I do not know whether I coined "heteropraxia" or not, certainly I was not
taking it from any other written text, and it is not in common use in the
fields in which I work and read. On the other hand I had certainly been
using it in conversations and talks before writing Textual Politics, and my
vague memories are that it first occurred in a conversation joking about
possible variations on 'heteroglossia' (including for example the pun
possible in 'homoglossia' in some contexts).
One of the regular features of my work is trying to find words for meanings
not regularly in our repertories. And in the last several years this has
especially been the case in trying to say things about social and cultural
practices in general that might be more commonly said only about words or
language practices.
In using the term heteropraxia, I wanted to emphasize not just the
diversity of practices, but their systematic interrelatedness in terms of
contrasts, indexical meanings, links to one another, etc., and just as for
Bakhtin's heteroglossia, both their aspect of instrumental doing and the
aspect of the values as well as other meanings that they have for us. A
'way of doing' indexes social positioning, distinguishes Us from Them,
signals positive or negative degrees of value, means as an act apart from
what it does as an act, etc. On the larger macrosocial scale, again as with
heteroglossia, we can imagine the 'social voices' of heteropraxia -- the
consistent 'styles of doing' that are characteristic of various alternative
social positions or cultural subgroups. It is interesting that we do not
have a handy metaphor for this. "Voice" connotes the specificity of a way
of speaking, but what has this connotation for a way of doing?
Conceptually, there is much in common here with Bourdieu's 'habitus', but
his is embodied in an individual actor, though common to similarly socially
positioned actors. Heteroglossia and heteropraxia are more community-level
phenomena, the repertory of ways-of-saying/doing that helps define the
structure of the community, and, I believe, much of its dynamics as well.
Another case of the 'organized heterogeneity' of culture.
Bourdieu borrowed his core of the idea from Mauss' notion of the culturally
specific body hexis of stance and movement styles. Literary theory coined
the term 'voice' for the style of an author. What analogous term is there
for, say, a choreographer? I guess it is "idiom", showing us once again the
power of logocentrism ... And Bakhtin, of course, used heteroglossia as a
dialectical counterpoint to the centripetal forces of language
homogenization, be they inevitable aspects of communicative efficacy, or
simply the historically specific effects of hegemonic standardizers.
In our time of greater global standardization and more far-reaching and
personally intrusive cultural hegemonies, it is not surprising that we
increasingly value diversity, and even Babel. But Babel was a disordered
heterogeneity, a means of disintegrating monolithic and hybristic hegemony.
Heteropraxia describes the vast historical range between totalitarian
fantasies of monopraxia, hated even by God, and the ultimate Babel of
idiopraxia, in which each isolated individual acts uniquely and with no
relation to others ... without culture, without community, without humanity.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------