The Outer course was dependent on others’ initiatives online and their response to my response to them. The Inner course was displayed seldom, but response to that contributed to the Outer course. The Inner course was exhibited by postings (and series of postings) that may have seemed hermetic—or, at worst, oblivious of others’ current foci or responses. Yet, the most intensive postings were intended for others’ consideration (my interest in being influenced by respected online friends) and didn’t exhibt features of the conceptual work I do off-line. I’ll call that latter kind of work Inner discursive inquiry (or philosophical research), such that the entire Habermasian online project was an Outer discursive inquiry.
The Outer discursive inquiry in Habermasian terms (mostly) involved 600+ postings (mixed with uncounted tens of postings that were tangential: bibliographical postings, short responses to others that weren’t part of a series I initiated, clarifications). That distinction between discourse-relevance and tangential conversation could be developed as a part of a concept of communicative coherence (with especially discursive interest) that emerges over time from the “noise” of conversation.
Finding a coherent narratability across massive ephemorality can be a project all its own. I had to at least do that to get the 600+ postings that comprise the framework that I’ll be sharing later.
Within each of those 600+ postings, one or more themes are salient, raising (in retrospect) an issue of hermeneutical thematization within a conversation and themography across series of exchanges.
Including repetition, I identified nearly 1300 themes, which altogether reflect (prior to coherent pattern) an expressed sense (an ethos to be identified) of Habermasian interaction that’s overtly textual (distinguishable from treating oral interaction as transcript).
From that, I formulated key topics—145, it turned out, and classified all 1300 themes by topics (in a database that links each theme to the posting it came from and to usually more than one topic—sometimes as many as ten topics), such that a search on a topic results in all the themes of all the postings covering that topic, and the database can open each posting associated with each record-theme (as well as allow working with large sets of themes spread over many years). Now, this may seem excessive (if not obsessive), but it’s really, I believe, a matter of software-based method in theorization. I found it kinda fun.
This allows for several kinds of discursive reconstruction for each topic from all the postings related to it: chronology, genealogy, and intra-topical meta-thematization structures—generally, a means of empirically deriving many kinds of discursive focus from a very extended conversation.
The tedium of following through with that—specific reconstructions—relative to each 145 topics is not something I’m planning to do! I’ll see in time which topics I want to go back to. (I’m more interested in going forward, rather than working retrospectively). But the option is there, as a venture of communicative fieldwork and for the sake of theorizing from practice, which is my main interest in that recent thematization venture—that tropography sojourn.
“...kinds of discursive focus....”: The 145 topics were organized three ways. The first way, I’ll call a FrameWork, the second a FramePractice, and the third way—obscure, maybe, but anyway—JH-GD identity-in-difference. Actually, the third way is the simplest, most intuitive, and precursory (though the last that I categorized—an afterthought). It’s not of much use to me, but you might think it should have something primary about it, since it’s obviously an overt relativization of interaction to Habermasian and my own (call it—cringe—Davisian) interest:
That is uselessly vague, you may think. But notice that it’s one way of organizing the 145 practice-based theoretical topics relative to [1] an idealized interaction partner, [2] sociality of domain (“standard”), and [3] discursant-centricness (“Major Habermasian” and three kinds of relationship to my own interests). This takes a thematization of conversations between myself and numerous others—none of whom are JH literally, obviously—and idealizes it as Habermasian vs. non-Habermasian interaction, on a coarse continuum.
Again, not very interesting. (What are the 145 topics?) But this highlights an issue of communicative thematization as discursive organization of particular interaction partners, ideal-typing a chronology of many interaction partners (via discussion lists) as a singular kind of discursive inquiry or continuum: between Habermas (almost overtly—"Major") and an other (myself, who also sometimes looks like an unappreciable Other, I suppose).
That provides a model for dramatizing a dimension of interpersonal interaction (communicative interaction) distinct from intersubjectivity, as all authoring here is “behind” the objective textuality of inferrable intentionality—or screen persona derivable from the text. The communicative role is a “personal” one which is distinguishable from self-presence. Textuality of authorship is the issue that I would carry forward from that, relative to a theme of self/personal differentiation, of lifeworld-temporal "verticality" and communication "horizontality." (Horizonality is distantly at a dissolution of the difference between "horizontal" and "vertical". Geometric figuration is crude, but you get the point).
But I’ll put that aside. An Outer discursive organization, which I’m calling the FramePractice, gathers the 145 topics into 20 recognizable academic areas. The exercise here is a matter of discursive practice as academic institutionality, directly associable with Habermas’s valuation of interdisciplinarity: discourses of application as appropriation of inquiry (topics) to standard discursive formations. I look at this as a matter of thinking “Theory vs. Practice” as university-based, as a matter of considering one’s activity relative to the entirety of the academic lifeworld (which I would distinguish from the “mundane” lifeworld). This is rough modelling in order to play with a kind of point: the common interest in a so-called “theory” / “practice” distinction, mapped into the common structure of academic life. Consider, then, Habermasian “Theory” in terms of traditional academics:
Keep in mind that the above is a parsing of a subset of my 145 topics, not parsing of the entirety of Habermas’s theory. Next, consider Habermasian “Practice” in terms of professional studies, and here my particular professional interests are the bias (since this is about organizing topics in a conversational experiment that I did), but you would do a similar kind of mapping with another body of discourse (derived from another chronology of conversation):
What interests me is an “and” of such Theory (regions) and such Practice (regions), which involves interdisciplinary studies that may bridge the two kinds of groups of practices (traditionally academic and profressional—or inner-directed academics and outer-directed academics), in terms that beg explication, to be sure:
My heuristic “FrameWork” organizes those same 145 topics according to the Inner Habermasian inquiry and Inner discursive inquiry of my investment in the Habermasian idiom, such that an Outer interplay of “Theory” “and” “Practice” (above) meshes intimately with my own conceptual designing—or discourse of application, if you will—in Habermasian terms, now as 145 topics derived from 600+ conversations.
Such "designing" has nothing to do with a fundamental conceptual infrastructure (though I’m very interested in that kind of thing); rather, it’s basically a matter of relativizing background conceptual work to a Habermasian venture. Derivatively, such appropriative thinking does express that background conceptuality, but the regionalization of those 145 topics (above and the heuristic FrameWork) is motivated by—oriented by—interest in the Habermasian venture.
The point of this, in the end, is modest: not a systemization of some permanent sort, but merely an exercise is theorizing from practice in terms that are both theoretical (145 topics) and practical (20 disciplinary/discursive areas heuristically divisible as “Theory” “and” “Practice”).
But what are the 145 topics!? And what’s the FrameWork? That’s for later. All I wanted to do here is set up a context of theorizing from practice for dwelling with Habermas’s essay “The Relation of Theory and Practice Revisited,” from Truth & Justification. [July, 2013: It didn't happen, but the relevant work for this continued—flourished—and is well-resourced. Meanwhile, Habermas' essay seems dated, but the challenge of interdisciplinary studies—within academia and across profressional schools, in turn across professions engaged progressively in communities, business, and government—has never been more worth revisiting.]
gary e. davis
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