Towards a Phenomenology of Subjective Praxis: Schutzian Contributions to Social Practice Theory

ALEXIS EMANUEL GROS

Konstanz

Congreso; 4th Conference of the International Alfred Schutz Circle for Phenomenology and Interpretive Social Science. Universität Konstanz, Alemania.; 2018

Schutz Circle for Phenomenology and Interpretive Social Science

In my view, practice theory has the merit of doing justice to a number of core dimensions of everyday agency that tend to be neglected by many classical and contemporary sociological theories of action ?corporeality, emotionality, habituality, implicit knowledge, the dealing with things and artifacts, etc.?, and in this sense it deserves to be taken seriously. However, arguing from a phenomenological point of view, and without diminishing the merits of practice theory in what refers to the analysis of core dimensions of human agency that tend to be neglected by many classical and contemporary sociological theories of action ?corporeality, emotionality, habituality, implicit knowledge, etc.?, it could be claimed that the account advocated by Reckwitz et al. exhibits serious shortcomings when it comes to systematically defining its key concepts, namely: "embodiment", "affect", "knowledge", and, above all, the very notion of "practice". As I shall argue in the present paper, this conceptual imprecision is ultimately due to the fact that praxis theorists do not operate with a thorough theoretical account of the experiential workings of pre-scientific, everyday subjectivity. To put it more precisely, it is my contention that since the key concepts of practice theory are necessarily related to ?and essentially depend on? the core features of subjective experience, they can only be thoroughly defined with the help of a well-crafted theory of it such as the one provided by the phenomenological tradition.