Reframing Media/Cultural Studies From Malay Viewing ‘Competencies’ to Sociology’s Varied ‘Materials’ A Hermeneutic Practices Perspective Tony Wilson
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Wednesday, 17 June 2015
Hermeneutic Practices
Hermeneutics as initiated by Heidegger and then developed by Gadamer and Ricoeur, addresses the question: How is understanding or meaning achieved in media, text, using equipment, or getting around a complex mall?
Practices research considers familiar or habitual
behaviour achieving understanding or meaning ‘meaning is use’ (Wittgenstein). Wednesday, 17 June 2015
‘Being Familiar With ...’ ‘(I) came back to the homeland, feeling so warm and so comfortable and glad to be back to the surroundings where I was grown up.’ (female, Chinese mall visitor) ‘In our first phenomenal indication of the fundamental constitution of Dasein, and the clarification of the existential meaning of being-in’ it ‘was defined as dwelling with ..., being familiar with ...’(Heidegger, 1962: 176).
Wednesday, 17 June 2015
Initiating Hermeneutics Behaviour may be considered as a sequence of ‘events’ and explained in terms of ‘causes’ and ‘effects’. It can also be understood as creating meaning, narrative-‘sense-content’(Ricoeur, 1981). Reflecting on how behavioural narrative - from people walking in malls to watching television - is constructed is to adopt a hermeneutic practices perspective. Is practices research ‘ethnography’?
Wednesday, 17 June 2015
Landscapes of ‘Practices’ A ‘practice’ is habitual (hence unreflective) construction of a narrative through equipped behaviour (e.g. walking in a mall was remembered as being in a ‘home from home’) Behaviour (talking, walking) incorporates - often visibly - expectations. Anticipation is articulated with events in narrative - in a ‘hermeneutic circle of understanding’ . ‘Projections’ from audience ‘horizons of understanding’ surroundings (e.g. a mall is a safe place) are realised in participatory ‘being-with-others’ (Heidegger). Wednesday, 17 June 2015
‘Projecting’ Meaning from ‘Horizons of
Understanding’ (Heidegger, Being and Time) In habitual practices (e.g. going to the mall), without reflection, people tacitly anticipate customary event (something unusual ‘gives them pause for thought’). Actions are implicitly ‘projected’, achieved without ‘thinking that one is doing x’ - continual commentary One can see understanding incorporated in people’s everyday activity. In discussion, research participants may offer presuppositions underwriting behaviour, discussing ‘horizons of understanding’/ assumption. Wednesday, 17 June 2015
Practices as Exercising Competences From a practices perspective, we primarily are said to understand entities through exercising competence* or using them as equipment: we ‘understand’ a car, mall, television using them. As Heidegger argued in Being and Time and Ryle in Concept of Mind, ‘knowing how’ is primary or precedes ‘knowing that’: ‘Knowing how to apply maxims cannot be reduced to, or derived from, the acceptance of those or any other maxims.’ (Concept of Mind, p. 20). Wednesday, 17 June 2015
Competenc(i)es*
A practice’s ‘constitutive elements’ are ‘meanings, competences, materials’ (Shove, 2012: 5). ‘Practices consist of discursive knowledge and tacit knowledge sometimes grouped together as competences, materials and affective engagements.’ (Arnould, 2014: 129) ‘We argue that Malay women act as strategic audiences who mobilise sophisticated viewing tactics that we call ‘watching competencies’ to negotiate the pleasures and potential conflicts of their access to non-Western soaps’. (Md Syed and Runnel, 2013: 1) Wednesday, 17 June 2015
Practices as Integrating Narrative A practice (or using) integrates assumptions (about a car, mall or television) with actuality (in driving , walking, watching) ... tacit ‘foreunderstanding’ with ‘facticity’ (Heidegger). A visitor may find her/his way around a mall (or be said to understand the place). Only afterwards - or occasionally therein - does he/she reflect or interpret visiting it as being (e.g.) an ‘adventure’ or ‘home from home’.
Wednesday, 17 June 2015
A Hermeneutic Practices Perspective - Summary -
For critical hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur), we construct meaning in practices: use of ‘tools’ (such as computer or TV) is to make sense of objects as equipment.Their recognising carries tacit generic assumptions we implicitly expect to actualise. Meaning is generated in habituated ‘ready-to-hand’ practices - narratives in/of behaviour - unreflectively. Unusually, we reflect within practices, in celebration or criticism. Subsequently, we can reflect on the practice or if breakdown has occurred, ‘present-it-at-hand’. Wednesday, 17 June 2015
Understanding - Embodied Expectation Integrated with Event - Example
A female Chinese participant reported: ‘basically, I expect good security from the mall’ she visits.
Entering from a habituated horizon of understanding this mall - her ‘basic’ assumption being ‘good security’ within this immersive ‘being-with-others’ - she invests it with meaning as a site of secure sense-making. Tacitly evident in behaviour (e.g. how she casually carries her bag), these expectations are integrated unreflectively with events, optimistically lacking issue. Wednesday, 17 June 2015
Everyday Gendered Habitual Unreflective Action (Guided by Tacit Assumptions)
‘Let’s say, a simple one: apples. Maybe the
apples look the same to the guys (laughter).
No offence. But, we, we, we pick the apple that looks nicer with no flaws. ( ... ) Like this apple looks fresher. Something like this. Normally,
they would say, “it’s just the same. Just grab
and go.”’(female Chinese student mall visitor
reflecting upon behaviour - in a focus group) Wednesday, 17 June 2015
In Habitual Behaviour,Entities Are Primarily
Regarded As ‘Equipment’ (Heidegger, 1962) From a practices perspective, this female contributor can be considered to primarily understand entities (apples!) as equipment, in her seeking a fruit ‘with no flaws’. Her behaviour projected - was oriented towards - producing participatory narrative of ‘picking’ apples, her mode of being-with-others (‘the guys’, who ‘just grab and go’!)
Wednesday, 17 June 2015
A Practices Perspective on Media Use-
Embodied Expectation Integrated with Event
A Consumer Constructing ‘Sense-Content’ (Ricoeur), Engaging in a ‘Ready-to-Hand’ (Heidegger), Tacit or Not Reflected-Upon Practice of Understanding Media Wednesday, 17 June 2015
Exercising Hermeneutic ‘Competencies’
in Viewing Television Such skilled managing ‘to make meanings’ from cultural resources is evident in Malay women’s ready-to-hand or ‘second nature’ ‘watching competencies’: ‘there is no precise or set framework demanding application, more an inbred sense of what is the right and fitting response in the circumstances’ of watching ‘foreign soaps’’(Md. Syed and Runnel, 2013), doing so ‘while retaining their values and expectations’ (Hamzah and Md. Syed, 2013:
Wednesday, 17 June 2015
Audiences Can Reflect Critically on/in Equipped Hermeneutic Practices
Audiences can reflect critically on/in ‘complex’ use of narrative tools in their understanding media. 'For me, the reality of investing in HSBC is as complex as how to understand the image', to 'capture' meaning (female Malay respondent asked by a Chinese focus group facilitator: ‘Do you feel you can relate to the video?'). University of Science, Malaysia focus group viewing an HSBC Marketing Narrative (on YouTube). Wednesday, 17 June 2015
The Practice of Understanding Media The Hermeneutic Circle of Understanding
An Opening Shot from a Maxis (Malaysian Telecommunications) Marketing Video Wednesday, 17 June 2015
Challenging Habituated Viewing Reflectively Revising Generic Projection Watching a ‘middle-aged man showing his car key to his wife (it’s like flaunting his new car to his wife)’, a male Chinese consumer initially projected a screen narrative of probable ‘car-sale’ media marketing. Hence, watching the video’s subsequent stories of ‘people conversing through mobile phones’ he found such narratives ‘really surprising’. Turning back in a hermeneutic circle of understanding, with the goal of articulating a coherent content, he retraced his epistemic path of making sense to posit telco marketing. (Extracts from UNIMAS student project) Wednesday, 17 June 2015
The ‘Hermeneutic Circle’ of Integrating Projection with Perceived Event
Wednesday, 17 June 2015
Thanks for Your Understandng!
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Wednesday, 17 June 2015
