The following scribbles are closely linked with my Ph.D.-thesis, and are meant as a possibility for discussing how the concept of Action Competence interacts with the comtemporary academic trends and how it could further developed.
T.
I aim to present two overall arguments:
1. The notion of Action Competence is in many ways a mix of essentialist normative bildung theory and non-essentialist critical and discursive theory. This lends Action competence an interesting and in many ways useful position as a theory compared with the contemporary academic mainstream. It can be argued that on a general level the use of discursive theory has been perverted far during the last decade, and become delinked with the important notions of the body, the unconscious and the bothersome demand for contextualization. A revitalized focus on the important dual aspects (essentialist and non-essentialist) of action competence could perhaps prove to be an important asset, when further developing the concept and the analytical use of it.
2. 2. The notion of Action Competence in many ways mirrors the body of theories focusing on criticism of ideology. Most importantly there is a tendency to emphasize the barriers for the development of action competence, and how to overcome these. It would be interesting and stimulating for the concept’s further development, to stress the role of these barriers for the individual and what kind of enjoyment is locked within everyday frustrating examples of bad practice.
Action competence?
The notion of Action Competence as understood and developed during the last 30 years, rest heavily on the theoretical insights brought forward by the critical theory tradition that took hold during the latter part of the 20th Century. At the same time the concept is greatly inspired by the concept of Bildung and a distinct emphasis on the individual’s possibilities for changing its outlook on and role in the surrounding society. It can be argued that Action Competence serves the role of coupling the notion of democratic liberal bildung with a newer non-essentialist input from discourse theory that abandons the idea of a true or perfect definition of learning and competences. This interesting mix of a quite normative belief in democratic values and the possibility of the individual to access a critical Bildung base, which enables he or she to make informed choices about the development of their own and others lives, and the discursive and constructionist approach that emphasizes the relationalist processes offers several useful applicable insights. As a theoretical standpoint it makes the most of theories that are often hard to operationalise, by enabling a fitting critique of many of the systems or logics that rule organizations and thoughts of learning and practice. This critique becomes embedded in the action part of the concept, which entails a practical and real world strategy for changing or overcoming a given “barrier” or “ideological mechanism”. This has over the years had the desirable consequence that the theory is inseparable with practice and a constant search for possibilities of not only understanding, but also changing the world for the “better”.
As such action competence retains a very interesting explicit normative base in a world that since 1968, the mainstreaming of the Franfurt Schools and the “new” French philosophers insights, has become more and more obsessed with the pure discursive and social constructivist stance. This position has offered countless inputs to theory building during the last 50 years, but perhaps the time is ripe to present the use of discursive theory to some of its own medicine. The social constructivist discursive theories, rightfully criticized the late 70’s use of dogmatic Marxian theories for always succeeding in its analysis, but seldom enabling room for change or, more seriously, often describing a reality much removed from the real world, so has the use discursive theory in many ways become too easy and convenient to apply, almost taking the like of a academic reflex.
The growing emphasis in academia on the convenient use of easily available documents (ahh…the wonders of the web!) as the base of theoretical analysis and a strong, perhaps perverted Foucauldian, focus on omnipresent Power, has in many disciplines lead to an abundance of “free flowing” analysis’ of contemporary issues and problems. Focusing primarily on the present when performing discursive social constructivist analysis’ runs the chance of forgetting how discursive theory was developed by Foucault and others. Foucault’s original method of time consuming historical excavation of how identity is constructed in relation to different issues over an often wide time span, installs a concrete link to the all important context when dealing with the discursive formations. Alas this is not always a possibility today when scholars performs analysis, as either the resources at hand or the framing of a given project, does not allow room for an extensive contextual mapping. In many ways the concept of Action Competence, with its more old school adherence to the notion of democratic bildung has managed to retain a very important and life giving link to at least a more normative contextualization. The outspoken goal of many analyses’ involving action competence, thus focuses on understanding the barriers for individuals and groups in developing a critical, informed knowledge base, which enables real world changes.
This strategy in many ways mirrors the classical Critique of Ideology where the job of a proper analyst is to identify ideological mechanisms that stem the individual’s possibilities for living a full life. By illuminating these ideological barriers the idea is that, it is possible for the individual to get rid of the suppressive shackles and transcend into a new field with a greater possibility of living a true, social, full etc. life that combines a critical understanding of the world with real possibilities of changing it. Of course such an overly crude comparison of even cruder descriptions of the vast bodies of knowledge and theory that is Action Competence and Critique of Ideology misses a whole range of issues, but an interesting point remains. Why have the various branches of critical, social constructivist theory and the overall Critique of Ideology and its educational child Action Competence had such a relatively meager impact during the last 50 or so years?
The world’s great problems like poverty, violence, climate issues (and of course western existential boredom) are still with us, mostly supported by the very same mechanisms, that being capitalism, ethnocentrism, fear mongering etc. that has been around for ages. In many ways it seems that ridding people of suppressive ideology and presenting the possibility of gaining some sort of Action Competence, does only to the smallest of measures change the way people actually life their lives and how we conceptualize our societies. The utopian struggle towards democracy and social cosmopolitan values over and over again loses out, to the everyday life and its myriad of convenient choices and comfortable positions. That in no way diminishes the importance of having a democratic utopia as a useful ideal, but it opens up the question of the importance of bad practice. Why do we cling like mad to practices that most people know are bad news for the individual and the society at large? Surely laziness is not the overall development strategy for our society? We still work incredibly hard to achieve many of the things we do, and “laziness” does not enter the equation when discussing the mainstream fitness craze or other trends like walking the Santiago De Compostela, diving in Thailand or working for 50 hours a week until you drop? Hardship, at least physically, and the continued postmodern need to find a substantial meaning behind all of this, often combines to make people perform wondrous deeds for their own and sometimes for the greater good.
Bad practice, in its many forms, cannot, as such, be dismissed as the modern human beings search for lazy physical comfort. Instead it might be possible to view our addiction to bad practice as some kind of mental laziness or more accurately a continued quest to secure a robust level of mental comfort. Actually changing the way you live your life, in its most radical form: the idea that you make a critically informed choice considering the real world, is surely a potentially traumatizing concept. Taking an individual critical stance towards the world, and accepting that the life you live is not fair, honest, just etc, but to a large degree a coincidence is almost impossible, as we constantly turn to larger ideas, discourses, ideologies as guidelines for living and making informed choices.
Social structures or ideologies that influence and change how we live our life and conceive our actions are still very much part of being a human, but the dream of “overcoming” these structures and arriving at some kind of utopian end target has in many fields vanished together with the collapse of the great 20th Century utopias of real existing socialism and the pre-72 The sky’s the limit liberal market driven democracy. Critical thought, and willingness to envision possibilities that are truly utopian (a non cynical demand for world peace, democracy, end of poverty etc.) is hard to imagine outside the already existing patterns of society. These social patterns often demand intense concentration and work from each resourceful individual, but also make it very hard to go move towards the vicinity of established society and view it critically.
We now to a certain extent live in a time where the rapid succession of crisis’ that the liberal capitalism has a hard time dealing with the, Balkans in the mid 90’s, the collapse of the tiger economies in the late 90’s, 9/11 (plus wars), global warming and the soon to be over (phew..) 2008 financial crisis, on one hand shows the limit of our surviving utopia, and at the same time leaves us little to believe in beyond the existing dogma. It often seems that continued fine tuning of a system that clearly presents us with daily problems on humongous scale, are our only possibility. That might very well be a quite true description of the world we live in, but the important thing here, from an educational standpoint, must be not to succumb to total cynicism regarding our common future, and uphold some kind of almost childish belief in that the human race, will be able to wobble, in dire contrast to racing, toward a better, different place for us all.
In such a situation aspects of bad practice, our daily rites of overindulgence in consumption, political impotence and the race-to-the-bottom standards of entertainment, could be seen as, not only barriers toward “good practice” and Action Competence, but the only sane thing that keeps us from breaking down. Grasping with the underlying values of Action Competence and democracy at large is indeed heady stuff, when viewed against the back drop of everyday life, but perhaps the understanding of why Bildung and Action Competence has such a hard time making a real world impact, could be developed with a critical eye towards the functions of bad practice? Binning the idea that bad practice acts primarily as barriers to promising practices, opens up for a critical understanding of why these exact barriers are so stubborn and why they in some forms will continue to exist no matter what kind of educational approaches are levied on them. Drawing on lacanian psychoanalysis it is interesting to address what kind of jouissance is imbedded within forms of bad practice and how these, most often socially constructed, enjoyments are part of a construction of a meaningful life for the individual. Of course this open up for an abundance of different levels of critique in that many normalized versions of bad practice are imbedded within the very fabric of our society: the links between obesity and commercials, poverty and overconsumption, war and industrialization etc. On a educational level and with regards to Action Competence it is interesting how the very things that are offered: critical insights, a notion of bildung that makes informed thinking possible etc. clashes violently with the way people live their lives. How the very issues that is taught, almost must be forgotten when one leaves the class room, in order to secure that the individual can uphold some kind of reasonable relationship with the surrounding society.
On one hand this of course has the potential that all who studies or are inspired by Action Competence in reality upholds a quite cynical distance to the concept as embedding it in everyday life would quickly lead to one evolving into a social leper. On the other hand however, Action Competence, actually presents a quite distinct alternative and useful utopia. In a often cynical world, utopias can be viewed as something with great emancipative powers, both inspiring to the possibility of thinking in new critical ways, but still qua the utopian nature forever “outside” everyday life and thus still facilitating our need for a “mental distance” to the horrors of the real. The notion of Action Competence has the possibility of grasping with the fickle relationship between our own idea or narrative of our “self” and the way we actually live, which often lies quite separate. Action Competence, resting on a kernel of impossible utopian values, thus already explicitly includes the distance between our self image and lived life, which so easily turns into a cynical identification with things we like the idea of, but do not incorporate into our lives. The “explicit” part is important, as this constant focus on the impossibility of actually comprehending and reaching a (utopian) Nirvana, could be used as leverage in an educational sense to enable students, once in a while and only shortly, to glimpse the true “horrors” of world poverty, war, capitalism etc. and how we ourselves, no matter what we do in some way or other aid the structures that maintain these “horrors”. This hopefully could lead not only to small behavioral changes, but also to the possibility of new “ideas”, new insights and new potentially “promising practices”. A “promising practice” should thus not abolish bad practices, but instead install the mechanisms of creating of meaning that bad practice reflects, into new structures that could be perhaps be a little less cynical toward the world we live in and the way we treat it.
Further development of the notion of action competence with a strong focus on the importance of bad practice, could prove interesting in the continued process of stressing contextualization as a central basis for all understanding. With inspiration from psychoanalysis a focus on Bad Practice could also serve as a useful tool to open up the questions of enjoyment that resides within the social structures and discourses that seemingly work very hard to ensure that we waste so much of our live eating, watching and dreaming about pure crap.
Jonas Lysgaard