Jack’s initial response (13/01/05) to reading Ole Dreier’s Personal Trajectories of Participation across Contexts of Social Practice. Outlines 1 (1), 5-32, 1999

There is much in this paper that I like and agree with. I like Dreier’s central theme of the need to develop a psychological conception of the person in its participating in structures of social practice. I understood the aim of his paper was to lay some of the most basic groundwork for such a theory. I liked his point that his conception in no way excludes recognition of the personal significance of values and ideas about the good life. I agreed with his point that as subjects move across contexts, their modes of participation vary because these diverse contexts embody particular positions, social relationships, scopes of possibilities, and personal concerns for them.

“Hence they must act, think, and feel in flexible ways. Their conduct can be no mere execution of schemata, procedures and rules. Subjects rather need to interpret and locate standards and rules in order to include them in concrete situated action (Taylor 1995), and a subject’s behavior often gets its meaning by intentionally differing from such standards. This presupposes that subjects are basically able to relate to their social circumstances and discourses in various ways, to exert influence upon them, to be critical of them, to contribute to their change, etc. (Holzkamp 1983).”

I liked most his concept of core blindness in a contextual theory of social practice and found myself wondering what Ole Dreier’s core blindness might be. I’ll come back to this when I look at his conception of ‘practice’ and some possible implications of his omission of a consideration of the influence of the flow of cosmological energy in explanations of personal, social, and educational practices.

I understood Dreier’s points about the adoption of participation as a key concept in a theory of the person where participation implies a conceptualization of the person as always and already involved in social practices. In Dreier’s use of the concept of participation it theorizes individual subjects as always situated in local contexts of social practice and involved from there in primarily practical relations with social structures of practice. But says Dreier social practice is not homogenous. It consists of diverse, located contextual practices which are linked in a social structure. He says that to capture this, we need a theory about the social structure of practice as a set of interrelated and diverse, local social contexts of action.

I followed and agreed with his argument that we need to theorize how subjects compose and structure their complex personal social practices. I feel convinced that he is right is saying that, as subjects we do structure our ongoing social practices in relations to specific others, specific commitments, specific places, specific organizations of rhythms of activity, etc. I agree that in order to accomplish this, we, as subjects, must develop and adopt personal stances on what we take part in, do, and want. We must find premises of action which reach across and relate our participations in different times and places. To adopt premises of action in our stances is likely to means a taking of sides in the conflicts and contradictions of social practice.

Dreier believes that a concept of the everyday conduct of life is not sufficient to theorize the basic complexity of personal social practice in the structure of social practice and the challenges driving the formation of personality. He says that we also need a concept of personal life-trajectory to theorize how individual life-courses stretch across social time and space. His choice of the concept of trajectory was to emphasize the neglected spatial dimension in the duality of projecting and transjecting across social contexts. And changing contextual participations.

“ Just as everyday personal social practice stretches across social contexts, so does the personal courses of life. The flow of the life-course also has a spatial dimension to it. Across the life-span the person participates in a changing configuration of particular social contexts, and the person composes these changing contextual participations into a personal life-trajectory.”

I think I will find useful his distinction between personal locations, positions, and stances. By location he says that he means the particular place in the world where a subject presently is in a particular context and from where the personal perspective reaches into the world. It marks the concrete situatedness of personal practice. By position he says that he means the particular social position which a subject occupies in the present social context. He recognises that if we only operate with concepts about locations and positions, however, we lose theoretical grounds for addressing issues about how subjects relate to these locations and positions. He says that we are left with an impersonal and deterministic notion of subjects in social practice and that to allow us to reflect these personal aspects in theoretical terms we need a third concept of personal stances. By stances he says that he means the standpoints a subject comes to adopt on its complex personal social practice, on that of which it is a part, and on its participations in it. Dreier says that making up one’s mind and taking a stance occurs by relating and comparing on a shifting set of premises taken from the very same components which are thus related and compared. For Dreier the generalizing of stances is composed, and the relating and comparing of contrasts play a key role in their identification. He says that stances develop and sustain an orientation for subjects in the structures of their complex, ongoing, personal social practice. His concept emphasizes the practical anchoring and consequences of personal reflection and he says that stances are first of all necessary precisely because of the complexly heterogeneous character of social practice and of persons’ participation in it.

He sees stances resting on and guiding a person’s multiple involvements in multiple practices with crosscutting concerns and issues of an often conflicting and contested nature.

This taking a stance on a shifting set of premises in the generalizing of stances could be fascinating to explore further in the intersubjective agreement that would be necessary to generate the epistemological standards of judgement for the new psychology that could be used to test the validity of the knowledge-claims generated from within the new psychological framework.

In his criticism of Smith’s view of standpoints Dreier says that Smith does not distinguish sufficiently between position and standpoint. If we do not draw that distinction, all persons who are members of a particular social category of persons, are believed to adopt a particular common standpoint on social practice and their participation in it. Dreier believes, rightly in my view, that diverse standpoints can be drawn from similar positions, among other things because everybody occupies multiple, diverse, interrelated and intersecting positions in the course of their personal social practice. He says that Smith bypasses the important issue of how persons come to terms with interrelated and intersecting diversities by elaborating particular stances on how to conduct their lives in such social structures of practice.

I particularly enjoyed the quality of Dreier’s precise criticism of the ideas of others. I am thinking here of Dreier’s criticisms of the ideas of Giddens, Ricoeur, Taylor and Griffiths amongst others.

Dreier points out that although Giddens uses time-space as a concept for the interconnectedness of time and space, ‘his notion of the abstraction of time and space and of disembedding and globalization makes him end up considering trajectories as merely stretching over the time dimension of an individual past-present-future’. Dreier says that in this way Giddens loses the spatial dimension of the contextual infrastructure of social practice and of the personal conduct of life and life-trajectory in his theoretical grasp of personal life. But in his understanding of planning, the contextual complexity disappeared in his analytic manoevres so that he finally ends up claiming that self-identity, as a coherent phenomenon, presumes a narrative. For Dreier theories of narrative conceptualize the personal conduct of life and life-trajectory one-sidedly in an abstract dimension of time and lose the relations of time-space in persons’ participation in the structures of social practice. Ricoeur (1992), says Dreier, sees identity as an emerging temporal sameness with a narrative core. Dreier, rightly in my view is critical of concepts of action that are abstractions from the contextual structure of personal participation. I’d like to consider the possibility later that Dreier’s own concepts of practice, the person and the subject may be open to the same criticism.

I was particularly drawn to Dreier’s criticism of numerous social theorists:

Numerous social theorists go along with the abstraction from place which Giddens holds to be characteristic of modernity (1991, 146). They confuse being situated with being situation-bound and argue for the rise of a ‘disembedding’ from place which they conceptualize like the well-known notion of abstraction as a detachment form any particular place into an ideational nowhere. In so doing they lose sight of the fact that individual subjects always act in a situated, embodied way from definite time-space locations as participants in local social contexts – even when their actions reach across translocal or global, definite or indefinite time-space distances. Whatever we may think of the process of globalization which overwhelms many of these authors, and regardless of how much some subjects travel around the globe, it does not follow that subjects’ personal social practice really is global. On the contrary, it keeps on being situated in and across particular locations, i.e. translocal, no matter how scattered the particular locations in which subjects take part. On the whole social theorists do not conceptualize boundaries and diversities in the structure of social practice in primarily practical terms. They see them as primarily functional distinctions, based on the division of labor, institutions, etc. When they analyze the personal significance of participating in a particular context, they, therefore, subsume it to the societal function that they presume the particular context fulfills.

Dreier is also critical of theorists who historicize the concept of identity but do not explicitly include in their conception diversity in the structure of social practice and personal participations. He says that like Burkitt (1994) they focus on the role of interpersonal relations in the formation of identity. “They historicize their notion of interpersonal relations in a free-floating manner and do not locate them anywhere in particular in the structure of social practice and personal participations. Their focus on intersubjectivity comes close to conversational and relations perspectives in current psychology in that it does not conceptualize how these social relations are located parts of a structured social practice.” Dreier takes Charles Taylor’s work as an example of this and says that he does not address the significance of people conducting their lives in and across these two spheres for the formation and dynamics of identity.

Dreier believes that the feminist literature is a promising place to look for current theorizing which is preoccupied with issues of the diversity of personal social practice in a complex social practice. His optimism is focused on the notions in feminist literature about authenticity of the person, self, and identity and that these may be introduced to emphasize complexities inherent in personal participation in social practice. However, Dreier is critical of Griffiths’ emphasis on fragmentation saying that it makes her lose sight of the personal necessity of becoming able to conduct a complex personal social practice and life-trajectory. He believes that her standpoint of analysis is contemplative rather than practical. He believes Griffiths’s stance to be deeply problematic in practice. Dreier believes that if a person were to stick to such a vision, many of its vital concerns and pursuits, which need to be located and conducted across social structures of practice, would be thrown off their tracks, and the person would turn into a sort of chameleon. Dreier claims that Griffiths neglects the fact that the person must first relate diverse claims and memberships in practical, personal terms into a personal conduct and trajectory of life.

I do agree with Dreier that this practical personal necessity cannot be neglected without serious personal consequences. I also agree with Dreier’s emphasis on the idea that diversities are located in a structure of social contexts in a structure of social practice, and with his understanding that these diversities primarily have to be dealt with in practical terms by persons as a part of the conduct of their everyday social practice and life-trajectory. Dreier’s most serious criticism of Griffith is that she loses the grounding of diversities and of personal processes of orientation in relation to them in that person’s participation in social practice.

I agree with Dreier’s conclusion that the examples he uses of research on the person, identity, and self show a remarkable neglect of the significance of the fact that persons live their lives by participating in complex structures of social practice and by conducting trajectories in and across diverse social contexts. I also agree that the examples he uses do not understand personality, identity, and self from the standpoint of subjects involved in such a practice and as a means for these subjects to orient themselves in it and reflect on it.

Dreier’s critique of the shortcomings of this research is part of his theoretical argument for why we need to develop theories about complex personal trajectories of participation in structures of social practice and to offer persons analytic means for an adequate self-understanding.

Dreier’s point about the theoretical shortcomings of existing theories of the person is that they make researchers present the person as a relatively free-floating and arbitrary agent. He says that their theories fit only too well into the fashionable social constructionism of our day. He says that the grounding of people’s lives in social practice becomes so thin and fragile that their lives give the impression of easily falling apart into fragmented bits and pieces, or multiple and fragmented selves as it is mostly called. He says that most narrative conceptions of the person, identity, and self seem similarly unconstrained and without serious personal stakes in relation to the person’s structuration of a conduct of life and life trajectory. Hence he says that much current theorizing of the person is floating above the ground of social practice and of only trivial significance for what it means and takes to be and develop as a person. He finds it odd, as do I, that a theory of the person, self, and identity stops short of theorizing the eminently subjective aspects of personal social practice one would expect to find in a theory of the subject in social practice.

Dreier believes, and I agree, that if we trivialize the full grounding of personal life in structures of social practice, then we lose what it is all about: its concrete contents, what it is a part of, involved in and concerned with the full significance of many of its real possibilities, challenges, dilemmas, problems, and contradictions. He believes that his alternative theorising of the person as participant in a complex social practice, will enable us to understand that being a many-sided person is not just having different streaks, sides, or patches, but is a reflection of living a many-sided life in which we pursue diverse concerns by participating in different ways in diverse contexts. Dreier says that his aim in the paper is ‘merely to lay some of the most basic groundwork for such a theory of the person’. He says that it remains to be elaborated and detailed in a richer and more concrete and lively understanding of the person, paradoxically, not by looking directly ‘into’ the person, but by looking into the world to grasp the person as a participant in that world.

In the growth of my own educational knowledge I am always seeking to extend my cognitive range and concern as I engage with the ideas of researchers from other disciplines to my own. I am thinking here of the discipline of educational enquiry in which I generate and test my living educational theories in stories of my own learning as I explore the implications of asking, researching and answering questions of the kind, ‘How do I improve what I am doing?’ In my reading of Dreier’s article I looked specifically for his explicit engagement with educational practices or ideas about education, learning and schooling. I found his recognition that comprehensive processes of learning are involved in the unfolding and change of a personal conduct of life and life-trajectory. He says that this learning is in principle unending and calls for many forms of reconsideration and re-learning, but he says that he cannot go into the topic of learning in this paper and refers the reader to earlier papers. He does however say that his approach opens the doors to seeing personal learning and development through participation and as participation in structures of social practice. He says that questions of personal stability and change are then tied to stable and changing structures of personal social practice and to participating within their given boundaries or to taking part in changing them and going beyond them.

I liked the way Dreier related the possibility of creative responses to schooling in the development of a personal life-trajectory.

“As in the personal conduct of life, there is also a historical dimension to the composition of life-trajectories. Particular historical arrangements, such as the development of intimate, private forms of family life, influence the configuration of personal life-trajectories, their structure of meaning, and hence the structuration of personhood. In a historical perspective life-trajectories have turned into less predetermined and preshaped molds so that the fashioning of trajectories calls fro more personal shaping, becomes more individualized, and calls for ‘individual labor’ (Jurczyk & Rerrich 1993). This gives new weight and new qualities to the issues which surround the personal configuration of a complexly contextualized lifetrajectory. Yet, social arrangements for evolving personal life-trajectories still exist, and observing how others unfold their trajectories in particular ways (plus advice from others) guides or misguides persons on how to realize their own personal trajectories. In other words, the unfolding of a personal trajectory is still arranged for in many historically specific ways. For instance, school is a particular institutional context with a particular significance in the students’ composition of a conduct of life across their various contexts which encompasses particular personal relationships and meanings. At the same time, school is arranged for a particular population which is obliged to participate in it for a particular period in their life-trajectories. What is more, school is arranged for particular age- and track-graded trajectories. And through the students’ particular modes of participation school polarizes them and the students polarizes themselves. They adopt and develop particular positions and stances and stake out particular (pro- and transjected) life-trajectories for themselves in relation to the institutionally prearranged molds of educational trajectories and their presumed place and significance in personal life-trajectories. The students re-appropriate such existing institutional landscapes for personal trajectories to become particular vehicles in their composition and orientation of a personal life-trajectory. In so doing, they also use the arrangement of age- and track-grading to define where they are in their trajectories. In institutional arrangements for trajectories transitions in life-trajectories with their necessary processes of personal re-orientation may also arranged for. These transitions must be accomplished in relation to the existing social structure of practice, and they may also be guided or misguided by observations of others and advice from others.”

I am wondering if a core blindness in Dreier’s development of a psychological conception of the person, in its participating in structures of social practice, might be that his language and logic is masking the dialectical and inclusional nature of a psychology of human existence that can explain personal life-trajectories. Could it be that the way Dreier ‘conceptualises’, through lexical definitions as he combines existing categories from psychology and social theories, has created a core blindness that will only be remedied by a psychological self-study of his own practices and learning as he ostensively generates the new meanings for his new psychology?

Is Dreier’s propositional language and logic masking a possibility for creating a new psychology of the human subject. I am thinking here of Ilyenkov’s problem in his Dialectical Logic when he asked, ‘if an object exists as a living contradiction what must the thought be that expresses it?’ Ilyenkov believed that he could find a solution by ‘writing logic’ Yet his writing conformed to the principles of Aristotelean logic that eliminated contradictions between statements in ‘correct thought’. I think that Ilyenkov needed to create a living logic to answer his question about a living contradiction. I can see that Dreier is using the same propositional form of language and logic as Ilyenkov, in his own arguments for the creation of a new psychology. I imagine that to create such a new psychology will mean developing a different approach to establishing the theoretical assumptions for the theory to the one used by Dreier. I am thinking of an approach that begins with an individual asking, researching and answering questions of the kind, ‘how do I improve what I am doing?’ where practice is experienced and understood in terms of ‘what I am doing’. That is, the ‘I’ is that of a conscious practitioner located and positioned in relation to the stances in his social practices. I am thinking of an approach that emphasises the importance of enquiry learning and the development of accounts of learning that can explain the learning in one’s own life-trajectory. For Dreier to give life to his notion of ‘stances’ I think he may need to show that stances can be understood as the expression of embodied values that have been clarified in the course of their emergence in practice and transformed, through the processes of clarification and intersubjective agreement, into living standards of judgement that can distinguish a particular stance.

There are many interesting ideas in Dreier’s perspective and I was particularly struck by the quality of his criticism of the ideas of others. I find myself exciting by what I am experiencing as a healthy creative tension in engaging with Dreier’s ideas in the creation of my own living educational theory. I find myself attracted to use his notion of ‘stance’ and a desire to acknowledge the validity of the criticism he makes of the ideas of others while wishing to avoid such criticism being made of my own ideas! I also find myself recognising a resistance to subsuming the creating and testing of living educational theories within the boundaries of his psychology and his key concept of participation. I think this is because of a limitation I perceive in what appears to be a lack of recognition of the significance of cosmic flows of life-affirming energy in explanations of personal life-trajectories that flow outside and through social practices through space. Hence my preference for Rayner’s notion of inclusionality as this includes Dreier’s notion of participation while being more extensive in its inclusion of cosmic flows of life-affirming energy through space and boundaries in explanations of the personal life-trajectories of complex selves.