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Introduction
Here are the 5 points I want to make:
- There are two points to be developed here. One is that when learning and everyday life are characterized together as about knowledge and its acquisition, the relation between them is one in which learning is suppose to involve movement away from the ordinary and the mundane knowledgeability of some "everyday life." Second, any question about "away from the everyday "towards what?"leads straight to the political assumptions underlying theories of learning formulated in this way.
It will take a bunch of work to figure out (1) how to recognize the "everyday life" of theories of learning [part of this chapter is an exercise akin to bird watching: coming to see that the next new bird, which starts out looking like "just another ordinary brown bird" is wildly different from the others. I want you to be able to distinguish several species of argumentation about "the everyday,"] and (2) how to theorize learning as part of everyday life. But first, a quick comment on theories of learning, on our way to a more searching discussion of conceptions of everyday life.
Consider again how difficult it was to comprehend the learning going on in the tailor shops. If the only sensible reaction to attempts to see learning in tailor shops in Monrovia was deep frustration (I felt despairing about the happenings that dreadful day when I was taught that the fly goes on the front of the trousers and learned thereby how little I understood about apprenticeship), surely culturally-, politically-, historically-obdurate questions formed the context of the inquiry. On the other hand, apprenticeship, among tailors, marginal in several senses, in West Africa, stirred things, and me and it, up in compelling ways, and this makes the location of apprenticeship in all those marginal senses worth further consideration in themselves.
What are theories of learning about? Just as we would expect (given that we grew up going to school), theories of learning are about individuals' psychological processes, leading to knowledge acquistion. They are typically framed as (1) transmission (training, teaching, inculcation) that leads to (2) input, storage in memory, internalization of what what's transmitted, followed by (3) retrieval and transfer to "problem solving in new situations." This is a curious characterization of everyday life.
This merits critical examination, but what seems more startling is the narrow, pervasive history of philosophical and psychological treatments of "learning" as wholely an epistemological problem--it is all about knowing, acquiring knowledge, beliefs, skills, changing the mind, moving from intuitions to rules, or the reverse, and that is all. Just as the history of philosophy is sometimes characterized as a "third person singular project," so, by only a very slight disciplinary shift and extension, is the project of theorizing about 'education,' knowledge, culture, and their production and reproduction.
It might seem that a separation between learning and social life is precisely a division between epistemological concerns with regard to learning and social concerns about the world in which learning takes place or which it is about. A history of philosophy, social theory, anthropology and Western cultural practices might be taken up almost anywhere and furnish arguments, mostly in favor, for the proposition that social life is socially-constituted while learning happens in the head.
"The everyday" is an odd concept. Its recent history and field of meanings matter, because the term often substitutes for situated, social practice without analysis in the discourse of social practice theorists. It also plays a key, different, but equally unexamined role in a binary politics of changing practice. Like "cognition" used freely (e.g. Harvey's response to feminist critics, Bloch, Goody, etc.), or "learning" used freely in all sorts of venues in which education is at issue, "the everyday" is widely taken to be one of those "natural" terms for a thing without a compelling history. Not so.
Everyday Life
"The everyday" has a variety of common meanings: 1) life experience that is mundane, prosaic, humdrum, boring; 2) that which reoccurs, the routine, the unchanging, the ordinary and expected, the perhaps inescapable round of daily existence. 3) It is sometimes equated with culture, the customary, the commonplace; sometimes with the fabric of belief, value and lived experience, the everywhere of our lives that is nowhere in particular or 4) the site of praxis, pragmatics, and social practice. If anything, these meanings sustain the vague and open sense of the term. We might expect, then, that the problem with "the everyday" would turn out to be its lack of specific meaning in fields of endeavor in which its pivotal role should recommend a more searching acquaintance. But in fact the problem is just the opposite: the "everyday" has a longer history and a more broadly shared, more narrowly constrained meaning than many users of the term are aware. The Critical Theory Program at UC Davis sponsored in 1991 a conference entitled "The Problematics of Daily Life in the Human Sciences." Speakers began in similar ways, with a disclaimer: none of the authors felt that they had any idea of what a conference on the everyday might be about; then they went on to discuss a surprisingly closely related set of issues. All of them claimed dissatisfaction with some well known ways of conceiving of the everyday. All of them took the matter at hand to be a question of how and what people know under ordinary circumstances. Given that everyday life is a key conception in a variety of theoretical arenas, and that it has a history of which its friendly users seem unaware, it is worth exploring further.
This concern is confirmed when one examines, for instance, the work of scholars whose work is known for taking up conceptions of everyday life, Marxists who at the time were struggling with issues of working class motivation and elite intellectual articulation of revolutionary issues, false consciousness, alienation, and in general the relations of social existence to the possibilities for originating social change in working class social revolution. They seem to me to provide a sort of "worst case" scenario for my purposes, for their concerns with social change (rather than social order) and knowledge of the theoretical premises that underpin development of social practice theory are similar to my own. I come away from reading them with something like my feelings after the fiasco in the tailor shop: chagrined at how difficult it is to escape a narrow epistemological framework of social analysis. For in Marxist existentialist views, "everyday life" is often relegated to yet another dualistic contrast between what they do, philosophy, reflection, and the residual other, everyday life, which, as the object of reflection, is not itself philosophical reflection. Ironically, then, what they have to say about everyday life directly often seems mired in the dualistic epistemological project rather than escaping from it. They seem unsure about how much of what kind of culture adheres to "ordinary" working people; sometimes see the everyday as a domestic, or private, or as a residual kind of zone or space or period in history; and struggle (e.g. Heller) to find a generative, emancipatory principle inherent in everyday life.
There are three common strategies for assigning 'location' to different conceptions of the everyday. The first is an asocial construal of a strictly epistemological "everyday," the second a partially social view of everyday life in which different zones of social life have different epistemological characteristics, polarized between the ordinary and the special or privileged, and finally, a view of everyday life as the fabric of social existence. The everyday as either logical operator or as a zone of social life, implies that there are other aspects of life that are not everyday.
Examples
Lefebvre, in three volumes titled Critique de la vie quotidien (1946, 1962, 1968), intended to confront a central contradiction between philosophy and the "non-philosophical everyday" life, arguing that under capitalism daily life is characterized by alienation, fetishism, and the lack of human satisfaction. That daily life (rather than philosophy or art) is the site at which one measures the progress of the dialectic of alienation and human becoming. In 1968 Everyday Life in the Modern World, he treats everyday life as "non-philosophical" in relation to philosophy, representing, respectively reality in relation to ideality. He argues that: "We should try to overcome the limitations of both...using borrowed philosophical terminology, but directing it at the study of everyday life. The Quotidian can't be understood outside philosophy..p. 13. P. 14: the limitations of philosophy--truth without reality--always counterbalance the limitations of everyday life--reality without truth." For Lefebvre, everyday life consists of recurrences--gestures of labor and leisure, mechanical movements both human and properly mechanic, hours, days, weeks, months, years, linear and cyclical repetitions, natural and rational time; the study of creative activity ( of production in its widest sense). ...This leads him to the study of re-production of the conditions in which actions producing objects and labor are re-produced, re-commenced, and re-assume their component proportions or, on the contrary, undergo gradual or sudden modifications." p. 18.
There is not just an opposition to philosophy but a view of modernity as high culture that turns the everyday into low culture. (Lefebvre warns us of the ambivalence of the philosophical towards the non-philosophical, vacillating between scorn and admiration.) Thus, at one point he speaks of the interdependent realities of the quotidian and the modern: while the quotidian is that which is humble, solid, taken for granted, its parts in regular recurrence, undated, and (apparently) insignificant etc. the modern is that which is novel, brilliant, paradoxical, technical, worldly and (apparently) daring and transitory." p. 24. In fact, in his accounts of "the everyday" one can find, not surprisingly, but confusingly jumbled together various conceptions of it, whose confusion reflects both the epistemological strait-jacket and his attempts to move beyond it into a social grounding of social life (and analysis).
What is bothersome about these accounts stems from the opposition posed between philosophy and everyday life that sustains the dominating value of distanced contemplation. In their different ways both Heller and Lefebvre are trying to overcome it, with only partial success. Such a philosophy -- everyday life axis sustains the view that questions about everyday life are first of all epistemological ones. It leaves philosophers caught in their own epistemological project. Their work offers more clues to the epistemological 'bias' of discussions of 'the everyday' than it does a social -- ontological reformulation of a conception of everyday practice. It should also be noted that while the imaginary "everydays" conjured up by philosophers from their intuitions, dreams and deductions, may offer clues concerning ongoing social practices, they cannot claim to capture changing everyday life merely by analyzing changes they believe to be occurring in epistemological landscapes (Rorty, in Hebdige, Hiding in the Light).
Perhaps the very circumscribed specialization of the everyday practice of philosophy accounts for their wobbling location of "the everyday:" There are several distinct ways of conceiving of "everyday life," each amply represented in classical accounts on the subject, sometimes jumbled together. Since they differ in their ontological assumptions--a world of knowledge, a world generated in knowledge on the one hand, and a social ontology on the other, it seems crucial to sort them out. Each of the three common strategies for locating "the everyday" specifies how everyday life isseparated (or not) from other aspects of social existence. They may be placed along a continuum from asocial construal of a strictly epistemological "everyday," to a view of everyday life as the fabric of social existence.
| The everyday ________as_________ |
The everyday _________as_________ |
The everyday _________as_________ |
| residual category vis a vis philos., high culture, science, in some sense merely a logical operator. | banal, but a form of existence with special times, places & characteristics, e.g., as private, domestic sphere. | Social practice, as all of social living; culture as praxis.6 |
The everyday as either logical operator or as a zone of social life, implies that there are other aspects of life that aren't everyday. The non--philosophical everyday described above is a good example. (Maybe Martin Packer/Mark Poster fn would go here?).
But de Certeau offers a clearer example in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) beginning with a critique of logical operator models of everyday life, predicated as they are on an "outsider's" position of knowledge vis a vis such an 'everyday.' He adopts rather consistently a "zone" conception of everyday life. He says that the roots of his work lie in Wittgenstein, ethnomethodology and analytic philosophy.
[Note: This discussion of DeCerteau's argument shortly turns into raw material that need reworking in my argument.]
DeCerteau explores in abstractly historical terms what he sees as the emergent procedures by which consumers, today's everyday practitioners who are the majority of "ordinary citizens" engage in the appropriation and momentary transformation of uses of the products of primary production in this "productivist economy (somehow the words "capitalism" and "commodity" are taboo in this argument). Everyday tactics are a kind of production, but a secondary production, with distinctive characteristics of its own. The procedures are both interestingly and narrowly defined: the 'tactics' of everyday life (in opposition to the 'strategies' of the powerful), he argues, have no spatial terrain of their "own": p. 38: Now tactics, what everyday folks and everyday lives consist of: de C wants to xiv-xv: "bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of "discipline." Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of an antidiscipline" [with which he aligns Henri Lefebvre's work on the everyday], the subject of his book. "Lacking its own place, lacking a view of the whole, limited by the blindness (which may lead to perspicacity) resulting from combat at close quarters, limited by the possibilities of the moment, a tactic is determined by the absence of power just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of power." Also, everyday time, arts of thinking and acting other than the logic of the proper" (eg the I Ching. [give me a break]; interstitial opportunism, no place, consumption, can't accumulate. Though it is also creative: "p. 38 [e.d. tactics' have] intellectual creativity as persistent as it is subtle, tireless, ready for every opportunity, scattered over the terrain of the dominant order and foreign to the rules laid down and imposed by a rationality founded on established rights and property." "It" bets on a clever utilization of time. The everyday implies a different mentality. Also it is based on a distinction between two kinds of creativity: primary production and a secondary "production" that is a matter of combining existing products. That's the interesting part.
More uninteresting: The narrow definition turns practices into ways of talking, walking, reading, cooking--action, certainly, but mainly in linguistic mode, a mode that takes as its subject a fatal "the": "the" walker, reader or cook--in the epistemological third person singular, which always seems to bring an individual basis of analysis back in, whatever the intentions of the author (de Certeau makes his anti-individualist intent clear in the very first sentence of his first chapter.) And these are actions in quite narrow senses, which may well be the wrong direction to move in trying to critically shake up existing conceptions of social existence. Practice here is not a constitutive everyday, nor is it, he makes clear, a matter of custom or tradition. He insists on the active and emergent character of practice, which seems salutary, but by talking of practice in general terms ("walking"), about fleeting acts of speech or movement. I haven't commented on the linguistic focus of his argument, but figure that its preoccupation with knowledge, thought, and reason is in part a result of the difficulties of treating language as generated in social life and in social relations of language practice, as opposed to his view that language is a system of which speech is an appropriation and in which thought and language are viewed as two sides of a single coin.
This is basically a "zone of everyday life argument, characteristically taking discussion of everyday life to be a matter of epistemological issues; and generating distinctions between science and culture, strategy and tactics, and (though critically) the "artificial languages" of a science he deplores versus a popular ratio-cination or "unself-conscious thought." With polar distinctions, a "zone of everyday activity" is characteristically distinguished from something elite and specialized that is different and more powerful and subject to epistemological questions. Its about knowledge/culture, sciences, specialized, vs. culture --science "constitute the whole as its remainder...what we call culture."...."scientific dominant islands" in a sea, "against a background of practical "resistances" and symbolizations that cannot be reduced to thought..
De Certeau's characterizations of everyday life and practice are not those of social practice theory as I conceive it. For him, practices are procedures, such as walking and reading, they are of the instant and emergent. "Practices" are not the stuff of social existence entire, and they are lodged in a dualism, though more subtle than some (see discussion of who gets to be creative, for instance). The critique of philosophy and social theory that leads him to posit his conception of tactics is in some respects quite similar to my argument about the predicament of learning. He has a politics of space that I find interesting--at the same time that it is a "zone" rather than a place or space of everyday life. It is evidently a zone, because he argues that there are strategies and tactics in the world, the latter the recourse of the weak. Weakness is reflected in the absence of power to claim spaces and draw boundaries as "properly" those of strategies imposable on others. So tactics have no spaces of their own but appropriate, for the moment, "foreign" or perhaps better "alien" territory. That doesn't, however, keep him from distinguishing between (everyday) tactics and (specialized) strategies nor from identifying the scientist, philosopher and expert as the carriers of the latter. These two points are related, combining to lead him to his own theory of practice, a phenomenological, emerging, one in which description from the "inside" is possible, and should be the goal of social theory/practice.
He is into language and the use of commodities by consumers, but mainly as representations. p. 48: "...we should look for "consumer" practices having the double characteristic, pointed out by Foucault, of being able to organize both spaces and languages, whether on a minute or a vast scale." He may be anti-individualist, but the manner in which he approaches the study of "practices" but not subjects doesn't leave him with any robust interest in participation--in relations of inter-activity. Much of at least the first several chapters is so abstract that it falls into the third person singular mode all over the place, which in effect is either about an abstract individual, e.g., "an appropriation of language by the speaker who uses it" p. 33. or about mass individual(s): same page, at random: "users, like renters, acquire the right to operate on and with this fund without owning it. In effect, he lines everyone up facing the same way, acting in relation to the formal rules, and the limitations of production on their actions.
Seems like "practices" for de C are, eg pp. 30-31: operational schemas, ways of operating, styles of action, ways of using the constraining order of the place or of the language. Representations. Without leaving the place where he has no choice but to live and which lays down its law for him, he establishes within it a degree of plurality and creativity. an art of being in between... a very ancient art of making do. uses not = to procedures accepted and reproduced by a group, its ways and customs.
p. 61: He says that what he, among others from Kant onwards at least, is trying to articulate "a discourse on non-discursive practices," as are Foucault and Bourdieu. He argues that this is a cliff hanger, because "the theorizing operation" involves the terrain that science excluded in order to constitute itself in the first place: non-discursive activity,...this immense "remainder" constituted by the part of human experience that has not been tamed and symbolized in language." Allying himself and the others in this project with the everyday folks who have access only to tactics, he asks what ruses they employ (p. 62).
p. 64-65 He says since the 16th c relations of knowing and doing have been reversed. I think he means that it used to be that you do in order to know. I'd call this apprenticeship, & praxis. But it has moved away towards a train of relations that begins with discourses. They shape thinking which plans operational rationality or whatever. He is talking crafts, arts, etc. I need to get clear. And has been talking about scientists using ruses of a) cutting out exotic practices, be they primitive or unconscious to stand metonymically for all of social life, homogeneously as well, and then b) inverting them-- finding in them the principles of scientific, modern, elite life. He says that Freud, Durkheim, Marx never went near the unconscious, Australian aborigines or a factory, respectively. He talks about the doing/knowing business, (which I'm very much into, mind) as the method of science, over centuries. And a history of relations between science and craft that have so stripped away assumptions about the formidable character of craft 'knowledge' as to render it only private, subjective, and unavailable though nonetheless potentially of formidable value to "science." This change is reflected, he argues, in a shift from a categorization of the world in terms of theory (science) versus craft (practice) to categorization in terms of explicit discourse and tacit knowledge. It seems to me he is turning theory into discourse and then making a new polarization between two kinds of discourse, commanding and silent. But if so, I am confused, because he never talks about how theory changes into a kind of practice/discourse.
De Certeau on the shift from theory/practice to explicit discourse/implicit or tacit knowledge: I really want to make a point of this, in anticipation of fashionable contemporary arguments, and in particular, Steen: "for three hundred years "the combination of two distinct terms persists unchanged, the first being a referential and unrefined knowledge, and the second an explanatory discourse that brings forth into the light an inverted representation of its opaque source. This discourse is what we call "theory." It retains the word's ancient and classical meaning of "looking at/showing"...or of "contemplating". What has changed is that "primitive knowledge,...gradually dissociated from the techniques and languages that objectified it, becomes [merely] another form of intelligence possessed by the individual subject [silent, uncapturable, private, -- indeed tacit.] (must be around pp. 60-70.) [There is an ancient and primitive craft polarity in here--don't let him off the hook.]
The "everyday," whether as logical operator or as zone of social life limited to certain kinds of activities by certain kinds of persons, preserves a dualism between the ordinary and the exceptional, however these may be conceived. It is evidently asymmetrical and polarized. The epistemological everyday is a residual category vis a vis high culture, the latter indicating idealized endpoints of learning; or the banal locus of social activity of kinds that supposedly produce a limited and private knowledge (unselfconscious, tacit, silent or what have you). The epistemological everyday is -- likewise -- the foil, the baseline in cognitive and other genres of theorizing about learning. Together they suggest that learning--"acquiring knowledge"--involves movement away from something towards something else: from ignorance to knowledge, from empty to full, from child to adult, from the mundane to the specialized expert/science/philosophy.
Example 3, everyday life as social practice.
The third version of "the everyday," as the stuff of social practice follows so simply from the drastic commitments implied in years of ethnographic fieldwork, that I have a hard time not seeing it as the defining mode of anthropology. It does not, of course, follow that all anthropologists would draw this lesson from fieldwork, but the opposite does hold: ethnographic field research is strongly indicated in this view of the everyday lived in world. The point here is that all social existence is given in day to day terms -- in social practice. Questions of boundaries and divisions, differences in power, in value, and the complex, conflictual relations separating the high and low components of social life, assumed and justified in those accounts of zones and logical operators, are all assumed to be made; they are processes structured and structuring in practice. By the third account of everyday life if knowledge production is reserved in ideological and structural terms for privileged classes or institutions, it is done in political, economic and cultural relations and practices, not because daily living somehow confines some people but not others, or permits the escape of a privileged few. There is no other way to engage in knowledge production than in everyday ways. It requires political-economic and cultural analysis to explain qualitative differences in the epistemological characteristics of social living, not epistemological analysis. For me anthropology is not grounded in the psychic unity of mankind, nor even humankind; nor is it floating in a cultural phenomenology. Rather it is the constitutive everyday character of social existence that grounds my continued participation in the field.
There is a now formidable body of research speaking to these issues, in Science, Technology/Society (STS) studies, which since Latour & Woolgar's initial Laboratory Life have worked in many different settings on the proposition that "knowledge production" at sites of the sorts of practices located at the "high" poles in the first two versions of the epistemological everyday is in fact a matter of day to day social practice. It is the political and institutional arrangments of laboratory science that make differences among practices in concrete terms. No special minds, special ethics, no power to create knowledge independent of the institutional arrangements that make "knowledge creation" an acceptable label for what goes on in laboratories and other sites of science practice. Indeed a good deal of Latour's work is aimed at laying out the complexities of their institutional arrangments. (DeCerteau would say they have the power to establish proper place --property--in which to locate their practices.)
This body of research encourages a pursuit of different understandings of the nature of learning with respect to everyday life, for several reasons. It immediately raises the question: if the work of science is done in everyday ways, what does that do to our conception of the everyday everyday? This raises questions about what would happen if we stopped mystifying political-economic differences and dominant ideologies as differences by assigning them to differences among minds, knowledge, processes of production of knowledge, etc., and insisted on analyzing even the latter in terms of their social production in practice. And by my reading of STS work it provides a powerful argument against an exclusively epistemological reading of everyday life (and learning).
Having introduced notions of three different common uses of "the everyday," I want to go back to those first two conceptions of everyday life where common and academic theories of learning dwell. Given pervasive epistemological concerns about "the everyday" we must consider in turn how that "everyday" logical operator or zone functions in theorizing about learning.
The Voice of the Hermit
Whatever academic theorizing about "learning" encompasses, it is for the most part very little transformed from widely shared views across the social spectrum and far beyond the academy. Second, there is a curious historical shift in the field of psychology (in the U.S. at least) to which learning and development are non-controversially assigned in the social sciences, such that what used to be a field of "learning theory" no longer exists as such. There is work on "learning disabilities and learning problems." There is something called "educational psychology." Third, much of what goes under the name 'learning' is not about learning at all but about cultural "transmission," or "teaching," or "instruction," or "inculcation." Finally, I have never found in discussions of learning any notion of what a theory of learning consists in.
This last point, however, is easy to remedy. Martin Packer has proposed a useful notion of waht a theory of learning might be, at minimum requiring three kinds of stipulations: a telos for the changes implied in notions of learning; an assumption about the relation between subject and social world; and mechanisms by which learning is supposed to take place. This is a useful analytic tool, furnishing a set of questions for interrogating anything claiming to be an example, or for that matter a theory, of learning.
Common notions about the telos of learning are quite revealing concerning the ways in which learning and life are made to separate (in both senses). "Learning" (whether in common parlance, as elaborated in the part of the academy reserved for its direct consideration, or in socio-cultural-historical research which makes assumptions about learning too), is a process, one that moves learners in the direction of "higher" knowledge, which implies as well moving away from "lower," that is, whatever constitutes the lowest common denominator, the everyday knowledge of everyday folks. Separation of knowledge producers from everyday life, which implies that novice knowers must withdraw or separate themselves from everyday concerns, and that knowledge is conditional on such movement, is a major theme in learning/education literature and in discussions of knowledge, its production, and acquisition. The problem of life is to accumulate (or articulate) knowledge; coming to know is a process of distancing oneself from the thing to be learned, via contemplation, or as a matter of representation, while everyday life is on the whole viewed as entrapping and limiting. This "everyday" lives in an interesting limbo. It is the epistemological space you wouldn't want to inhabit were you a significant learner or a philosopher.
There is a further elusiveness for what is about to follow. I have often in the past and earlier in the book anchored a critical account of common claims about learning in the social evolutionary theory of late 19th century and early 20th century proto- and early anthropologists--especially Levy-Bruhl, because of his continuing influence to the present. But Tylor, Morgan, Spencer, Durkheim & Mauss, among others, all were grappling with the same issues. I am sometimes asked "why begin then", "why them?" For which I have none but presentist answers--their influence is still felt today. Timothy Mitchell locates broad sweeps of Western thought in the technologies of colonial domination in Egypt in the 18th and 19th centuries (Colonizing Egypt). Yet, when Steven Shapin describes the strong presence of these separations and social hierarchizations in Christianity, Greek thought, and early science, it makes me uneasy about my anthroplogically-bound 'history' or Mitchell's complex political, economic, social and cultural history. Are they adequate historical accounts of deeply practiced beliefs about knowledge, learning, and a politics of social privilege? There is overdetermination in many dimensions of ideology and practice that claim to lay down a separation of knowledge production from it's "reception" or "reproduction;" the separation of designated 'knowledge producers' or more broadly 'high culture producers' from "ordinary folks," and the understanding of learning processes that result: to learn requires withdrawal from ordinary life, learning requires "distance," to learn is to become specialized, non-ordinary.
Steven Shapin insists on the historical depth of very general beliefs about the direction, or movement, of what might be called the telos, of learning [But note that he does not think he is talking about learning!]:
Certain understandings and stipulations about the place of knowledge 'have'...scarcely changed from their Greek and Roman origins, and indeed, remain fundamentally unchanged today....In our culture we do not have to listen hard to hear the hermit's voice." (1990: 208).
Further,
[W]e inherit the historical legacy of so much testimony that the producers of our most valued knowledge are not in society. At the point of securing their knowledge [at the end of learning process], they are said to be outside the society to which they mundanely belong. And when they are being most authentically intellectual agents, they are said to be most purely alone. (Shapin 1990: 192).
He catalogues a long list of religious prophets, artists, poets, writers, painters composers, and philosophers struggling in or sitting on an assortment of hilltops, wildernesses, cells, garrets, logs in forests, islands and pond-sides, both literary inventions and real. He quotes popular poetic views such as the lines of Wordsworth on Newton: "Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone." He observes that "Descartes prefaced his Discourse on Method with a picture of chilling aloneness...Descartes decided that his renewal of philosophic method depended on separating himself from society, resolving "to remove myself from all places where any acquaintance were possible, and to retire to a country such as this [Holland]...where...I can live as solitary and retired as in deserts the most remote." (Shapin quoting Descartes p. 194). He describes separation-solitude-withdrawal in terms of "retirement"(Shapin p. 202), and it applies equally to p., 206: "scientific discovery" and "moral enlightenment." p. 206: "The solitary philosopher, like the religious isolate, might be seen as separated from the corruptions and contaminations of social life," from "publics" or "civic society" of various kinds, or mundane life.
The nature of that "solitude," as one guise for the separation of social life and learning, requires careful thought -- it is only a symbolic (or ideological) solitude as Shapin points out; in concrete social terms it requires withdrawing into certain kinds of -- notably privileged-- social and institutional settings (the company of gentlemen or the brotherhood of monks) and often pointedly announces withdrawal from specific contaminants (e.g., the company of women and the hurly burly of "ordinary" life. For seventeenth century scientists in England it implied refuge from participation in a dangerous political scene as well). This is also only made possible by the scientists' access to wealth and position, and by the labor of others. "No solitude without servitude," is the way sociologist of science Leigh Star has summed it up.
Shapin in the published paper doesn't say a whole lot about from "what" the scientists felt the need to withdraw, though class prejudice and misogyny both seem heavily implicated. But even without elaboration withdrawal -- indeed, the making of distinctions-- seems to be a fundamental gesture of privilege, of conventional practices, including withdrawal into elite pursuits, into rational, neutral objectivity, away from dominated and common, crude persons, activities, locations, collectivity, and ways of knowing.
Bourdieu pursues this line of argument in his analysis of the axis of ease/necessity in Distinction. Cultural competence [ugh!] (though it is a nicely broader term than "knowledge" or "skill") is learned, he says, under certain objective conditions of acquisition for instance, at home or in school. These shape what is learned, but also the manner in which they are learned. The manner of learning is related to both content and circumstances: it is part of culture, it is a cultured relation with culture and it grows out of, and helps to perpetuate the conditions of acquisition. This thickens the notion of "cultural competence" into a nexus of relations rather than a single operation. It insists on the situated character of cultural competence, as always acquired in relation to a particular social field (though of course the social world is not exhaustively composed of social fields).
To get to the telos of learning, we can begin with an obvious candidate for high cultural endpoint: artists' and connoisseurs' command of "the pure aesthetic gaze." We can ask about the conditions of production of French cultural understanding (and practice) in the anthropological sense, of such cultural competence. It is notable that this high cultural competence and its acquisition depend deeply on various kinds of separation from the everyday.
The aesthetic disposition, a generalized capacity to neutralize ordinary urgencies and to bracket off practical ends, a durable inclination and aptitude for practice without a practical function, can only be constituted within an experience of the world freed from urgency and through the practice of activities which are an end in themselves, such as scholastic exercises or the contemplation of works of art. In other words, it presupposes the distance from the world...which is the basis of the bourgeois experience of the world. (Distinction p. 64.)
The main social conditions according to Bourdieu are relations of different social classes to economic ease/necessity. The cultural valuation of wealth and prosperity as freedom from necessity, as separation from the concerns of "ordinary" folks who must act according to their economic necessities is characteristic of claims about cultural production in the schoolish-academic-scholarly terms which infuse and shape the broad cultural constitution of high culture. They make distance from necessity the keystone of privilege and the deeply embedded characteristic of high-cultural endeavors, including the production of knowledge and the identification of culture-heroic destinies or destinations (or the directional beacons of academic assumptions about learning). This involves movement away from the ordinary in two senses, from lower social class positions, and from economic functional urgencies.
Economic power is first and foremost the power to keep economic necessity at arm's length....This affirmation of power over a dominated necessity always implies a claim to a legitimate superiority over those who, because they cannot assert the same contempt for contingencies in gratuitous luxury and conspicuous consumption, remain dominated by ordinary interests and urgencies. ...The tastes of freedom can only assert themselves as such in relation to the tastes of necessity, which are thereby brought to the level of the aesthetic and so defined as vulgar. This claim to aristocracy is less likely to be contested than any other, because the relation of the 'pure', 'disinterested' disposition to the conditions which make it possible...has every chance of passing unnoticed. The most 'classifying' privilege thus has the privilege of appearing to be the most natural one. (Distinction 55-56.)
He argues that the manner of using symbolic goods, [whether artistic or intellectual]
especially those regarded as the attributes of excellence, constitutes one of the key markers of 'class' and also the ideal weapon in strategies of distinction, that is, as Proust put it, 'the infinitely varied art of marking distances.' (Distinction p. 65.)
In fact, learning theory, to the extent it implies movement away from the everyday towards something that is supposedly not, could be summed up in Proust's phrase. It isn't learning itself, surely that generates these distinctions, distances and relations of domination. Rather, theories of learning are instruments in bringing them about.
This leads to further questions: Whose points of view shape theories of learning? Do we need to worry about whether what Bourdieu says about the pure aesthetic gaze operates in radically different ways than the cultural competence more typical of those physicists, prophets, and experts of American and British discussions of learning? In my view the question is not whether aesthetic analysis does, or could effortlessly, include the academic/rationalist stuff of the science/expertise directed theories of learning. The real question is where shall we turn for conceptions of becoming culturally competent when the term culture begins with a small c rather than capital C? For one can only conclude along with Bourdieu that theorizing about the acquisition of cultural competence is being purveyed from a thoroughly bourgeois point of view and with respect only to what is commonly accepted as high culture. The rest of learning-everyday-life goes unexamined and untheorized as well.
Is Bourdieu's an epistemological everyday? Yes and no. He is insistent on the fundamentally political character of the most basic epistemological concerns, even, most especially, that relation at the heart of culture for many anthropologists, acts of classification and the making of cultural categories. His analysis of classification as symbolic violence runs throughout his work. So epistemological issues are never only that, and certainly never politically neutral. He also insists on the social, structural, conditions, in relation with which day by day internalized dispositions are laid down. So it is not knowledge alone that reproduces knowledge. Indeed this may be another structural, if not practice-based, way to indicate what is meant by the notion that learning, knowing, etc. are "situated." He argues about everyday life in France that it operates in differentiated class-cultural terms, on the basis of an ideology which would fit very well with the notion of the French conception of the everyday as a zone, different from rarified privileged, autonomous or semi-autonomous fields of high cultural production. He would no doubt treat theories of learning as part of the ideological apparatus for producing people who act in its name. Nonetheless, in spite of the ways in which his work does not reflect standard characterizations of epistemological issues, I find serious problems with respect to his conceptions of everyday life, perhaps more sharply and precisely addressable as questions about his theory of social practice.
Reification and the Politics of Telos
Though it is impossible to separate casual conceptions of learning as movement away from the everyday from conceptions of learning as movement towards a state of knowledgeable cultural privilege, each has distinct analytic implications. The claim that to learn is to move away from some putative everyday, (whether merely a residual dualist category or some zone of living) is to set apart and reify learning as a process in and of itself. To stipulate general societal ends towards which learning should move is an inescapably political act. Mainstream and unintended assumptions and claims about "learning" are not apolitical or neutral, as they might wish to claim. Rather, they have the effect of accepting and justifying the contemporary social order in culturally powerful, powerfully cultural, terms. Indeed, if Shapin, Bourdieu and de Certeau are right, present ways of theorizing about learning rest on political premises and have political effects that go back to ancient and/or colonial and/or assorted recent histories, closely reflected in contemporary standpoints.
The drawbacks of reifying learning, whether in the common terms of short formal stints of mentally internalizing knowledge, or less immediate terms, are quickly catalogued: As a thing in itself, "learning" is something that must take place elsewhere than in the circumstances in which what is learned is supposed to be "applied," or at least it must happen before the test, or as a precondition for "learning transfer" to occur, or in childhood as preparation for adulthood, or in transitions from school as preparing for a changing world of work. These create disturbing (and specious) divisions between learning and using knowledge, and linear relations in time between learning "before" to use "after." Most seriously they produce a division such that: one may be learning or living but not both at once. They also tend to produce an ideology of specific institutional settings for propagating and characterizing (and studying) "real learning" while leaving as a vague residual (everywhere and nowhere), unstudied operators or zones of life in which application of the products of learning--"knowledge," "skill" -- not learning is the order of the day. (This state of (ideological) affairs, indeed, set me off in pursuit of apprenticeship in West Africa.) The emphasis on learning now for other times and places has in it an idea of connectedness, indeed of absolutely essential connectedness "then and now" or "now and later." But what isn't clear is that any theory of learning that starts with this principle is proposing that learning is produced in a site in which 'real life' is temporarily suspended. As "product" knowledge is to be applied in real life in which whatever people are doing is not "learning.' This is a set of normative prescriptions for relations among communities of practice so exotic that it is difficult to see how they have come to be mistaken as universals.
Stipulations in theory of a telos for learning of what should constitute movement towards greater knowledge/mastery is at its root a political declaration. A number of privileged directions of knowledge accumulation, cultural capital, expertise, etc., have been discussed already in Shapin's account of early science and Bourdieu's analysis of relations among French class cultures: monks and saints, artists and other producers of high culture, philosophers, scientists, and perhaps less romantically, professionals and experts.
There are two common ways of expressing the telos of learning:
There are widespread evolutionary views about the accumulation of knowledge and the conditions for acquiring it as progression in the direction of rational inquiry, science, individuality, or continual organizational learning. This assumption about telos does hardly more than invoke a conventional whig history of science or ideas. Examples would include the two principle strands of cognitive science that recommend movement towards self-contained, computational rationality (Haugeland p. 28) and professional life (Simon) or expert knowledge (Dreyfus & Dreyfus); or Piaget's developmental trajectory is that of formal operational intelligence, inspiration for his genetic epistemology coming from the mathematical foundations posited by the Burbaki. The point is that theorizing about learning is always about who learners should stop being and who they should become, what masters they should follow and what makes those masters exemplary.
It is also about which few should arrive at exemplary knowing and which should not. Contrastive social categorizations or identities are partly furnished and made vivid by the way in which what they are commonly assumed to be able to know, know a lot of, be terrible at, or extraordinary in other ways. As Bourdieu suggests, cultural competence is characterized by not only how much of what sorts of high culture is acquired, but also the manner of relating to it. A theory that posits a telos of refinement (a move away from the messiness of practical concerns, to a realm of reflection and detachment where genuine knowledge resides), embodies suppositions about unequal social categories. Inequalities of social class, ethnicity, and gender relations are fashioned, assumed, indeed learned, in terms positively and negatively valued with respect to the class, gender and ethnic hierachies bounded at one pole by the ordinary everyday and at the other pole by a telos of mastery. Or in "scientific" accounts of rationality, formal logic, and distanced contemplation, knowledge production, autonomy and neutral objectivity are thought to characterize the dominant category in each case. The everyday world of reproduction and maintenance, the ordinary, routine, particular and interested are assumed to characterize the dominated category (Lave 1988; 1996 The Savagery of the Domestic Mind (in Laura Nader (ed.) Naked Science ).
Whether in common "common sense" or academic "common sense" terms, distance from the ordinary is equated with privilege. The shape of this argument should seem familiar, and owes a debt to Bourdieu as we have seen. His argument in Distinction in the end levels at Kant's project the charge that it is generated in bourgeois culture and embodies a bourgeois ideology of culture rather than a universalist aesthetics. The same is true for theories of learning which take high cultural ends as the telos of "normal" learning. Where is the telos of culture-learning in the anthropological sense? In everyday life? In everyday social practice? There is extraordinary silence about this, or rather abstractly negative judgments. Or else a kind of abstract assumption that whatever constitutes modes of knowledgeability in high cultural terms, the everyday learning of everyday life must have opposite characteristics.
The perks of privilege involve appropriating the legitimate possibility of producing knowledge. This is simply another way to speak of hegemonic power/knowledge relations as these are reflected indirectly in assumptions about what learning is about. Bourdieu insists that in French class culture, at least, the production of culture is reserved by the haute bourgeoisie for the haute bourgeosie. He discusses at length the ways in which the dominated fraction of the dominant class is the site of cultural production in France, for example. Lefebvre, de Certeau, Shapin, as well as Bourdieu, among others, are notable for struggling with these issues in more subtle terms than most, rather than just assuming the distinction to start with. But pervading everyday life and social research (whether addressing social practice, learning and everyday life directly or not) there is an absolute division between producing knowledge and reproducing knowledge, mostly without the sociological analysis Bourdieu brings to bear. The division permeates Western cultural and educational assumptions in a big way. Widespread belief in academic circles underwrites distinctions between teaching and research, the equation of mental and manual labor with conception and execution, not to mention those distinctions themselves. It is elaborated in notions that teaching is a matter of reproducing knowledge, and that creativity cannot be taught. That learning is a matter of internalizing existing knowledge, and reproducing culture (produced elsewhere). In the gulf of practiced distinctions between knowledge production and learning as concepts: In one sense we might well wonder why we require two terms rather than one. Creating knowledge certainly involves learning. Surely the reverse is also true? Not if the term knowledge actually stands for something else: for official knowledge, and the social locations for which production of new knowledge is reserved to itself--to philosphy, science, high culture, to as Bourdieu argues, the dominated fraction of the dominant class. The dual division plays out in this work as it is accompanied by the claim that there is only one source of (high) cultural production and that all the rest is merely class-cultural ways of taking it up or not.
The argument is twofold and accords with other attempts to think about the issues in more nuanced terms: Surely there is never knowledge production that is not at the same time knowledge reproduction, and vice versa. The problem is to discover how such things are enacted in multi-level ongoing social practice. Second, if this is the problem, then the question must be broadened, for production and reproduction of even the most prototypical examples of what might be called "knowledge" are never only that--we do not live an epistemologically constituted social existence. Third, if the simple dual division between production and reproduction of knowledge is not an adequate description of social life, we must search for better terms in which to understand it, and we must not forget to ask what this division does to our understanding of learning and our everyday lives as it affects them, adequate or not.
Conclusion
I have been discussing two major political premises embedded in common assumptions about learning. The first premise is that learning involves movement away from the ordinary and everyday. It thus creates divisions and distinctions in degrees of privilege and mundaneness. It relegates the study of everyday social life to epistemological abstractions and ideological pronouncements. It also abstracts, or defines everyday life as the base, the lowest forms of living and learning imaginable, or as the site of social disorder and faulty social reproduction. It creates polarized distinctions between learning and doing, learning and living, learning and using knowledge. The second premise is that there is a pervasive naturalized assumption that divides the production of knowledge and the reproduction of knowledge. It draws a line between asymmetrically valued relations concerning knowledge: Knowledge is either created or it is reproduced. There are profound political struggles involved in deciding which is which (especially given that some much more complex state of affairs characterizes all everyday lives). Both premises grow out of that profoundly disturbing claim about the nature of social order that insists on the separation of learning from everyday life.
Suppose we reconsider learning as part of social life. If social life is not construed to be an epistemological everyday realm, then what? And is a non-reified conception of learning, as part of everyday life possible? Is it possible without "disappearing" learning altogether into everyday life? It means that everyday life is partially fashioned in relations of learning -- apprenticeship rather than mental exercise. It means considering the workings of apprenticeship in social practice, as in the mosque-school effects described by Mitchell (even if they must leave the stage of Mitchell's particular discussion of Egyptian political history). This brings us to perhaps the principle suggestion of the book for how to begin: Social existence, everyday social practice is first of all socially-historically generated. It is not constituted in and of knowledge, knowing, truth, certainty or a humanized omniscience (Farrell first essay). Most especially the epistemological issues of social existence are social in their constitution. There are epistemological questions, and whole Western traditions which derive from an assumed primacy of epistemological concerns their central characteristics and very being. But if they have no existence independent of the social practice of which they are a part, then epistemological issues are subsumed within the social ontology of human existence and not the other way around. Most especially when we explore issues of learning, knowing, skill, knowledge, etc., in social context we ignore these radically counter-intuitive relations at our peril. Reversing the customary relations between social ontological and epistemological inquiry is one of the most central issues in reformulating a theory of social life and learning.
What are alternative ways to look at learning as a part of everyday life and everyday life as in part a matter of learning? If learning isn't movement away from ordinary social existence, perhaps it is movement more deeply into and through social existence; if not individual mental process, it is a social, relational, decentered process--not simple, nor narrowly univocal. If knowledge, or rather knowing, is creative and reproductive participation at the same time, subsumed within ongoing social practice (not as preparation for it), the interesting questions lie not in dual categories of elite knowledge producers and luckless consumers (a category to which all teachers are consigned except designated "knowledge producers" (cf. Herndon 1978)), but in the nature of those relations of apprenticeship in everyday life through which practices, participants, and ways of participating change in part to be different than before and in part to be "the same." These are good leads into an exploration of apprenticeship and learning as social practice.
And this raises questions about how we are to conceive of ongoing social life as social practice rather than as an epistemological everyday. We're going to be talking about in effect the social/political ontology of everyday life. Social practice theory looks like good problematic for this; and yet, there are different kinds, and they have quite different implications for understandings of everyday life and how to address it. My own version begins with the notion that everyday life and learning are made in the medium of participants' partial participation in ongoing, changing social practices. It is not possible to polarize knowers from novices, learners from inculcators, or knowledge production from reproduction, for polarization ceases to be possible as soon as located people lead partial, multiple-practice, interrelated lives.