Friday, October 28, 2005
life becomes the primordial venue
of theoretical practice
Normative validity of lifeworld practices looks proximally the same as factical acceptance. The difference depends on the ability of the truly normative claim to work with validation processes when (inasmuch as) they’re required. People working pre-critically do much the same things as people working in ordinary life critically, because most unquestioned presumptions are established for (once-overtly) good reason, though the good reason is beyond ordinary understanding or has been forgotten.
Anyway, a theoretically valid practice is not the same as a theoretical practice! How to do things with words, for example, is not practically about linguistic analysis (and/or showing mastery of surrealizing narrativity).
Nonetheless, love of “theory” is something that fellow lovers best understand.
But what we also should appreciate is why 99.9% (?) of the world gets along just fine without the intervention of the theorists; the world is not largely proceeding invalidly (It’s not invalid to be underdeveloped, rather invalid to be disinterested in learning, since disinterest in learning is a deformation of one’s nature, which at birth loved learning).
A valid practice usually isn’t required to validate itself; its proof is in the pudding, as they say (i.e., as durably acceptable efficacy of the activity having—tacitly “claiming”—validity). A valid practice may largely self-[re]validate via the adaptability of its pretext, as it embodies a mirrorplay of sensitivity that avoids driving interactions to contention, staying sensitive to ever-changing shared implicature, knowing how to recognize possible invalidity prior to significant miscarriage of understanding, and having nearly invisible flexibility.
A good practice doesn’t require ongoing theorization of itself in order to work validly! (Analogously, good science doesn’t require in-house epistemologists.) “Application” (valid practice—an intimacy of genuineness and normative acceptability in fluid lifeworldliness) is no mere instantiation of “Justification” (a standing accountability); normative-and-genuine validity is not the same as assertoric accounting. Inasmuch as a practice is questioned, then of course [re]validation will require accounting (and may have to [re]turn to theoretical investments of the practice’s Position).
Truly representing progressive Theoretical understanding—embodying it, living it—is not a matter of always doing Theory. “Discourses of application” require long-term, complex engagements of lifeworld-based systemic practices (organizational life) that go way beyond instantiating Theoretical understanding in foreseeable contexts. Seeking to accomplish something really progressive (or progressively real), besides spreading Theory across curriculae, inevitably transforms self-understanding of the whole theoretical-practical enterprise. The discourse of application becomes an applying lifework, a kind of career that may validly elude conceptual comprehensiveness, dissolving into an evolving ethos of contemporaneity that may later instruct Theory (the whole theory-practice enterprise) primordially. So, what results from progressive theoretical practice, way down the road—what really progressive work may generally exemplify (accumulating from a mass of incremental successes)—what the lifework may model for Theory—is a matter for much-later reconstructive examination of a lifeworld.
