Praxis. An Exercise in Engaging Cultural Studies

This book first appeared as “Praxis and the City. An Exercise in Engaging Cultural Studies” in Polish in 2017, as part of the “New Humanities” series published by the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The book’s inclusion in this series is a good indication of its intention: to show the praxis trend in the humanities in the context of contemporary transformations – of both the world and knowledge. Praxis philosophies and theories of practice are, of course, nothing new. After all, the tradition of the concept of praxis can be traced back to Aristotle, and in modern times to Marxism, pragmatism, phenomenology and struggles with structuralism. Today, however, the question of praxis is returning in the context of so-called post-anthropocentric humanities and the ontological turn, as practical traditions share a common postulate with these most current philosophical trends – to bring the humanities closer to reality, “back to the rough ground” as Wittgenstein put it, the “turning theory on its head” demanded by the young Marx. In this book I contend that the reason for this particular coincidence, happenstance or intellectual conjuncture lies in the fact that we have become aware of the ontological complexity of the world against the background of dramatic transformations to the technological, environmental and mental reality (the Anthropocene, climate change, unbridled urbanisation, migration and social mobility, cultural conflicts etc.). Praxis and the related knowledge – sensitive, responsible and mindful of the composition of the world – that is phronesis are once again returning to the fold as we realise that our everyday experience of reality is increasingly complicated. At the same time, however, praxis or practical trends, like so-called post-humanism, are a reaction to knowledge in the humanities isolated from the world: epistemocentric of logocentric, as we shall call it here. In my home field of cultural research (by which I understand Anglo-American cultural studies, French and Polish sociology of culture, as well as the original project of Polish cultural studies), this is an especially difficult task. Like it or not, use of the notion of “culture” points us towards the constructed nature of reality: its consciousness aspect and ideas, symbols, meanings and norms. As I will endeavour to persuade readers, praxis models respond very cautiously to this challenge, without forcing us to abandon the concept of “culture” or succumbing to a naive, pre-philosophical realism, but making a certain ontological shift: placing the cultural in the field of social practices. They therefore enter a dialogue with new ontologies, but without being guilty of the naivety or radicalism of some post-anthropocentric concepts, demonstrating that agency equipped with senses, meanings, and conscious intentions – both human and cultural agency – retains an important function in an ontically complex reality. But at the same time, culture from this perspective is ceasing to be a stabilised, reified object of academic explanations and a sphere of thought isolated from the world of nature, matter and technology. It is becoming, as Ryszard Nycz put it, culture as a verb,² culture as an act, a process jointly composed of our thoughts and actions. This is one of the reasons why Praxis can be seen as a topical book, although it picks up very old concepts and returns to well-established intellectual traditions.

When published, however, Praxis immediately raised doubts and debates, some of which led me to decide to make a number of corrections and changes to the text of the book. First, the original Polish title also included the words “the city”. This led some readers to expect a book proposing a concept of “urban practices” or situated in the space of specific cities and with a description and analysis of practices understood in this way – objectively. And yet this was not the intention at all – from the outset, I planned the book as a methodological and theoretical undertaking. My regular research field is Polish cultural studies, and within it a specific strand of research – cultural urban studies. So indeed, my everyday work involves research on cities and conducted in cities. In Praxis, however, I did not want to reduce the city to the role of research subject. I was more interested in whether elements of praxis can provide us with a source of methodological postulates for contemporary urban studies and whether they offer a promise of cognitive innovation, redefining not the object of the research, but above all the scientific knowledge itself and the method leading to it. This intention seemed possible to fulfil as, after all, the very roots of the concept of the city – in the Greek polis – revealed a strong connection between praxis and urban life. The Marxist or pragmatic variant of this thinking is conceived in the conditions of industrial-type urbanisation, and today urban studies scholars are often interested in reality as practical, not least because of the philosophical legacy of Henri Lefebvre. This is because the praxis–phronesis dyad inherited from Aristotle was supposed to result in common knowledge, created collectively and leading to a common good. It was supposed to provide the ethical, social and material foundations for a community to function. At its source, therefore, praxis–phronesis was a political question, tackled after the Industrial Revolution in the conditions of urbanised societies.

Nevertheless, the original title was indeed misleading. It raised the expectation that this book would focus on analysis and interpretation of certain “typical urban practices” differing from “non-urban” ones. This is not an unworkable idea, but I do not see it as the most important thing to construct a special catalogue of practices related, for example, to characteristic ways of travelling, producing, living or working in specific cities. Urban studies literature is full of such analyses. The idea of this book was more profound than a straightforward description of reality: what I am looking for is a particular way of theorising that keeps up with this reality and a methodological project that makes this possible. It is this project that I call “engaging cultural studies”. These, of course, are conducted in the contemporary, urbanised world, which, following the post-Lefebvrian theory of planetary urbanisation, basically means the entire world experienced by us – even mountain ranges or bodies of water bear traces of urbanised life. Yet these are not the subject of my analyses – this is a field explored by Neil Brenner and Carl Schmidt and many other promotors of new epistemologies of the urban. What interests me is the tools, methods, ways of proceeding, research approaches, and relations into which I enter with this reality. More than anything else, then, I am interested in research praxis.

Secondly, therefore, doubts were raised as to the book’s distinctly theoretical, methodological orientation. This in turn resulted from the eternal difficulties of practical perspectives in the humanities – since they are geared towards praxis, they should be practical, not theoretical. The text should therefore be filled with examples of practical research experiences, and not a dense, engaging reading of other people’s theories. Yet that is de facto exactly what this book is. It is a debate with intellectuals. It is an attempt to engage readers in a sensitive reading of other people’s concepts and writings. It is a record of my own engagement in various traditions, searching through them, and examining them as tools for thinking. This is again an entirely deliberate choice. Praxis is an attempt to tackle the stereotype that practical reality is intellectually straightforward, non-refined, lacking reflection, everyday and colloquial – that it is a lower-status reality that does not generate its own forms of knowledge and does not entail a theorising process. I demonstrate, however, looking back to different variants of praxis philosophies, that the opposite is true. After all, one of the greatest accomplishments of these models in the humanities was to make us aware of the existence of two sides to the coin: the peculiar status of what Louis Althusser termed “theoretical practice” and the particular challenge presented by – here following Pierre Bourdieu – building a “theory of practice”. These two concepts are essentially inextricable. Both are also an extremely important lesson for contemporary humanities in how to build a relationship between academic knowledge and the reality experienced by humans in order avoid simple oppositions: distanced speculation or naive immersion in the world. The main challenge that practical theoreticians set themselves was to conceive the whole experience – not only popular, but also academic – as practical: situated in realities, societal, dynamic, historical, material, and embodied. I would like now to again embrace this challenge, because at play are the connections between knowledge of the humanities and the world available to use with its problems. Of course, though, this made a particular type of writing necessary – eschewing traditional analysis and reconstruction of theories in favour of showing the processes of theorising. I therefore try to examine the “instrumental” side of theory, asking not only what these theories explain, but also how and why they do so. Finally, I also enquire whether these theories can still be used. I want to show them as the products of practical people created with a certain objective, but also in specific historical circumstances. Theories do not fall out of the sky, but are formed between and among us.

Part Two of the first edition of Praxis contained a dense, autoethnographic description of my own research experiences. In this version I decided to shorten this part to synthetic examples of specific aspects of research that proved to be the most problematic but also the most instructive. The dense autoethnographies would be unclear to readers from outside of the Polish context – they would require numerous clarifications and footnotes, which would lose sight of the key problems.

But this is only one of the reasons for the editorial changes in the text. Another is the fact that I decided to react to doubts not by weakening, but strengthening the methodological and theoretical objective of the book. This is simply its most important aim. The difficulties experienced by praxis-based orientations in the humanities stem from the fact that they were not expected to produce methodological innovation or advanced theory, but rather naive engagement. This is one of the reasons why, in my view, their enormous contribution to global humanities has never been fully recognised and appreciated and they have seldom been reconstructed as a separate model. Today, this somewhat harmful attitude towards the concepts of praxis and practice and those who employ them in academic reflection results from another – in my view more dangerous – tendency. The neoliberalisation of academia and radical marketisation of knowledge lead to a host of risky simplifications. Precedence is given to just one, very narrow understanding of practice in research: only “applied”, applicable, implementable and ready-made solutions are practical. Humanities from this point of view are either perceived as socially useless or tailored to this reductive view of the practical consequences of knowledge. I would like to defend at all costs the traditions discussed here from such a naive and dangerous understanding of practice. Most them, declaratively, were established as forms of critical and engaged – socially and politically – thinking. The concept of praxis has more often been used to enable change than to sustain the status quo, with practical philosophers often expecting to be followed in the direction of social change. Nowadays, traditions of praxis – not only in the variant derived from the writings of Marx, Gramsci and Habermas – more often provide us with critical theory and the capacity to recognise the status quo than agree to reproduce the unjust conditions of the world. Yet this is a type of a particular criticism – I call it engaging, and not simply engaged, because it requires that we undertake several tasks: adopt a position of practical reason (phronesis), situate our theoretical thinking in the (natural, material, human) world, and learn. These all combine to form the methodological programme developed in this book, which envisages that, given the threats and crises we face, the humanities should become more modest and socially and politically responsible, as well as permitting – both us and those who familiarise themselves with our knowledge – to learn from each other. This is a vision of academic conduct in which we speak not as authorities or experts, but as colleagues and partners who want to engage people in knowledge as an adventure and collective task to perform. I hope that in this book I manage to show the different variants of the philosophy of praxis as good guides in this venture.

As a result of all this, the structure of Praxis is distinct and not straightforward. The opening chapter, entitled “Research design. Introduction to the workshop” aims to explain the book’s main objectives. But it is not an ordinary introduction, an explication of the book’s main premises or hypotheses. In it, I attempt to show the text of Praxis (and the research process in the humanities as a whole) as an essentially practical undertaking. This chapter serves to expose the seams and share the tricks of the trade, showing elements of the humanities workshop – asking questions, planning the research process, searching for keywords, creating mind maps, writing and reading – as practical actions in which occasionally we encounter great fortune and at times we come up against hurdles and hindrances. This chapter is therefore rather a methodological tool for reading the whole book than a linear interpretation of the methodology it promotes – it is meant to reveal the purpose and intent behind the rest of the text and help readers to understand them.