Rouse, two concepts of practices

 Rouse, two concepts of practices, 

In this chapter, Rouse distinguishes between two sorts of practices: normative and regularities. While Bourdieu doesn't get mentioned, I take R to be talking about a kind of Bourdieu practice because R keeps talking about continuity, and B talks about reproduction. Of course, reproduction is a kind of continuity. 

R does mention Wittgenstein and Heidegger. As I was beginning to suspect, those are the two anchors for the practice framework. They too then don't think of practices normatively. 

R also makes the point that they weren't politically awesome, and in fact that's one of the benefits of thinking about practice as normative, i.e., you get to be more political, and that's because the gulf between thing studied and the person doing the studying is collapsed--thus echoing KKC's connection to Jameson (the collapse of method into its object). To that end, R talks about an increased reflexivity.

This conception of the critical positioning of science studies calls for a thicker conception of reflexivity than has usually been articulated in the science studies literature. Reflexivity has moral and political as well as rhetorical and epistemological dimensions: what do our writings and sayings do? to whom do we speak? what other voices and concerns do we acknowledge, make room for, or foreclose? which tendencies and alignments do we reinforce and which do we challenge? above all, to whom are we accountable? These questions arise with considerable force, because science studies as such are not politically or epistemically pre-positioned: our work might variously articulate and reinforce dominant epistemic alignments, contribute to or extend oppositional discourses, or shift the field to envision new possibilities. A modest and self-critical attentiveness to our own partiality and situatedness, and accountability for what we say and do, are the political responsibility incurred by our own contingent positionings within the cultures of science. 

Let's see. What else? R aligns himself with Davidson and Brandom, it seems. 

Brandom:

Turner fails to acknowledge the possibility of an alternative conception of a ‘practice,’ in which actors share a practice if their actions are appropriately regarded as answerable to norms of correct or incorrect practice. Not all practitioners perform the same actions or presuppose the same beliefs, but some are subject to sanctions for actions or beliefs that are inappropriate or otherwise incorrect. Of course, not all improprieties are actually corrected or sanctioned. So the differential responses that would signify the incorrectness of some performances are themselves normative practices. It is always possible that such chains of proprieties come to an end in some kind of objectively recognizable regularity. But, as Robert Brandom has noted, ‘we can envisage a situation in which every social practice of [a] community has as its generating response a performance which must be in accord with another social practice’ (Brandom 1979:189–90). Such a network of practices need not be identifiable as a regularity, even as a whole. Brandom therefore argues that the difference between regularities and norms should itself be regarded normatively, that is, as a distinction between those patterns appropriately explained in causal terms, and

TWO CONCEPTS OF PRACTICES 199

200 JOSEPH ROUSE

those things appropriately understood as subject to interpretation and normative response. 

Not quite sure what R is getting at with this, but my intimation is that it gets us back to the time issue. Or temporality. For some reason, correction just seems like it's need a post facto justification. Like you don't know what is going to be correct until you do it. Maybe. 

Taking science studies as inescapably ‘internal’ to the cultures of science may

thereby raise Fuller’s principal worry, that interpretive engagement with

scientific practices is necessarily conservative. Fuller (1992) claims that

interpretive engagements with scientific practices abandon any attempt to hold

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But Fuller’s criticism only shows his commitment to a conception of practices as regularities: he limits ‘science’ to the set of practices already conventionally recognized as science, its ‘norms’ to the goals and standards to which its practitioners already subscribe, and therefore concludes that critical perspective must come from elsewhere. If one instead recognizes scientific practices as normative, what science or knowledge is is not already determined, but is at issue in what scientists and others do. Various epistemically significant practices are normatively accountable, but such practices also offer competing interpretations of the norms within which they are situated. The interpretive resources for science studies thus include a multiplicity of sciences and metascientific discourses, together with various marginal and oppositional epistemic practices. Science studies do not come in from the ‘outside’ to settle the differences among these coexisting and competing

science accountable to norms not of its own choosing.

practices, but are already situated among them and engaged with them.

Some of the key terms in this chapter were

• simulacrum
• power
• normativity
• temporality

Probably more too. 

The connection to B & T was particularly strong with this one. 

This is trip:

Conceiving of practices normatively rather than as composed of underlying regularities, and refusing to reify language, power, and knowledge, thus challenge many of the most familiar philosophical and sociological approaches to science studies. An important aspect of this challenge concerns the theoretical and political ‘location’ of science studies themselves, often discussed under the heading of reflexivity. Philosophers and sociologists alike have aspired to a standpoint of ‘epistemic sovereignty’ (Rouse 1996a), a theoretical position ‘outside’ or ‘above’ scientific practices from which to establish or undermine their legitimacy once and for all. If we understand scientific practices normatively, no such standpoint is available. Davidson’s and Brandom’s semantics offer a useful parallel; they take natural language as its own metalanguage, and explicate language from ‘within.’ We must likewise, I argue, recognize ‘science’ to

include its own metapractices, and engage in epistemic explication from within. 

What would this even mean? It doesn't seem like R is saying, it's both a natural language and a metalanguage. It sounds like it is its own metalanguage. That being said, there would be no key to unlock the practice (of, say, science, if we want to call it a practice...). Let's see, "...science’ to

include its own metapractices" Again, very B & T. For sure B. This would mean that they'd be wanting to distinguish between different kinds of practices, kind of like what Heidegger did with vorhandenheit and zuhandenheit. So instead of trying to explain science you wait for science to explain itself, which gets you into the territory of, where does science do that? and how? in journals? in the lab? probably the latter. 

And why does this matter? politics? power?

I guess this would matter for change, sure, because the new would be susceptible to claims of being incorrect. It would seem broken or present to hand. 

Simulacra. 

This constitutive role for norms and sanctions in linguistic interaction thus

already shows the indispensability of concepts of ‘power’ and ‘resistance’ for

understanding language. Whether an unfamiliar [see, unfamiliar, new] way of speaking about or dealing

with a situation is taken as an innovation, a mistake, a curiosity, an irony, or a

variation on the familiar depends crucially upon asymmetries of authority among

those who encounter it. Yet the recognition of models as simulacra extends the

interconnection of meaning and power beyond the immediate relation [ok, so this is going to connect to the power thing as dynamic in a second] between

speakers and their interpreters. To see why this is so, consider a question

sometimes asked rhetorically about meaning: how could merely representing

things differently possibly have a causal influence on them? A similar question

about simulacra cannot have the same rhetorical effect: simulacra are

transformations of the world, and, more significantly, they transform the

available possibilities for human action. They do so both by materially enabling

some activities and obstructing others, and also by changing the situation such

that some possible actions or roles lose their point, while others acquire new significance

Power:

Reducing meaning or significance to rhetorical effects is nevertheless a fundamental mistake. The mistake can be avoided if we also conceive of power dynamically, not as a regularity of social life, a thing possessed or exercised by dominant agents, but as a situated and temporally extended relationship among agents and their surroundings. 

I still don't get the connection between a power like this and normativity. What's the problem? Is the problem just with Turner?

Is the problem that people are taking practice as an explanas or whatever? so that practice explains regularity? That would make sense with the whole discussion of causality.