A PARTICULAR PROBLEM arises when, instead of being a discourse on other discourses, as is usually the case, theory has to advance over an area where there are no longer any discourses. There is a sudden unevenness of terrain: the ground on which verbal language rests begins to fail. The theorizing operation finds itself at the limits of the terrain where it normally functions, like an automobile at the edge of a cliff. Beyond and below lies the ocean.
Foucault and Bourdieu situate their enterprise on this edge by articulating a discourse on non-discursive practices. They are not the first to do so. Without going back to ancient times, we can say that since Kant every theoretical effort has had to give a more or less direct explanation of its relationship to this non-discursive activity, to this immense “remainder” constituted by the part of human experience that has not been tamed and symbolized in language. An individual science can avoid this direct confrontation. It grants itself a priori the conditions that allow it to encounter things only in its own limited field where it can “verbalize” them. It lies in wait for them in the gridwork of models and hypotheses where it can “make them talk,” and this interrogatory apparatus, like a hunter’s trap, transforms their wordless silence into “answers,” and hence into language: this is called experimentation.1 Theoretical questioning, on the contrary, does not forget, cannot forget that in addition to the relationship of these scientific discourses to one another, there is also their common relation with what they have taken care to exclude from their field in order to constitute it. It is linked to the pullulation of that which does not speak (does not yet speak?) and which takes the shape (among others) of “ordinary” practices. It is the memory of this “remainder.” It is the Antigone of what is not acceptable within the scientific jurisdiction. It constantly brings this unforgettable element back into the scientific places where technical constraints make it “politically” (methodologically, and in theory, provisionally) necessary to forget it. How does it succeed in doing this? By what brilliant strokes or through what ruses?—that is the question.
We must return to the works of Foucault and Bourdieu. Although they are both important, there is an obvious difference between them, and that in itself is a reason for paying attention to them on the threshold of an essay that does not claim to be a history of theories concerning practices. These two monuments situate a field of research, standing almost at its two poles. Nevertheless, however distant they may be from each other, the two bodies of work seem to be constructed by means of the same procedures. The same operational schema can be observed in both, in spite of the difference in the materials used, the problematics involved, and the perspectives opened up. We seem to have here two variants of a “way of making” the theory of practices. Like a way of cooking, this “way” can be exercised in different circumstances and with heterogeneous interests; it has its tricks of the trade and its good or bad players; it also allows one to score points. Using the imperatives that punctuate the steps in a recipe, we could say that this theorizing operation consists of two moments: first, cut out; then turn over. First an “ethnological” isolation; then a logical inversion.
The first move cuts out certain practices from an undefined fabric, in such a way as to treat them as a separate population, forming a coherent whole but foreign to the place in which the theory is produced. Thus we have Foucault’s “panoptic” procedures, isolated within a multitude, or Bourdieu’s “strategies,” localized among the inhabitants of Béarn or Kabylia. In that way, they receive an ethnological form. Moreover, in both cases, the genre (Foucault) or the place (Bourdieu) isolated is considered a metonymic figure of the whole species: a part (which is observable because it is circumscribed) is supposed to represent the totality (itself undefinable) of practices. To be sure, in Foucault’s work this isolation is based on the elucidation of the dynamics proper to a technology: it is a cutting-out produced by the historiographic discourse. In Bourdieu, it is supposed to be provided by the space organized by the protection of a patrimony: it is taken as a socioeconomic and geographical datum. But it remains the case that cutting-out, ethnological or metonymic, is common to the two analyses, even if the modalities of its determination are hetereogeneous in each case.
The second move turns over the unit thus cut out. At first obscure, silent, and remote, the unit is inverted to become the element that illuminates theory and sustains discourse. In Foucault, the procedures hidden in the details of educational, military, or clinical control, micro-apparatuses without discursive legitimacy, techniques foreign to the Enlightenment, become the reason through which both the system of our society and that of the human sciences are illuminated. Through them and in them, nothing escapes Foucault. They allow his discourse to be itself and to be theoretically panoptical, seeing everything. In Bourdieu, the remote and opaque place organized by wily, polymorphic and transgressive “strategies” in relation to the order of discourse is also inverted in order to give its plausibility and its essential articulation to a theory recognizing the reproduction of the same order everywhere. Reduced to the habitus which exteriorizes itself in them, these strategies which do not know what it is they know provide Bourdieu with the means of explaining everything and of being conscious of everything. Granted that Foucault is interested in the effect of his procedures on a system, and Bourdieu, in the “single principle” of which his strategies are the effect, both nonetheless play the same trick when they transform practices isolated as aphasic and secret into the keystone of their theory, when they make of that nocturnal population the mirror in which the decisive element of their explanatory discourse shines forth.
Inasmuch as it makes use of this device, the theory belongs to the procedures it deals with, in spite of the fact that, by considering a single category of the species, by assuming that this isolated element has a metonymic value, and by thus passing over other practices, it forgets those that guarantee its own construction. Foucault’s own analysis shows that, in the case of the human sciences, discourse is determined by procedures. But his analysis, confirmed by the mode of production it reflects, also depends on an apparatus analogous to the apparatuses whose functioning it discerns. It remains to be discovered what is the difference that introduces, in relation to the panoptic procedures whose history Foucault writes, the double move of delimiting an alien body of practices and inverting its obscure content into a luminous writing.
But we should first clarify the nature of these moves, and not limit our examination of them to two bodies of work that might be selected and praised because they support our point. In reality, the procedure from which they result is far from being exceptional. Indeed, it is an old recipe, frequently used, and therefore all the more deserving of consideration. It will suffice to recall two famous examples from the beginning of the century: Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life and Freud’s Totem and Taboo. When these authors construct a theory of practices, they situate them first in a “primitive” and closed space, ethnological with respect to our “enlightened” societies, and they recognize the theoretical formula of their analysis in that remote, obscure place. It is in the sacrificial practices of the Australian Arunta, a cultural group guaranteed to be primitive even among “primitives,” that Durkheim discovers the principle of a contemporary ethics and social theory: the restriction opposed (through sacrifice) to the indefinite will of each individual makes coexistence and conventions possible among members of a group; in other words, the practice of renunciation and self-sacrifice permits plurality and contracts, that is, a society: the acceptance of a limit is the foundation of the social contract.2 For his part, Freud deciphers the essential concepts of psychoanalysis in the practices of the primitive horde: incest, castration, the articulation of the law about the death of the father.3 This detour is all the more striking because no direct experience justifies it. Neither of these authors has observed the practices he is dealing with. They never went to see for themselves, any more than Marx ever went to a factory.4 Why then do they constitute these practices as a hermetic enigma in which they can read in inverted form the key word of their theories?
Today, these practices bearing the secret of our rationality no longer look so remote. With time, they are coming closer. It is pointless now to look for this ethnological reality in Australia or at the beginning of history. It resides in our own system (the panoptic procedures), or next door to it, if not inside our cities (the strategies of Béarn or Kabylia), then still nearer (the “unconscious”). But however proximate the content may be, its “ethnological” form remains. The form given to these practices located far away from knowledge and yet possessing its secret poses a problem from the outset. One may see in this problem a figure of modernity.
Theoretical reflection does not elect to keep practices at a distance, so that first it has to leave its own place to analyze them and then by simply inverting them may find itself at home. The partitioning (découpage) that it carries out, it also repeats. This partitioning is imposed on it by history. Procedures without discourse are collected and located in an area organized by the past and giving them the role, a determining one for theory, of being constituted as wild “reserves” for enlightened knowledge.
The distinction no longer refers essentially to the traditional binominal set of “theory” and “practice,” specified by a further distinction between “speculation” aimed at deciphering the book of the cosmos and concrete “applications”; rather the distinction concerns two different operations, the one discursive (in and through language) and the other without discourse. Since the sixteenth century, the idea of method has progressively overturned the relation between knowing and doing: on a base of legal and rhetorical practices, changed little by little into discursive “actions” executed on diversified terrains and thus into techniques for the transformation of a milieu, is imposed the fundamental schema of a discourse organizing the way of thinking as a way of operating, as a rational management of production and as a regulated operation on appropriate fields. That is “method,” the seed of modern science. Ultimately, it systematizes the art that Plato had already placed under the sign of activity.7 But it orders a know-how (savoir-faire) by means of discourse. The frontier thus no longer separates two hierarchized bodies of knowledge, the one speculative, the other linked to particulars, the one concerned with reading the order of the world and the other coming to terms with the details of things within the framework set up for it by the first; rather it sets off practices articulated by discourse from those that are not (yet) articulated by it.
What then will be the status of this “know-how” without a discourse, essentially without writing (it is the discourse on method that is both writing and science)? It is composed of multiple but untamed operativities. This proliferation does not obey the law of discourse, but rather that of production, the ultimate value of physiocratic and later capitalist economics. It thus challenges scientific writing’s privilege of organizing production. It alternately exacerbates and stimulates the technicians of language. It claims to conquer and annex not contemptible practices, but “ingenious,” “complex,” and “effective” forms of knowledge. From Bacon to Christian Wolff or Jean Beckmann, a gigantic effort is made to colonize this immense reserve of “arts” and “crafts” which, although they cannot yet be articulated in a science, can already by introduced into language through a “Description” and, in consequence, brought to a greater “perfection.” Through these two terms—the “description” which depends on narrativity and the “perfection” that aims at a technical optimalization—the position of the “arts” is fixed, neighboring on but outside of the field of science.8
The Encyclopédie of the late eighteenth century is the result and at the same time the banner of this labor of collation: Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. It places “sciences” and “arts” side by side, in a proximity that promises a later assimilation: the sciences are the operational languages whose grammar and syntax form constructed, regulated, and thus writeable, systems; the arts are techniques that await an enlightened knowledge they currently lack. In the article “Art,” Diderot tries to clarify the relation between these heterogeneous elements. We are dealing with an “art,” he writes, “if the object is executed”; with a “science,” “if the object is contemplated,” using a distinction more Baconian than Cartesian between execution and speculation. The distinction is repeated within “art” itself, according to whether it is represented or practiced: “Every art has its speculative and its practical aspect: its speculation, which is merely the inoperative knowledge of the rules of the art; its practice, which is merely the habitual and non-reflective use of these same rules.” Art is thus a kind of knowledge that operates outside the enlightened discourse which it lacks. More importantly, this know-how surpasses, in its complexity, enlightened science. Thus, concerning “the geometry of the arts,” Diderot notes: “It is obvious that the elements of academic geometry are not more than the simplest and least complex among those in the merchant’s geometry.” For example, in many problems concerning levers, friction, textile twisting, clock mechanisms, etc., the usual calculations are still insufficient. The solution will be found in a very ancient “experimental and practical, manouvrier) mathematics,” even if its “language” remains unrefined through a “lack of the proper words” and an “abundance of synonyms.”9
Like Girard, Diderot uses the term “manouvrier” to designate those arts that are satisfied with “adapting” materials by cutting, shaping, joining, and so on, without giving them a “new state” (by fusion, composition, etc.) as the manufacturing arts do.10 The “everyday” arts no more “form” a new product than they have their own language. They “make do” (bricolent). But through the reorganization and hierarchization of knowledge according to the criterion of productivity, these arts come to represent a standard, because of their operativity, and an avant-garde, because of their “experimental and manouvrier “sublety. Foreign to scientific “languages,” they constitute outside of the latter an absolute of the power of operating (an efficiency which, unmoored from discourse, nevertheless reflects its productivist ideal) and a reserve of knowledge one can inventory in shops or in the countryside (a logos is concealed within artisanry, a logos in which the future of science may already be faintly heard). A problematics of lag or delay is introduced into the relation between science and the arts. A temporal handicap separates the various kinds of know-how from their gradual elucidation by epistemologically superior sciences.
“Observers” thus move quickly in the direction of these practices that remain at a distance from the sciences but in advance of them. Fontenelle suggested as early as 1699 that “artisans’ shops sparkle everywhere with an intelligence and a creativity that nevertheless does not attract our attention. Spectators are lacking for these very useful and very ingeniously contrived instruments and practices. . . .”11 These “spectators” become collectors, describers, analysts. But at the same time that they acknowledge in these practices a kind of knowledge preceding that of the scientists, they have to release it from its “improper” language and invert into a “proper” discourse the erroneous expression of “marvels” that are already present in everyday ways of operating. Science will make princesses out of all these Cinderellas. The principle of an ethnological operation on practices is thus formulated: their social isolation calls for a sort of “education” which, through a linguistic inversion, introduces them into the field of scientific written language.
It is a notable fact that from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, ethnologists or historians consider these techniques intrinsically worthy of respect: they consider what these techniques do. No need to interpret. It suffices to describe. In contrast, these scholars consider the stories by means of which a group situates or symbolizes its activities to be “legends” that mean something other than what is said. There is strange disparity between the way of treating practices and that of treating discourses. Whereas the first way records a “truth” about operating, the second way decodes the “lies” of speech. Moreover, the brief descriptions of the first way contrast with the prolix interpretations which have made myths and legends an object privileged by the professionals of language, intellectuals long accustomed to using the hermeneutic procedures transmitted by jurists to professors and/or ethnologists to comment on, gloss, and “translate” referential documents into scientific texts.
The issues are already settled. The mute jurisdiction of practices is historically limited. A hundred and fifty years after Diderot, Durkheim accepts almost without correction this “ethnological” definition—and even reinforces it—when he takes up the problem of art (the art of operating), that is, of “pure practice without theory.” The absolute of operativity is there, in its “purity.” He writes: “An art is a system of ways of operating that are adjusted to special ends and the product of either a traditional experience communicated through education or the personal experience of the individual.” Encysted in particularity, deprived of the generalizations proper to discourse alone, art nevertheless forms a “system” and is organized by “ends”—two postulates that permit a science and an ethics to keep in its place the discourse of its own which art lacks, that is, to inscribe themselves in the place and in the name of these practices.
It is also characteristic of Durkheim, the great pioneer who linked the foundation of sociology to a theory of education, that he should take such an interest in the production or acquisition of art: “One can acquire it only by putting oneself in connection with the things on which the action is to be exercised and in exercising it oneself.” To the “immediacy” of operation, Durkheim no longer opposes, as Diderot did, a lagging-behind of theory in relation to the manouvrier knowledge of artisans. There remains only a hierarchy established by the criterion of education. “To be sure,” Durkheim goes on, “it can happen that art is enlightened [the key word of the Enlightenment] through reflection, but reflection is not its essential element, since art can exist without it. But there does not exist a single art in which everything is reflective.”12
Does any science exist in which “everything is reflective”? In any event, in a vocabulary still very close that of the Encyclopédie (which spoke of “contemplating”), theory is given the task of “reflecting” this “whole.” More generally, for Durkheim, society is a kind of writing that only he can read. Here, knowledge is already written in practices, but not yet enlightened. Science will be the mirror that makes it readable, the discourse “reflecting” an immediate and precise operativity lacking language and consciousness, an operativity already knowledgeable but unrefined.
Like sacrifice, which “is closer to us than one would think in view of its apparent brutality,”13 art is a kind of knowledge essential in itself but unreadable without science. This is a dangerous position for science to be in because it retains only the power of expressing the knowledge which it lacks. Moreover, in the relation between science and art is envisaged not an alternative but a complementarity and, if possible, an articulating link; that is, as Wolff thought in 1740 (after Swedenborg, or before Lavoisier, Désaudray, Auguste Comte, et al.), “a third man who would combine in his person both science and art: he would repair the infirmity of the theoreticians, and free amateurs of the arts from the prejudice according to which the latter could perfect themselves without theory. . . .”14 This mediator between “the man of the theorem” and “the man of experience”15 would be the engineer.
The “third man” haunted enlightened discourse (whether philosophical or scientific) and continues to do so today,16 but he has not turned out with the personality which had been hoped. The place he has been accorded (currently being slowly overtaken by that of the technocrat) is a function of the process that all through the nineteenth century on the one hand isolated artistic techniques from art itself and on the other “geometrized” and mathematicized these techniques. From this know-how, what could be detached from human performance was gradually cut out and “perfected” with machines that use regulatable combinations of forms, materials, and forces. These “technical organs” are withdrawn from manual competence (they transcend it in becoming machines) and placed in a space of their own under the jurisdiction of the engineer. They depend on a technology. Henceforth know-how (savoir-faire) finds itself slowly deprived of what objectively articulated it with respect to a “how-to-do” (un faire). As its techniques are gradually taken away from it in order to transform them into machines, it seems to withdraw into a subjective knowledge (savoir) separated from the language of its procedures (which are then reverted to it in the form imposed by technologically-produced machines). Thus know-how takes on the appearance of an “intuitive” or “reflex” ability, which is almost invisible and whose status remains unrecognized. The technical optimization of the nineteenth century, by drawing from the reservoir of the “arts” and “crafts” the models, pretexts or limits of its mechanical inventions, left to everyday practices only a space without means or products of its own; the optimization constitutes that space as a folkloric region or rather as an overly silent land, still without a verbal discourse and henceforth deprived of its manouvrier language as well.
A sort of “knowledge” remains there, though deprived of its technical apparatus (out of which machines have been made); the remaining ways of operating are those that have no legitimacy with respect to productivist rationality (e.g., the everyday arts of cooking, cleaning, sewing, etc.). On the other hand, what is left behind by ethnological colonization acquires the status of a “private” activity, is charged with symbolic investments concerning everyday activity, and functions under the sign of collective or individual particulars; it becomes in short the legendary and at the same time active memory of what remains on the margins or in the interstices of scientific or cultural orthopraxis. As indexes of particulars—the poetic or tragic murmurings of the everyday—ways of operating enter massively into the novel or the short story, most notably into the nineteenth-century realistic novel. They find there a new representational space, that of fiction, populated by everyday virtuosities that science doesn’t know what to do with and which become the signatures, easily recognized by readers, of everyone’s micro-stories. Literature is transformed into a repertory of these practices that have no technological copyright. They soon occupy a privileged place in the stories that patients tell in the wards of psychiatric institutions or in psychoanalysts’ offices.
In other words, “stories” provide the decorative container of a narrativity for everyday practices. To be sure, they describe only fragments of these practices. They are no more than its metaphors. But, in spite of the ruptures separating successive configurations of knowledge, they represent a new variant in the continuous series of narrative documents which, from folktales providing a panoply of schemas for action17 to the Descriptions des Arts of the classical age, set forth ways of operating in the form of tales. This series includes therefore the contemporary novel as well as the micro-novels often constituted by ethnological descriptions of the techniques of craftwork, cooking, etc. A similar continuity suggests a certain theoretical relevance of narrativity so far as everyday practices are concerned.
The “return” of these practices in narration (we shall have to examine their bearing on many other examples) is connected with a broader and historically less determined phenomenon, which one might designate as an estheticization of the knowledge implied by know-how. Detached from its procedures, this knowledge may pass for a kind of “taste,” “tact,” or even “genius.” It is accorded the characteristics of an intuition that is alternately artistic and automatic. It is supposed to be a knowledge that is unaware of itself. This “cognitive operation” is supposed not to be accompanied by that self-consciousness that would give it mastery through reduplication or internal “reflection.” Between practice and theory, it occupies a “third” position, no longer discursive but primitive. It is secluded, originary, like a “source” of something that will later differentiate and elucidate itself.
This knowledge is not known. In practices, it has a status analogous to that granted fables and myths as the expression of kinds of knowledge that do not know themselves. In both cases it is a knowledge that subjects do not reflect. They bear witness to it without being able to appropriate it. They are in the end the renters and not the owners of their own know-how. Concerning them it occurs to no one to ask whether there is knowledge; it is assumed that there must be, but that it is known only by people other than its bearers. Like that of poets and painters, the know-how of daily practices is supposed to be known only by the interpreter who illuminates it in his discursive mirror though he does not possess it either. It thus belongs to no one. It passes from the unconsciousness of its practitioners to the reflection of non-practitioners without involving any individual subject. It is an anonymous and referential knowledge, a condition of the possibility of technical or scientific practices.
Freudian psychoanalysis provides a particularly interesting version of this secluded knowledge lacking both expressive procedures (it has no language of its own) and legitimate proprietor (it has no subject of its own). Everything works on a postulate that its effects have caused to be taken for a reality: there is knowledge, but it is unconscious; reciprocally, it is the unconscious that knows.18 Patients’ stories and Freudian case histories (Krankengeschichte) narrate the knowledge at length. Moreover, since Freud, every psychoanalyst has learned from his experience that “people already know everything” that he, in his position of being the one who is “supposed to know,” can or might be able to allow them to articulate. It is as though the “artisanal shops” Diderot spoke of had become the metaphor of the repressed and secluded place in whose depths “experimental and manouvrier” knowledge still precedes the discourse pronounced about it by theory or the psychoanalytic academy. About patients—and about everyone else as well—the analyst often says: “They know it somewhere.” “Somewhere”: but where? Their practices know it—moves, behaviors, ways of talking or walking, etc. A knowledge is there, but whose? It is so rigorous and precise that all the values of scientific method seem to have moved wholesale over to the side of this unconscious element, so that in consciousness itself there remain only fragments and effects of this knowledge, devices and tactics analogous to those that earlier characterized “art.” Through this reversal, it is the rational that is not reflective and does not speak, the unrecognized and the unspoken (l’insu et l’in-fans), whereas “enlightened” consciousness is only the “improper” language of that knowledge.
But this reversal is aimed far more at the privilege of consciousness than at changing the distribution of knowledge and discourse. In the artisanal “workshops,” as in those of the unconscious, lies a fundamental and primitive knowledge that precedes enlightened discourse but lacks its own culture. The analyst offers this knowledge of the unconscious—and that of the “arts”—the possibility of having its “own” words and a means of distinguishing between “synonyms.” Theory reflects in the daylight of “scientific” language a portion of what moves about obscurely in the depths of this well of knowledge. Over three centuries, in spite of the historical avatars of consciousness or the successive definitions of knowledge, the combination of two distinct terms persists unchanged, the first being a referential and unrefined knowledge, and the second an explanatory discourse that brings forth into the light an inverted representation of its opaque source. This discourse is what we call “theory.” It retains the word’s ancient and classical meaning of “looking at/showing” (“voir/faire voir”) or of “contemplating” (theōrein). It is “enlightened.” Primitive knowledge, insofar as it has been gradually dissociated from the techniques and languages that objectified it, becomes another form of intelligence possessed by the individual subject and poorly defined except in neutral terms (to have a flair, tact, taste, judgment, instinct, etc.) that oscillate among the esthetic, cognitive, and reflex systems, as if “know-how” amounted to a principle of knowledge that nobody could capture.
Characteristically, Kant treats the relation between the art of operating (Kunst) and science (Wissenschaft), or between a technique (Technik) and theory (Theorie), in the context of an investigation that has moved from earlier versions on taste toward a critique of judgment.19 He encounters art, on the road leading from taste to judgment, as the parameter of a practical knowledge exceeding knowledge and having an esthetic form. Kant discerns in it what he calls, in a stroke of genius, a “logical tact” (logische Takt). Inscribed in the orbit of an esthetics, the art of operating is placed under the sign of the faculty of judgment, the “alogical” condition of thought.20 The traditional antinomy between “operativity” and “reflection” is transcended through a point of view which, acknowledging an art at the root of thought, makes judgment a “middle term” (Mittelglied) between theory and praxis. This art of thinking constitutes a synthetic unity of the two terms.
Kant’s examples concern precisely everyday practices: “The faculty of judgment exceeds the understanding. . . . The faculty of judging what clothes a chambermaid should wear. The faculty of judging by the dignity appropriate to an edifice what ornaments will not conflict with the goal in view.”21 Judgment does not bear on social conventions (the elastic equilibrium of a network of tacit contracts) alone, but more generally on the relation among a great number of elements, and it exists only in the act of concretely creating a new set by putting one more element into a convenient connection with this relation, just as one adds a touch of red or ochre to a painting, changing it without destroying it. The transformation of a given equilibrium into another one characterizes art.
To explain this, Kant mentions the general authority of discourse, an authority which is nevertheless never more than local and concrete: where I come from, he writes (in meinem Gegenden: in my region, in my “homeland”), “the ordinary man” (der Gemeine Mann) says (sagt) that charlatans and magicians (Taschenspielers) depend on knowledge (you can do it if you know the trick), whereas tightrope dancers (Seiltänzers) depend on an art.22 Dancing on a tightrope requires that one maintain an equilibrium from one moment to the next by recreating it at every step by means of new adjustments; it requires one to maintain a balance that is never permanently acquired; constant readjustment renews the balance while giving the impression of “keeping” it. The art of operating is thus admirably defined, all the more so because in fact the practitioner himself is part of the equilibrium that he modifies without compromising it. In this ability to create a new set on the basis of a preexisting harmony and to maintain a formal relationship in spite of the variation of the elements, it very closely resembles artistic production. It could be considered the ceaseless creativity of a kind of taste in practical experience.
But this art also designates that which, in scientific work itself, does not depend on the (necessary) application of rules or models and so remains in the final analysis, as Freud also says, “a matter of tact” (eine Sache des Takts).23 When he returns to this point, Freud has diagnosis in view, a question of judgment that, in a practical treatment, concerns precisely a relationship or an equilibrium among a multitude of elements. For Freud as for Kant, it is a matter of an autonomous faculty that can be defined but not learned: “The lack of judgment,” Kant says, “is properly what one calls stupidity, and for this vice there is no remedy.”24 The scientist is no more spared this vice than anyone else.
Between the understanding that knows and the reason that desires, the faculty of judgment is thus a formal “composition,” a subjective “equilibrium” of imagining and understanding. It has the form of a pleasure, relative not to an exteriority, but to a mode of exercise: it puts into play the concrete experience of a universal principle of harmony between the imagination and the understanding. It is a sense (Sinn), but it is “common”: common sense (Gemeinsinn) or judgment. Without going into the details of a thesis that disqualifies the ideological divisions between kinds of knowledge, and thus also their social hierarchization, we can at least point out that this tact ties together (moral) freedom, (esthetic) creation, and a (practical) act—three elements already present in the practice of “la perruque,” that modern-day example of an everyday tactic.25
The antecedents of this judgment invested in an ethical and poetic act are perhaps to be sought in the religious experience of earlier times, which was also a kind of “tact,” the apprehension and creation of a “harmony” among particular practices, the ethical and poetic gesture of religare (tying together) or making a concordance through an indefinite series of concrete acts. Newman still sees this experience as involving a sort of “tact.” But as a result of historical changes that have singularly limited the equilibria open to the religious art of “tightrope dancing,” it has slowly been replaced by a practice of esthetics, itself progressively isolated from the operational and scientific method to the point that, for example, from Schleiermacher to Gadamer, it has become the marginal experience to which a “hermeneutic” tradition constantly appeals to support its critique of the objective sciences. Because of his own genius and his historical intellectual background (from the art of J. S. Bach to that of the French Revolution), Kant is situated at a crossroads where the ethical and esthetic form of the concrete religious act remains (though its dogmatic content is disappearing), and where artistic creation is still considered as a moral and technical act. This transitionary combination, which in his work already oscillates between a “Critique of taste” and a “Metaphysics of morals,” furnishes a modern point of reference that is fundamental for the analysis of the esthetic, ethical, and practical nature of everyday know-how.
Kant tries to define this tact again in a piece of superior journalism published during the French Revolution in the Berlinische Monatsschrift (September 1793) concerning the “old saw,” “That may be right in theory, but it won’t work in practice.”26 This important theoretical text takes a common saying as its subject and title, and adopts newspaper language (people have spoken of Kant’s “popular works”). In it Kant participates in a debate: he responds to Christian Garve’s objections (1792), and articles by Friedrich Gentz (December 1793) and August Wilhelm Rehber (February 1794) continue the discussion of this saying in the same journal. This “saying” is a Spruch, that is, at once a proverb (a form of wisdom), a maxim (a statement), and an oracle (a verbal formula legitimizing a certain knowledge). Is it a byproduct of the Revolution that a proverb should be accorded the philosophical pertinence of a verse (Spruch) from Holy Scripture and have mobilized around it, as in the old editions of the Talmud, the Koran, and the Bible, the exegetical efforts of the theoreticians?27 This philosophical debate concerning a proverb calls to mind the Gospel story of the Child (Infans) discoursing among the teachers in the Temple, or the popular theme of the “enfant sage à trois ans” (“wise three-year-old”).28 But the discussion is no longer concerned with the theme of childhood, any more than with that of old age (as Kant’s translators make it appear in rendering his Gemeinspruch by “old saw”) but rather with anyone and everyone, with the “common” and “ordinary” (Gemein) man, whose saying once again questions the intellectuals and makes their commentaries proliferate.
The common “saying” does not affirm a principle. It notes a fact, which Kant interprets as the sign of either the practitioner’s insufficient interest in theory or an insufficient development of theory on the part of the theoretician himself. “If theory has still little (noch wenig) effect on practice, it is not theory’s fault; it is rather that there is not enough (nicht genug) of the sort of theory that one should have learned from experience. . . .”29 Regardless of the examples he gives (they involve the traditional problem of friction), Kant organizes his demonstration in a three-act drama in which the ordinary man appears alternately in the role of three characters (the business man, the politician, and the citizen of the world) that are opposed to three philosophers (Garve, Hobbes, and Mendelssohn) and allow Kant to analyze in succession questions relative to ethics, constitutional law, and international order. What is more important here than these variations is the principle of a formal harmony of the mental faculties in the judgment. The latter can be located neither in scientific discourse, nor in a particular technique, nor yet again in an artistic expression. It is an art of thinking on which ordinary practices as well as theory depend. Like the tightrope walker’s activity, it has an ethical, esthetic, and practical character. It is then hardly surprising that there is an art that organizes discourses dealing with practices in the name of a theory, for example, Foucault’s or Bourdieu’s analyses. But to move in that direction is to open a not very Kantian question concerning a discourse which would be the art of talking about or constructing theory as well as the theory of that art—that is, a discourse that would be the memory and the practice, or in short, the life-story of tact itself.