Coronation as Legible Practice
... This is, of course, the theory of "practice." Theories of practice are by no means giddily new. A determinate point of origin would be the work of Bourdieu and Giddens in the 1970s, with the appearance of Bourdieus Outline of a Theory of Practice in English in 1977 and Giddenss Central Problems in Social Theory in 1979. ... In its inception, practice theory posed a welcome alternative to the unwelcome binary in which human behavior was seen either as rational, purposive, and agent-driven or as a wholly agentless product of synchronous social structure. ... At the heart of practice theory lies an understanding of human activity as what Bourdieu calls "regulated improvisation,"3 as activity occurring within structure, but not structurally determined. Or, to put it slightly differently, practice theory offers an analysis of activity as conceived, and made intelligible within, a set of tacit rules, but not as wholly predetermined by those rules. Even so short a summary suggests the advantage of practice theory over its adversaries in the 1970s: over, that is, a residual humanism that admitted no obstacles to individual self-determination, and a briefly triumphant structuralism which insisted on the subjection of individuals to rules. But what conceptual advantages does practice-theory, twenty years after, continue to allow to its practitioners? ... A more specific observation, bearing on a particular problem of my discipline, is that practice soars over the imagined chasm between the symbolic and the material, or (to put it slightly differently) the textual and the historical.