres as further parameters.

The paper examines the relationship between praxeology and Schutzian phenomenology. It does so by tracing and comparing the conceptualizations of sense and sensemaking in both approaches. In a first step the phenomenological concept of mental and subjective sense and meaning is discerned. Subsequently, different disengagements from this concept within interpretative sociologies are reconstructed. It is argued that those disengagements, which seek to replace the understanding of sense and meaning as private, ,inner’ entities with notions of the ,publicness’ of practical social sensemaking are crucial for advancing a praxeological perspective in social theory.

The problem of practice in phenomenology including the political and ethical consequences of phenomenology has long been the focus of my personal interests and my philosophical, that is to say, phenomenological research. The guiding principle is that taking phenomenology as a description of the experiences of a subject rooted within experience is not only concerned with the theorisation of the experience but also necessary with the practices of the subject. In France, the “mainstream”-reading of a phenomenology which orientates itself towards logic, mathematics and transcendental philosophy prevailed for far too long, with the result that the interest in social sciences, psychology and neurobiology (the so called “cognitive sciences”) is often still met with scepticism. Instead I want to understand phenomenology as a practice through exercise which as practice has political and ethical implications.