Tony Wilson [Tony Wilson] - Consumption, Psychology and Practice Theories

In this first chapter, I begin to explore co-incidence or distance between practice theories and philosophical hermeneutics. Both argue for understanding-in-practicesor practical habituated unreflected upon understanding how evident in our everyday coping behaviour as fundamental. Propositional understanding that something is the caseor reflectionis secondary. I trace a threefold narrative of moments characterising practical understanding, following its theorising through hermeneutics (Husserl to Heidegger, Gadamer to Ricoeur), seeing it finally flourish as generically configured action, embodied and equipped, embedded within habituated horizons of understanding. Tacit horizons of focussed behaviour or practical understanding (such as concern for human dignity in caring) are often distant cognitive frameworks of involvement, far from the attention of an actor. As such, they are an eminently suitable subject for research from health psychology to marketing. In this chapter, I commence constructing a hermeneutic perspective on social practices from making meaning while watching television to our purchasing everyday products in the local supermarket.

Considered from a hermeneutic perspective, our human understanding is fundamentally or primordially exemplified by using equipment, in the philosopher Heideggers example, a hammer. We can be said to understand its usage. Visibly incorporated in habituated, hence ready-to-hand, behaviour as an embodied narrative belonging to an accustomed generic goal-directed practice, our understanding implicitly or tacitly anticipates and actualises an activity subject to a public standard of achievement. In practices, attention is upon aim or goal rather than embodiment or equipment.

Our engagement with entities ready-to-hand does not involve explicit awareness of their properties; instead, we see through them to the task we are engaged in. When we are smoothly driving in nails with a hammer, our focus is on the thing we are building not the size or shape or colour of the hammer.

(Dotov et al., 2010)

Such habitual, little reflected on, skilled coping (ibid.) in material circumstances involves our knowing or understanding how to act appropriately. This embodied perception of surroundings precedes secondary reflective propositional knowing that . Performative knowing is distinct from declarative asserting (Brown and Duguid, 2001: 199). So, for instance, a female Chinese frequent mall visitor told us in a research focus group: Basically, I expect good security from the mall. Her statement can be interpreted hermeneutically as referring to material/metaphorical horizons of understanding (Gadamer, 1975) from which she enters this shopping mall, supporting her forward projecting (ibid.) there of good security from an enabling equipped social tool (Burchell, 2017). Her embodied understanding of the mall as secure is evident not in concurrent propositional assertion but rather as projected by her habitual mode of walking, thus visible in her behaviour (e.g. how she carries valuables, displaying a tacit view of the place as equipped to deter snatch thieves). Whatever they are calledpractical understanding, habitus, tacit knowledge, skills, competencescapabilities are embodied through practices. (Wallenborn and Wilhite, 2014: 60) Visual evidence of affective intentionality (understanding) (e.g. finding a mall secure) can be constituted behaviourally. Embodying assumptions formed through repetition, a horizon of understanding informs actionor as Bourdieu, similarly, writes, embodiment is the creation of a memory by repetition (1977: 59).

Importantly, truth conditions for this embodied public narrative of projecting and producing participatory activity need not include (indeed may be taken to exclude) her thinking about security when in the mall. Rather, the evidence is embodiment in publicly accessible activity (Rouse, 2006: 504). While not reflected upon during this practice, a subsequent occasion of research allows her to speak about her expectation, integrated with mall events in a hermeneutic circle (Gadamer, 1975) of her behavioural assemblage (Canniford and Shankar, 2013), conjoining meaning and material. Albeit mundanely instantiated here in a mall, understanding constitutes the basic being-in-motion ( Bewegtheit , movedness) of the existing human being ( Dasein ) (Gadamer, 2006: 39).

As Davey writes, unpacking the qualities of unquiet understanding, the notion of practice is central to how we understand ourselves as hermeneutic subjects (2006: 55)not least in a focus group. Here Heideggers hermeneutics moves our understanding of understanding from replicating subjectivity (Dilthey) to projecting and producing public meaning in a behavioural narrative. What then is the primordial structure of being there in everyday living as understanding-in-practices? How do our wider value-laden horizons of (generic) expectations (Livingstone, 2012: 189) (such as good security in a mall) (in)form or shape more specifically occupied orientations (Morley, 1992: 50) in understanding particular practices (e.g. purchasing products) we appropriateor are alienated fromin daily living? How is their embodied ideational relationship evident?