RELATED TERMS: Praxis; Practice

Design practices may be considered a form of reflexive practice, employing both reflexivity and reflection.

For Mary Holmes (2010), reflexivity refers to the practices of altering one’s life as a response to knowledge about one’s circumstances. In the context of education, Kaya Prpic (2005) defines reflexive practice as reflective inquiry that involves making connection between one’s personal life and professional career. For Siraj-Blatchford and Siraj-Blatchford (1997, p. 237), reflexivity is, “the self-conscious co-ordination of the observed with existing cognitive structures of meaning”, i.e. it is a process in which the observations that we make are dependent upon our prior understandings of the subject of our observations. On this basis, reflection may be defined as ‘thinking about’ something after the event. Reflexivity, by contrast, involves a more immediate, dynamic and continuing self-awareness, a reflection in the moment which is incorporated into the ongoing inter-action.

Prpic argues that It is important to distinguish between reflexivity as a position and reflectivity as a general process, by which she means that a position of reflexivity, an ability to locate ourselves in the situation, is complemented by a process of reflectivity. Reflectivity, as developed from the ideas of Argyris and Schön (1974), is the process in which we are able to reflect upon the ways our own assumptions and actions influence a situation, and thus change our practice as a direct result of this reflective process.

In the context of social theory, reflexive practice is situated within the concepts of reflexivity, modernity, globalisation and individualism, according to Giddens (1990). Giddens considers that reflexivity concerns the relationships between knowledge and social life, arguing that, as traditional frameworks of society dissolve, new patterns of identity are emerging, forcing people to live in a more open or ‘reflexive’ way. Giddens, therefore, thinks that we are all engaged in some level of reflexive practice every day, even if unconsciously, in that we make choices and react to the world in which we live, as we constantly respond and adjust to the changing environment around us. Even the small choices we make in our daily lives, such as what we wear, what we eat, how we spend our time, how we take care of our health and our bodies, are part of an ongoing process of creating and recreating our reflexive self-identities or, rather, positionalities.

Such definitions of reflexive and reflective practices are close to the concept of praxis, as discussed by bell hooks and Paulo Freire, for whom praxis involves critical reflection and contemplation on one’s actions and using the reflection to inform practice.

Boden (2016) argues that traditional theories of reflexivity, such as, for example that provided by Giddens, are overly rational and individualistic. Such approaches do not take into account the role that feelings play in reflexive processes, as is argued by Burkitt (2012) and Holmes (2010). Reflexivity is better understood as relational, embodied, and emotional, Burkitt contends. Dallos and Stedman (2009) further contend that reflexivity can be a creative, artistic and playful activity that utilises a person’s selfhood and agency beyond the narrower confines of their acquired academic knowledge.

For those advocating a more mindful approach to living, reflective practice is a step towards reflexive practice and a move from individuality to relationality. Thus, Tanaka, Nicholson and Farish (2013) argue that,

“Engaging in reflexivity requires critical thought and careful consideration followed by action rooted in understanding. Engaging in mindfulness and introspection with careful and open consideration to the complexity of situations and events that present themselves frequently generates reflexive practice. Where reflection is often individual, reflexivity is decidedly relational.”

As Dressman (1998) expresses it, reflexivity while including reflecting on the more mechanical aspects of practice, moves towards a deep attention to individual positioning within social contexts. In this way, reflexivity moves from awareness to connectedness. Reflexivity is a process that includes attention to beliefs about ontology, the study of what it means to exist, and epistemology, the study of what it means to know, thus providing an opportunity to explore other world views. Reflexivity requires attention to an object, while at the same time attending to one’s role in how that object is being constructed or constituted, as noted by Davies, et. al, 2004.

Being reflexive then is not simply a process of looking back and contemplating. It also involves considering one’s contributions to the construction of meanings and the reinterpretation of one’s actions in light of newly constructed meaning, as discussed by Willig (2001). Moreover, one is able to amend misinterpretations in what you believe and how you act.

In turn, Tanaka, Nicholson and Farish (2013) see reflexive practice as a step towards understanding the role of mindfulness and inter being, the capacity to be aware of what is going on and of what is there, which they see as as a more useful approach to engaging an ongoing consideration of self and other, as well as, it might be added, self and other in situation and in environment, to which narrative environment design could be attuned.

In the context of biology, Willis (2019) states that, “The concept of reflexivity, akin to the self-referential “strange loop” of Hofstadter (1979; 2007), refers to an aspect of systems comprised of objects with properties in distinguishable but interacting domains, variously construed to be related hierarchically.”

References

Argyris, C. and Schon, D.A. (1974). Theory in practice: increasing professional effectiveness. San Francisco, CA; London: Jossey-Bass.

Boden, Z.V.R. et al. (2016). Feelings and intersubjectivity in qualitative suicide research. Qualitative Health Research, 26 (8), 1078–1090. Available from http://qhr.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/1049732315576709 [Accessed 5 September 2016].

Burkitt, I. (2012). Emotional reflexivity: Feeling, emotion and imagination in reflexive dialogues. Sociology, 46, 458–472.

Dallos, R. and Stedman, J. (2009). Flying over the swampy lowlands: reflective and reflexive practice. In: Reflective Practice in Psychotherapy and Counselling. Maidenhead, England: McGraw-Hill Education, 1–22.

Davies, B. et al. (2004). The ambivilant practice of reflexivity. Qualitative Inquiry, 10 (3), 360-389.

Dressman, M. (1998). Confessions of a methods fetishist: Or the cultural politics of Reflective nonengagement. In, Chavez, R. C. & O’Donnell (Eds.), Speaking the unpleasant: The politics of (non)engagement in the multicultural terrain, (pp. 108-126.). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Holmes, M. (2010). The emotionalization of reflexivity. Sociology, 44, 139–154.

Prpic, K. (2005). Managing academic change through reflexive practice: a quest for new views. In: Higher education in a changing world, Proceedings of the 28th HERDSA Annual Conference, Sydney, 3-6 July 2005, Milpera, NSW: Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia. Available from http://www.herdsa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/conference/2005/papers/prpic.pdf [Accessed 10 October 2013].

Roebuck, J. (2007). Reflexive practice: To enhance student learning. Journal of Learning Design, 2 (1), 77–91.

Siraj-Blatchford, I. and Siraj-Blatchford, J. (1997). Reflexivity, social justice and educational research. Cambridge Journal of Education, 27 (2), 235–248. Available from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0305764970270207?journalCode=ccje20#.UgDUbGTTUxQ [Accessed 10 October 2016].

Tanaka, M.T.D., Nicholson, D. and Farish, M. (2013). Beyond reflection. In: Transformative Inquiry. Available from http://www.transformativeinquiry.ca/TIbook/c6/c6/c6s2.html [Accessed 5 September 2016].

Willig, C. (2001). Introducing qualitative research in psychology. Adventures in theory and method. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Wills, P. R. (2019) ‘Reflexivity, coding and quantum biology’, BioSystems, 185, pp. 1–9. doi: 10.1016/j.biosystems.2019.104027

RELATED TERMS: Audience; Filmmaking; Narratology

The role of the reader is crucial for reception theory and reader-response criticism. Reception theory has had its greatest impact in Germany while reader-response criticism is associated mainly with American criticism. There is some continuity between the two. This is particularly the case with the work of Wolfgang Iser, who is frequently included in both camps (Newton, 1988).

As Akimoto and Ogata (2012) explains, reception theory is one standpoint in modern literary theories and narratology. This approach focuses on the reception or reading process of literary works and has been extended to the reception of works in other media, such as film, television and works of art. In this theory, readers, viewers or spectators contribute strongly to the production process of literary and other works as a whole.

One representative theorist of reception theory is Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997), who does not fit well into a reader-response framework. Jauss characterises literary history using a concept of “horizon of expectation”, which means a kind of previous knowledge for positioning a new work on the context of readers’ experiences of reading. The artistic character of a new work is grasped through the disparity between the given horizon and the work. The appearance of a new work may result in the change of an old horizon. In this theory, literary works and other works are continuously changing through the interaction between authors and readers.

As Newton explains it, Jauss uses Gadamer’s concept of a fusion of horizons, a fusion that takes place between the past experiences that are embodied in the text and the interests of its present-day readers, to discuss the relation between the original reception of a literary text and how it is perceived at different stages in history up to a current moment.

Rather than Gadamer, Iser takes his lead from the phenomenology of Roman Ingarden. Iser differs from reader-response critics in his belief that the text has an objective structure, even if that structure must be completed by the reader. Iser argues that all texts have lacunae that the reader must fill by using their imagination. In this interaction between text and reader, the aesthetic response is created.

Theorists who analyse media through reception studies are concerned with the experience, for example, of reading a book or watching a cinema film or a television programme, and how meaning is created through that experience.

In reception theory, it is important to understand that the media text, that is, the individual movie or television programme, has no inherent meaning in and of itself. Rather, meaning is created in the interaction between reader/spectator and textual structures and media. In other words, meaning is created as the viewer watches and processes the film.

Reception theory argues that contextual factors, as much as textual ones, influence the way the spectator views the film or television program. Contextual factors include elements of the viewer’s identity as well as the circumstances of exhibition, the spectator’s preconceived notions concerning the film or television programme’s genre and production, and even broad social, historical, and political issues.

In short, reception theory places the viewer in context, taking into account all of the various factors that might influence how she or he will read and create meaning from the text.

References

Akimoto, T. and Ogata, T. (2012). A Narratological approach for narrative discourse: implementation and evaluation of the system based on Genette and Jauss. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 34 1272–1277. Available from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9xx344rq [Accessed 10 October 2015].

Newton, K.M. (1988). Reception theory and reader-response criticism. In: Newton, K.M., ed. Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. London: Macmillan Education UK, 219–240.

RELATED TERMS: Audience; Posthumanism; Humanism; Actant; Defamiliarisation, Ostranenie or making strange; Dau Project

“The essence of realism … is the distance taken with regard to stories, to their temporal schemes and their sequences of causes and effects. Realism opposes situations that endure to stories that link together and pass from one to the next.” (Ranciere, 2013: 7)

Rationale

How meaningful is the question of ‘realism’ for design practices? Is it an important question, or one that is more important for works of art, whether literary, visual or audiovisual?

While not directly relevant as an aesthetic, semiotic or representational judgment, it could be argued that the question of ‘realism’ is important for designers because it also implicitly raises a number of questions concerning: the character of of ’reality’; the character of that which is being represented; and, by implication, the question of the ‘subject’, as actant or interpretant, for whom the design establishes relationships among the ‘realistic’, the ‘real’, the ‘fictional’ and the ‘factual’. Understanding the complex relationships among these four terms, ‘realistic’, ‘real’, ‘fictional’ and ‘factual’, is vital for understanding how the ‘real’ is constituted, experienced and indeed performed.

One important reason for considering ‘realism’, then, especially in its ‘deformed’ or ‘neo-‘ forms, is the nature of the (human) ’subject’, or, more broadly, in a post-humanist and ‘augmented reality’ digital environment, the ‘persona’, ‘avatar’ or ’actant’, that is implicated. Of particular interest is how bodily capacities drawn upon by the design, which determines the nature of the participatory action required of the (human or other) interpretant-actant.

In terms of participation, the implied ’subject’ of a conventional work of ‘realism’ is a reader, viewer or spectator, that is, focused primarily on ‘the eye’ with responses that are primarily intellectual. The sensory range is curtailed, excluding the other sense-organs, and the interpretive range is restricted, to cognitive understanding, issues which Juhani Pallasmaaa (2005, 2009) discusses in the context of architectural design.

In short, ‘realism’ is not a primary issue for designers. However, the issue of ‘reality’ is a key concern. So is the relationship established to an implied/addressed ‘subject’, through whatever degree of participation is called upon between the design and the ‘reality’ that the designer is seeking to evoke, affirm or critique; or, indeed, affirm critically. This assumes that the primary aim of a design is not to describe, show or represent a reality but to take up an active, practical, critical relationship to a specific, definable social-material ’reality’.

While those artefacts deemed to be works of ‘realism’, for example, in the late 19th century, may have been ‘critical’ of the ‘reality’ they were representing, the implied subject received that critique as a reader of a literary text or as a viewer of a pictorial text, in short, as a spectator of that ‘reality’ not as an active participant in that ‘reality’. For the participant-actant in a design, particularly if it is an environmental design, while it may the world of an other that is being enacted (their world), it is presented in such a way that ‘you’, the participant-actant is implicated. In other words, ‘your world’ is put into relation with ‘their world’ in a practical dialogue.

It is, therefore, not so much the techniques of ‘realism’ that are of primary interest or value to the designer, but their purpose: to highlight in a critical manner, to establish a critical relationship to, an enacted ‘reality’. It has to be said, in case there are any misunderstandings at this point, that ‘reality’ itself is always in question, realised as emergence through a plurality (Arendt, 1990) of distinct standpoints and viewpoints inter-acting while seeking to establish the (symbolic, rational) ‘reality principles’ (Brown, 2015, 2018; Parsons, 2018) among themselves.

Because ‘designs’ are not ‘works of art’ in any straightforward sense, they are not simply works of representation, realistic or otherwise. They take place in ‘the real’, and (re-)enact the real. Nevertheless their ‘reality’ is a ‘mixed reality’: realistic and real; fictional and factual. They are, in the words of Jacques Derrida (1994), artifactual and actuvirtual.

Realism in Jakobson: Summary

Although one should bear in mind, as Nelson Goodman (1983: 272) cautions, that, “Realism, like reality, is multiple and evanescent, and no one account of it will do.” [1], nevertheless, in discussing ‘realism’, a good place to start is the work of Roman Jakobson (1987), who differentiates among five different meanings of the word ‘realism’:

1. Realism as the intention of the author/creator/maker, who conceives the text as realistic;

2. Realism as the reception of the text, i.e. the reader/spectator/auditor perceives the text as realistic;

3. Realism as literature and painting characteristic of the realistic movement(s) of the nineteenth century, literary realism and realism in painting [2];

4. Realism as any number of literary, painterly, theatrical, photographic or cinematographic techniques and devices which lend a sense of the real to a text, image, cinematic, televisual, videographic or theatrical production;

5. Realism as the consistent motivation and realisation of poetic devices, for example, in the poetic (‘more accurate’) rendering of a delirious experiential state (experiential realism)

For Jakobson (1987: 13), realism does not represent the extra-literary or extra-artistic world as it really is. Rather, it follows certain rules whose goal is to create a particular illusion or impression of reality, a reality-effect, so to speak.

Realism in Jakobson: Narration

Realism, as Roman Jakobson (1987) defines it, is “an artistic trend which aims at conveying reality as closely as possible and strives” for maximum verisimilitude. We call realistic those works which we feel accurately depict life by displaying verisimilitude.

Jakobson points out that this immediately faces us with a dilemma. Realism may be taken to refer to the aspiration and intent of the author, i.e. it is conceived by its author as a display of verisimilitude (meaning 1). It is conceived as intending to be true to life. Alternatively, a work may be called realistic if the person judging it perceives it as being true to life (meaning 2).

In the first case, we evaluate on an intrinsic basis, in terms of the literary or other artistic conventions used, the diegetic universe, in Souriau’s phrase, the structure and rhetoric of the work. In the second case, the reader’s individual impression is the decisive criterion, the imaginary world constructed by the reader or spectator ‘measured’ against, compared with or contrasted with the symbolic world the reader or spectator inhabits). The realism lies in the reception and interpretation of the work.

Jakobson considers that these two distinct meanings have been irredeemably confounded in the history art, such that the question of whether a given work is realistic or not is covertly reduced to the question of what attitude the reader or spectator takes toward it.

This has led, Jakobson argues, to the emergence of a third meaning. He points out that classicists, sentimentalists, the romanticists (to an extent), even the “realists” of the nineteenth century, the modernists to a large degree, and finally the futurists, expressionists, and their like, have all proclaimed faithfulness to reality, maximum verisimilitude, in other words, realism, as the guiding motto of their artistic programme.

In the 19th century, this motto gave rise to an artistic movement. It was primarily the late copiers of that trend, Jakobson argues, who outlined the history of art (as recognised at the time of Jakobson’s writing in 1921), in particular, the history of literature. Hence, he suggests, one specific case, one separate artistic movement, was identified as the ultimate manifestation of realism in art and was made the standard by which to measure the degree of realism in preceding and succeeding artistic movements.

Thus, a new covert identification has occurred, a third meaning of the word “realism” has crept in (meaning 3), one which comprehends the sum total of the features characteristic of one specific artistic current of the nineteenth century. For literary and art historians in the early 20th century, the realistic works of the 19th century represent the highest degree of verisimilitude, the maximum faithfulness to life.

As the conventions of a particular moment in art and literary history come to be equated with realism (meaning 3), the definition of realism as the artistic intent to render life as it is (meaning 1) becomes subject to ambiguity: realism can be taken as the tendency to deform the given artistic norms that are conceived as an approximation of reality (meaning 2.1); or as the tendency to conform to the conventions of a given artistic tradition, one conservatively conceived as faithfulness to reality (meaning 2.2).

Taking this ambiguity into account, and applying it in the context of meaning 2, which presupposes that my subjective evaluation will pronounce a given artistic fact faithful to reality, meaning 2.1 emerges when I rebel against a given artistic code and view its deformation as a more accurate rendition of reality; while meaning 2.2 emerges when I am conservative and view the deformation of the artistic code to which I subscribe as a distortion of reality.

The concrete content of 1.1, 1.2, 2.1 and 2.2 is extremely relative, Jakobson notes.

Thus, new realist artists (in the sense of 2.1) were compelled to call themselves neo-realists, realists in a higher sense of the word, or naturalists, and they drew a line between quasi- or pseudo-realism (meaning 3) and what they conceived to be genuine realism, that is, as borne out in their own work.

‘’I am a realist, but only in the higher sense of the word”, Dostoevski claimed, while almost identical declarations have been made in turn by the Symbolists, by Italian and Russian Futurists, by German Expressionists, and so on.” (Jakobson, 1987: 24)

Progressive realism can be characterised in terms of unessential details. One such device, Jakobson argues, is the condensation of the narrative by means of images based on contiguity, that is, avoidance of the normal designative term in favour of metonymy or synecdoche, a condensation which is realised either in spite of the plot or by eliminating the plot entirely. For example, when describing Anna’s suicide, Tolstoj primarily writes about her handbag. Such an unessential detail would have made no sense to Karamzin, although Karamzin’s own tale, in comparison with the 18th-century adventure novel, would likewise seem but a series of unessential details [3]. Since such a device is frequently thought to be realistic, i.e. lifelike in the sense that life does not follow a narrow narrative path but is full of irrelevant (from the perspective of story) personas and events, this gives rise to meaning 4, stressing that 4 is often found within 3.

This desire to conceal the answer, this deliberate effort to delay recognition, brings out a new feature, the newly improvised epithet or added quality. Thus, a strange term may be foisted on an object or asserted as a particular aspect of it. Negative parallelism explicitly rejects metaphorical substitution for its proper term: “I am not a tree, I am a woman,” says the girl in a poem by the Czech poet Sramek. This literary construction can be justified; from a special narrative feature, it can become a detail of plot development.

From time to time, the consistent motivation and justification of poetic constructions have also been called realism. Thus, the Czech novelist Capek-Chod in his tale, “The Westernmost Slav” somewhat disingenuously calls the first chapter, in which a ”romantic” fantasy is motivated by typhoid delirium, a “realistic” chapter. Jakobson calls such realism meaning 5. That is, it is a mode of ‘realism’ in which the requirement of consistent motivation and realisation of poetic devices is met. Meaning 5 is often confused with 3, 2 and so on.

Notes

[1] Similarly, Kirstin Sørensen comments that there are three perceptions of literary realism that predominate. All of them have been considered, and sometimes still are considered, to define literary realism, but all of which ultimately do a disservice to the genre and its appreciation. They are realism as a period phenomenon, that is, the realistic literature of the 19th century; realism as maximum accuracy in the representation of reality; and realism as maximum verisimilitude to the real (appearance of the real).

[2] In literature, this includes the work of Honoré de Balzac in France, George Eliot in England, and William Dean Howells in America. In painting, this includes the work of French artists Gustave Courbet, such as, for example, ‘The Stonebreakers’ of1850, Honoré Daumier, and Jean François Millet as well as such US artists as William Sidney Mount, Thomas Eakins and (although a little later in the early 20th century) the Ashcan school. According to literary history, realist literature is was produced in Europe and the USA from the1840s to the 1890s, when realism was superseded by naturalism.

[3] As Jakobson (1987: 25) explains, “If the hero of an eighteenth-century adventure novel encounters a passer-by, it may be taken for granted that the latter is of importance either to the hero or, at least, to the plot. But it is obligatory in Gogol or Tolstoj or Dostoevskij that the hero first meet an unimportant and (from the point of view of the story) superfluous passer-by, and that their resulting conversation should have no bearing on the story.”

References

Arendt, H. (1990). Philosophy and politics. Social Research, 57 (1), 73–103.

Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Brown, W. and Hamburger, J. (2018). Wendy Brown: ‘Who is not a neoliberal today?’ Tocqueville21 Blog. Available from https://tocqueville21.com/interviews/wendy-brown-not-neoliberal-today/ [Accessed 21 January 2018].

Derrida, J. (1994) ‘The Deconstruction of actuality’, Radical Philosophy, 68 (Autumn), pp. 28–41. Available at: https://www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com/issue-files/rp68_interview_derrida.pdf (Accessed: 3 April 2020).

Jakobson, R. (1987). Language in literature, edited by K. Pomorska and S. Rudy. Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press.

Pallasmaa, J. (2005). The eyes of the skin: architecture and the senses. Chichester, UK: Wiley.

Pallasmaa, J. (2009). The thinking hand: existential and embodied wisdom in architecture. Chichester, UK: Wiley.

Parsons, A. (2018). Neoliberalism’s “reality principles”. Poiesis and Prolepsis [Blog]. Available from http://prolepsis-ap.blogspot.com/2018/01/neoliberalisms-reality-principles.html [Accessed 9 September 2018].

Ranciere, J. (2013) Bela Tarr: The Time after. Translated by E. Beranek. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal.

Shiff, R. (1988). Art history and the nineteenth century: realism and resistance. Art Bulletin, 70 (1), 25–48. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3051152 [Accessed 6 September 2018].

What is literary realism? [Website]. http://www.varlaweb.com/whatisliteraryrealism/word.php

Willemen, P. (1972). On realism in the cinema. Screen, 13 (1), 37–44. Available from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/screen/13.1.37 [Accessed 4 July 2018].

RELATED TERMS: Biopolitics and Biopower

According to Ekin Erkan (2019: 218), while biopower may sufficiently explain the kinds of neuroses troubling citizens in the mid-to-late 20th century, psychopower, in contrast, is globalized and diffracted. As a system, it encompasses the organization of the capture of attention made possible by the psycho-technologies developed gradually through radio in the early 20th century, television in the mid-20th century and digital technologies in the late 20th century.

Psychopower results in the massive destruction of attention, exacerbated by ‘24/7 capitalism’, “where generalized human life is inscribed into duration without breaks and defined by a principle of continuous functioning (and sleeplessness)” (Erkan, 2019: 218).

Design challenge or design paradox

In this context, a challenge for design practices might be expressed as follows:

How can you use what Rosen (2012) calls the ‘weapons of mass distraction’ (broadcast media plus internet-based media) to gain the attention of people in order for them to be able to focus on the problems (at various scales) in which they are entangled? This is conceived as problem setting rather than problem solving.

If you do not use those media, people will not see your design. If you do use those media, they will be unable to act on it, because they will not be attending to it and focusing on it (Rosen, 2012). A further difficulty is that, given the proliferation of information and misinformation, people will find it difficult to decide who or what to trust as a basis and an orientation for action (Quill, 2014).

In this context, Larry Rosen (2012) makes a distinction between addiction and obsession. He argues that people are obsessed by their devices and platforms, such as smartphones and Facebook. Simplifying greatly, he argues that addiction stems from a need to increase neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, endorphins and others, in our brain, while obsession stems from a need to decrease neurotransmitters that are related to anxiety. He adds the caveat that obsessions also increase other neurotransmitters that block positive, elevated moods and produce anxiety.

Of relevance for design practice is that anxiety spans addiction and obsession, both of which affect the ability of attend and to focus. Both, in other words, affect human actantiality as capability to act-in-situation, to be able to recognise, constitute and act upon affordances. What might be described as a perceptual and interactional impoverishment ensues.

References

Erkan, E. (2019) ‘Psychopower and ordinary madness: Reticulated dividuals in cognitive capitalism’, Cosmos and History, 15(1), pp. 214–241.

Quill, L. (2014) Secrets and Democracy. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rosen, L. D. (2012) ‘Weapons of Mass Distraction: why we have lost the ability to focus’, Psychology Today, (18 December). Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rewired-the-psychology-technology/201212/weapons-mass-distraction (Accessed: 28 June 2021).

RELATED TERMS: Defamiliarisation; Derive; Detournement; Situationist International; Methodology and method; Alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt)

In the practice of the Situationist International, psychogeography is defined as the study of the specific effects of the geographical (and topographical) environment, whether consciously organised or not, on people’s emotions and behaviour.

Debord and his Situationist International colleagues proposed a set of cultural strategies to combat and subvert the commodification of everyday life under contemporary capitalism, of which psychogeography was part. Psychogeography draws attention to the emotional or psychic aspects of urban experience, and to the spontaneous encounter with and reflection on this experience.

Debord associates two key strategies with psychogeographical practice: ‘derive’ and ‘detournement’.

The figure of the psychogeographer has obvious affinities with the earlier idea of the urban flaneur and draws also on the ideas of the surrealists on the modern city, as explored, notably, in Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926) and Andre Breton’s Nadja (1928), both set in Paris. (Brooker, 2003: 2010)

The film below presents a portrait of Timothy ‘Speed’ Levitch, a tour guide whose embodiment of ‘cruising’ enacts the spirit of psychogeography.https://www.youtube.com/embed/IOeXcXUzyPU

References

Bonnett, A. (1992). Art, ideology, and everyday space: subversive tendencies from Dada to postmodernism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 10 (1), pp.69–86.

Brooker, P. (2003). A Glossary of Cultural Theory, 2nd ed. London, UK: Arnold.

Coverley, M. (2006) Psychogeography. Harpenden, Herts, UK: Pocket Essentials.

Ellard, C. (2015) Places of the heart: the psychogeography of everyday life. New York, NY: Bellevue Literary Press.

Richardson, T. (ed.) (2015) Walking inside out: contemporary British psychogeography. London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield International.

RELATED TERMS: Actantial model – Greimas; Agon; Antagonist; Epic theatre – Brecht; (The) Heroic; Narratology; New Materialism; Theatre

The protagonist may sometimes be referred to as the main character, the focal character or the hero. In one sense, it is the actantiality around which the unfolding of the narrative unfolds: its movements and actions giving rise to counter-movements and counter-actions, creating a centre or point of return for the specific actantial dynamics and also, in many respects, the narrative’s deictic centre. For design practices, taking into account Greimas’ and Latour’s actantial theory, the actant by means of which the action centrally unfolds may not be a human ‘character’ but rather a place, an atmosphere, an institution, an organisation or a non-human life form which has agency in some respect.

For example, while Lear is clearly the protagonist in Shakespeare’s King Lear, it could also be said, taking into account the way agency is distributed by the plotting of the play, that the the force of nature, as embodiment of ‘the gods’ and their will, is the protagonist. In more contemporary examples, concerning ecological and environmental narratives and assuming a non-theological perspective, the protagonist might be the world’s oceans and their circulations, the atmosphere’s air and its flows or the earth’s oceanic and continental plates and their movements. These types of environments open up to the kind of thinking that takes place under the heading of ‘new materialism’, in which matter is not assumed to be passive and inert but active and ‘vital’, a problematic term which, in turn, opens up debates about what is meant by ‘material vitality’ (Bennett, 2010).

From another perspective, the protagonist is the character with whom the audience is intended to share the most empathy.

Empathy is a pivotal moment in engaging a reader, viewer or audience in the sequence of action in a narrative. The question of whether such emotional engagement is conjoined with an accompanying intellectual engagement or is treated as an end in itself, as part of an emotional catharsis, is key to the debate that Brecht, in establishing the ground for his ‘epic theatre’, develops with the Aristotelian view of tragic theatre.

The protagonist, while sometimes referred to as the “good guy”, in a pre-feminist or a pre-gender-neutral formulation, may be the clear villain or antihero of the piece.

Further discussion

In an interesting discussion of kinds of fictions, relevant for notions of the protagonist in design practices, Northrop Frye (2000: 33-34) argues that it is possible to classify fictions or narratives by the hero’s, heroine’s or protagonist’s power of action, which may be greater than, less than or roughly the same as that of the reader, viewer or audience.

Thus, in Frye’s scheme, if the protagonist is superior in kind both to other humans and to the environment of other humans, they are a divine being, and the story about this protagonist will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god.

If the protagonist is superior in degree to other humans and to the environment, the hero/ine is that of romance, whose actions are marvellous but who is nonetheless a human being. The hero/ine of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are partly, but not wholly, suspended.

If the protagonist is superior in degree to other humans but not to the natural environment, the hero/ine is a leader. While this protagonist has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than the reader, viewer or audience, what they do is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature. This is the hero/ine of the high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy, and is the kind of tragic hero/ine that Aristotle had in mind.

If the protagonist is superior neither to other humans nor to the environment, the hero/ine is one of us. The reader, viewer or audience responds to a sense of their common humanity, and the world conforms to our own experience. This is the hero/ine of the low mimetic mode, of most comedy and of realistic fiction. It may be difficult to retain the word ‘hero/ine’ for this type of protagonist, while such a character may not attain to the degree of becoming an anti-hero/ine.

If the protagonist is inferior in power or intelligence to the reader, viewer or audience, so that there is a sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration or absurdity, the hero/ine belongs to the ironic mode. This remains the case when the reader, viewer or audience feels that s/he is or might be in the same situation, as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom.

References

Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Frye, N. (2000). Historical criticism: theory of modes. In: Anatomy of criticism: four essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

RELATED TERMS:

The terms product design and industrial design are often used interchangeably. Industrial designers, emerging during the Industrial Revolution beginning the mid-1700s, sought to generate new ideas within an industry. At a later time, product designers shifted the emphasis within industrial design away from how to make a product towards including questions about why to make it and for whom.

Product design covers all the work from the initial idea of a product all the way through to the point where the customers have the product in their hands. An industrial design may be a part of product design or it may be product design all on its own. Industrial design, however, generally applies only to industrial products. Thus, while a fashion designer or a software developer uses product design to develop their concepts, industrial design is used only when the final product has to be built or produced as an marketable entity. Where product design focuses on study or professional activity that involves the more technical roles involved in new product development, mostly using scientific methods, engineering design seems to be a more appropriate designation.

Victor Papanek, writing in the early 1970s proposed that,

“There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second.”

Since that time, product design has addressed many of the concerns which Papanek expressed. Critical product design, for example, focuses on maintenance, repair and upgradability of products to foster new modes of ownership that transgress fashion and trends and to contribute to the future design of more sustainable products.

Even so, one should be very aware, however, of the paradoxes inherent in practising design in the 21st century, as outlined by Rodgers, Inella and Bremner (2017). For example, they argue that, “Design’s Devotion to Sustainability is Unsustainable”.

References

Papanek, V (1973) Design for the real world: human ecology and social change. Toronto, CA: Bantam Books.

Rodgers, P. A., Innella, G. and Bremner, C. (2017) ‘Paradoxes in design thinking’. The Design Journal, 20(sup1), pp. S4444–S4458. doi: 10.1080/14606925.2017.1352941.

RELATED TERMS: Dasein; Phenomenology; Heidegger

Some design discourses have made use of the terms ‘present-at-hand’ and ‘ready-to-hand’, derived from Martin Heidegger, to discuss artefacts, entities, interactions and systems such as, for example, in human computer interaction (HCI), interaction design, game design and systems design (Ferris, 2003; Dourish, 1999; Dourish, 2001; Martin, 2012; Karlstrom, 2007; Tanenbaum, Antle and Bizzocchi, 2011). In using such terms, one has to bear in mind the difficulties of extracting concepts from the context of one particular mode of thought and translating them to other contexts, particularly in the case of Heidegger’s thought.

Heidegger defines present-at-hand and ready-to-hand as modes of being, in contrast to Dasein, which is by existing as a self-related being for whom its own Being is at issue as it goes about inhabiting the world.

Thus, for Heidegger, what it means for a present-at-hand entity to be, that is, to become or come into existence as a temporal, historical being, is to be given as an object to a theoretical gaze (Fried and Polt, 2014: xii). This includes both the ‘objects’ of science and the ‘objects’ of everyday perception.

A ready-to-hand entity, such as a tool, is, that is,, becomes or comes into existence as a temporal, historical being, when it fits into a meaningful network of purposes and functions, in other words, when it becomes part of a world of practice.

This means that such entities do not exist in some essential, a-temporal, a-historical or universal way as present-at-hand or ready-to-hand but have a temporal, historical, inter-active or relational mode of being. Thus, as Paul Dourish (1999) explains, Heidegger argued that the ontological structure of the world is not a given, already there to be found, discovered or revealed, but arises through interaction, through unfolding. To explain Heidegger’s position Dourish considers the example of the computer mouse.

Once one has learned to use it, the mouse, in a sense, ‘disappears’ from conscious attention. One acts ‘im-mediately’ through the mouse as an extension of one’s hand as one selects objects, operates menus, navigates pages, and so on. The mouse is, in Heidegger’s terms, ready-to-hand, i.e. it fits ‘seamlessly’ into a meaningful network of actions, purposes and functions. In being part of one’s action, it becomes part of ‘oneself’, ‘one’s body’, part of a domain of ‘ownness’ or ‘mineness’.

However, on occasions such as when the mouse ceases to function, for example, because of a failure of the connection between mouse and computer, one’s orientation towards the mouse changes. The mouse ‘reappears’ to conscious attention. One becomes conscious of the mouse mediating one’s action. One moves from a sense of im-mediacy and seamless connectivity to one of mediacy and failure of connectivity. The mouse becomes problematic, as one acts to solve or resolve the problem. When one acts on the mouse in this way, being mindful of it as an object of my activity, as an objector a theoretical (problem-solving) gaze, the mouse is present-at-hand.

Dourish (1999: 10) points out that,

“Heidegger’s concern with this distinction is not simply to observe that one has different ways of orienting towards objects; his observation is more radical. He argues that the mouse exists as a mouse only because of the way in which it can become present-at-hand. The origin of ontology, and the existence of entities, lies precisely in the way those moments make objects apparent.”

Dourish, 1999: 10)

Otherwise, the mouse is invisible or imperceptible because it immediately and seamlessly is part of one’s flow of actions and inter-actions.

However, when an entity becomes present at hand, for example because problematic in relation to one’s actions and inter-actions, it is not simply that it is revealing itself, or as if it was waiting there all along to be discovered. Rather, it is through this moment of becoming present-at-hand that the object takes on an existence as an entity, whose meaning is determined by the character of the theoretical gaze to which it is subjected. This happens through involved, embodied action, and thus changes its relation to Dasein, the way in which one acts an handles ’things’. In this way, it can be recognised that action is constitutive of ontology, of determining what exists and how it exists, not independent of it.

References

Dourish, P. (1999). Embodied interaction: exploring the foundations of a new approach to HCI [Unpublished draft paper]. Available from http://www.dourish.com/embodied/embodied99.pdf [Accessed 28 August 2016].

Dourish, P. (2001). Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ferris, T.L.J. (2003). Exploration of the application of ‘ready-to-hand’ and ‘present-to-hand’ in the design of systems. In: Australia and New Zealand Systems Society Conference, 2003. Available from http://www.anzsys.org/anzsys03/yis3000061_2.pdf [Accessed 28 August 2016].

Fried, G. and Polt, R. (2014). Translators’ introduction to the second edition. In: Introduction to metaphysics, 2nd ed., by Martin Heidegger. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Karlstrom, P. (2007). Existential phenomenology and design – Why ‘ready-to-hand’ is not enough. Workshop for Interaction Design in Pedagogical Practice, Södertörn University College, Haninge, Sweden. Available from http://petter.blogs.dsv.su.se/files/2011/02/Existential_phenomenolgy-and-HCI.pdf [Accessed 28 August 2016].

Martin, P. (2012). A phenomenological account of the playing-body in avatar-based action games. In: Sixth Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Medialab-Prado, Plaza de las Letras, C/ Alameda, 15 Madrid. Available from http://gamephilosophy.org/download/philosophy_of_computer_games_2012/Martin 2012 -A-phenomenological-account-of-the-playing-body-in-avatar-based-action-games.pdf [Accessed 28 August 2016].

Tanenbaum, K., Antle, A.N. and Bizzocchi, J. (2011). Understandings narrative and embodied interactions with ‘present-at-mind’. In: The 29th ACM International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 88–91. Available from http://www.antle.iat.sfu.ca/chi2011_EmbodiedWorkshop/Papers/KarenTanenbaum_CHI11EIWkshp_PresentAtMind.pdf [Accessed 28 August 2016].

RELATED TERMS: Poeisis; Reflexivity and Reflection

The term praxis is one of Aristotle’s three main categories action, alongside poiesis and theoria. Praxis is taken to mean doing or acting, rather than making (poiesis) or thinking (theoria), although ‘thinking’ here is restricted to thinking about ‘universals’. Each form of action is associated with a characteristic form of knowing: theoria with episteme (knowledge of universals); poiesis with techne (technical knowledge, knowing how to make); and praxis with phronesis (practical wisdom, knowing what to do).

For Marx and later Marxist writers, praxis is contrasted with wage labour. Praxis is free, conscious, creative human activity, which alone is capable of generating knowledge and creating change in the social order.

Interesting contributions to the concept of praxis have been made by Jurgen Habermas and, particularly, Hannah Arendt, who revises Aristotle’s and Marx’s categorisations in her discussion of labour, work and action.

The questions that arise here for design practices concern whether design is considered a form of praxis, in the Marxian sense, and what acts designs, once in the world, may be said to perform. This extends the Arendtian sense of praxis beyond doing through words and deeds to doing through designs. Further questions arise in the context of whether such conceptions of praxis are humanist, which may limit the understanding of action and agency, or as fields of actantiality in which human ‘agency’, human bodily acts and discurive acts, are understood in the context of interaction in and with the built, constructed world and the natural world.

Further reading

Dunne, J. (1997). Back to the rough ground: practical judgment and the lure of technique. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Melaney, W. D. (2006), Arendt’s Revision of Praxis: On Plurality and Narrative Experience. Analecta Husserliana, 90, pp. 465-479.

Pilario, D.F. (2005). The Adventures of praxis: a critical encounter of three traditions. In: Back to the rough grounds of praxis: exploring theological method with Pierre Bourdieu. Leuven, Belgium: University of Leuven Press, 1–97.

RELATED TERMS: Apparatus – Dispositif; Design Practice and Functionalism; Ontological Turn; Reflexivity and Reflection; Theoretical Practice;

The ‘practice’ approach to social phenomena is very important for design, as it underlies the conceptualisation of designs as forms of spatio-temporal (social) practice. The notion of practice is a way of understanding the co-implication and entanglement of environments, discourse (including narrative discourse) and human activity in a design. All of the following approaches may have value in thinking through what may be said to happen in a design, as a field of (social, spatial, temporal) practice, and what designs may be said to do (how designs, once designed and in use, continue to design).

Emergence of the ‘practice turn’

In seeking to convey the significance of the term ‘practice’, Theodrore Schatzki states that while thinkers once spoke of ‘structures’, ‘systems,’ ‘meaning,’ ‘life world,’ ‘events,’ and ‘actions’, when seeking to define the primary generic social entity, many theorists in more recent times would give ‘practices’ a comparable primacy (Schatzki, Knorr Cetina and Von Savigny, 2001: 10).

Calvert-Minor (2014: 124) points out that the ‘linguistic turn’ disclosed that our languages and concepts play constitutive roles in knowledge claims. The ‘social turn’ revealed that what we take as known or take to be rationally justified is a function of social and cultural contexts. In more recent times, many social epistemologists, sociologists of knowledge and science studies practitioners recognise that what lies at the heart of knowledge production are not individuals or communities, but practices. This is the ‘practice turn’ in epistemology that maintains the constitutive importance of language and society in epistemology but shifts the centre of epistemological inquiry to practices.

Similarly, Reckwitz (2002) considers that after the ‘interpretative turn’ of the 1970s, ‘practice theories’ or ‘theories of social practices’ formed a conceptual alternative that seemed attractive to those dissatisfied with classically modern and high-modern types of social theories. Nevertheless, this praxeological approach, emphasising practice, Reckwitz notes, has never been systematically elaborated. Elements of a theory of practice can be found across a spectrum of social theorists in the last third of the 20th century.

Of greatest significance in this respect for Reckwitz are Pierre Bourdieu whose praxeological project carries a trace of structuralism, Anthony Giddens, who developed a ‘theory of structuration’, heavily influenced by late Wittgenstein, and Michel Foucault, who pursued diverse theoretical options between structuralism, post-structuralism and a Nietzschean theory of the body, arriving at a framework of analysing the relations among bodies, agency, knowledge and understanding. Although not mentioned by Reckwitz, the work of Henri Lefebvre should be included in this context as being particularly important for design practices, as he developed an explicit concept of ‘spatial practice’ and of the rhythms of daily activity through his concept of rhythmanalysis into which designs may be said to intervene.

Furthermore, Reckwitz continues, in empirical sociology, cultural studies and anthropology works in the wake of Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, Judith Butler’s performative gender studies and Bruno Latour’s science studies can be understood as members of the praxeological family of theories. In social philosophy, Charles Taylor’s neo-hermeneutical model of embodied agency and the self-interpreting animal follows a praxeological path. Of this group of thinkers, particularly Garfinkel and Butler, and to the extent that Garfinkel’s influence can be detected in Latour, one might legitimately talk of a ‘performative turn’.

However, it was not until Theodore Schatzki published Social Practices. A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social in 1996 that a social philosophy explicitly focused on the practice concept emerged, Reckwitz argues.

For Schatzki (2001), as Postill (2010) notes, there are four main types of practice theorists: philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, Dreyfus and Taylor; social theorists, such as Bourdieu, de Certeau and Giddens; cultural theorists such as Foucault and Lyotard; and theorists of science and technology, such as Latour, Rouse and Pickering.

These theorists may be considered as the first generation or wave of practice thinkers who laid the foundations of practice theory. The second generation, who are testing those foundations and building new extensions to the theoretical edifice, include Sherry Ortner (1984) [1], Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, von Savigny, Reckwitz and Warde (Postill, 2010).

One of the traditions of thought to which Schatzki refers above, which talked of structures and systems, is Marxism. This tradition does not fit easily within Postill’s characterisation of two generations of practice theorists, but Ortner (1984) is well aware of the threading of Marxist influences through the first generation’s thought. Another approach to ‘practice’ can be seen to emerge from this Marxist lineage by way of Arendt’s, and subsequently Habermas’, re-conceptualisations of Aristotle’s categories of action, i.e. theoria, praxis and poiesis (very roughly translated as reflective/systemic thinking, doing and making, respectively), and accompanying modes knowing, i.e. episteme, phronesis and techne (again very roughly translated as systemic knowledge, practical (ethical and political) knowledge and technical knowledge, respectively). Both Arendt and Habermas offer a critique of Marx’s appropriation of Aristotle’s categories. For Arendt’s, Marx over-emphasises ‘labour’ (in her terms ‘work’) to the detriment of ‘action’ (in her terms, ‘politics’).

Dimensions of ‘practice’; Practices and material arrangements

Sarah Pink (2012) notes that, in the context of the ‘practice turn’ in contemporary thinking, practices have come to be defined, loosely, as sets of human actions that can be associated with each other in some way and that can form a category for sociological analysis. Given this looseness, it becomes possible to refer to local, micro-scale phenomena such as washing up, doing the laundry or gardening and activities which are less defined by location, such as digital photography and social media activism, as forms of practice. As a result, theories of practice and the uses to which they have been put remain diverse, meaning that there is no unified practice approach.

Schatzki (2011), for example, approaches the study of large social phenomena as bundles of practices and material arrangements. Such bundles of practices and material arrangements make up sites of the social, which may be termed sociotechnical regimes. By ‘practices’ Schatzki intends spatially-temporally dispersed, open sets of doings and sayings organised by common understandings, teleologies (ends and tasks), and rules. By material arrangements he means links among people, organisms, artefacts and things of nature.

Practices and arrangements are interlinked in that, firstly, practices effect, alter, use, and are inseparable from arrangements; while, secondly, arrangements channel, prefigure, and facilitate practices. An important feature of practice-arrangement bundles, and thereby of social phenomena, is interwoven time-spaces: interwoven teleologies and motivations that govern, and place-path contexts in which the activities composing bundles and social phenomena take place.

Schatzki explains that the activities, entities, rules, understandings, and teleologies that are at work in any local situation are elements of phenomena, i.e. practices, arrangements, and bundles thereof, that stretch out over time and space beyond such proximate situations. Indeed, these items come to be at work in local situations because they are components of practice-arrangement bundles. Elements of local situations also often come from elsewhere to be part of them, as Latour (2005) discusses in his chapter “Redistributing the Local”. For this reason, the ontology of practice must be distinguished from those of ethnomethodology and phenomenology, which highlight local (proximate) situations.

Notes

[1] Ortner argues in 1984 that “a new key symbol of theoretical orientation is emerging, which may be labeled “practice” (or “action” or “praxis”). This is neither a theory nor a method in itself, but rather … a symbol, in the name of which a variety of theories and methods are being developed.”

Bibliography

Calvert-Minor, C. (2014). Epistemological misgivings of Karen Barad’s ‘posthumanism’. Human Studies, 37 (1), 123–137. Available from http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10746-013-9285-x [Accessed 14 January 2016].

Ortner, S.B. (1984). Theory in anthropology since the sixties.Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26 (1), 126–166. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/178524?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents [Accessed 4 October 2015].

Pink, S. (2012). Theorising the familiar: practices and places. In: Situating everyday life practices and places. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 14–30. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446250679 [Accessed 19 January 2016].

Postill, J. (2010). Theorising media and practice. Oxford, UK: Berghahn.

Reckwitz, A. (2002). Toward a theory of social practices: a development in culturalist theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5 (2), 243–263. Available from http://est.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/13684310222225432 [Accessed 28 January 2016].

Schatzki, T.R. (1996). A Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Schatzki, T.R. (2011). Where the action is (on large social phenomena such as sociotechnical regimes ). Sustainable Practices Research Group Working Paper, 1-31. Available from http://www.sprg.ac.uk/uploads/schatzki-wp1.pdf [Accessed 27 January 2016].

Schatzki, T.R., Knorr Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E., eds. (2001). The Practice turn in contemporary theory. London, UK: Routledge.