Practice v. Theory: A Smackdown

Derek Neal on lived experience and against the goddamned eggheads

Dear Republic,

It’s a core principle of The Republic of Letters to let no piece — however erudite, however intelligent — go unargued with, and here

Derek Neal

confronts the uselessness of Theory. Unlike with James Tussing’s essay, with which this piece is in dialogue, it’s perfectly possible to read on without knowing Schelling from Shinola, although you probably should bow out now if you’ve never heard of Earl Weaver!.

I’m enjoying the “What Happened To Literary Men?” pieces. Thank you! Those — and the future of the university pieces — to come out soon.

-ROL

PRACTICE V. THEORY: A SMACKDOWN

There’s a story my dad likes to tell about his grandfather — Grandpa Joe — a man I never met but who lives on in our family lore. When I was a child, I would say to my dad, “tell me a Grandpa Joe story.” I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but the appeal of those stories was in their clash of opposing cultures. We lived in Vermont, in a large house in the suburbs, and my dad taught at the university, but Grandpa Joe had been a coal miner in West Virginia, had started working as a young teenager, and had gotten black lung by the time he was in his 30s. Somehow he’d lived to be 92, passing away when I was four years old.

My dad, being the first of his family to attend college and eventually becoming a professor, delighted me with stories that brought out the differences between his academic knowledge and the commonsense know-how that characterized the environment he grew up in. In one story, my dad’s mother is starting a fire on a cold winter night and using newspaper as kindling. Dad tells her not to use newspaper as he is afraid it might get blown up the chimney, setting the roof on fire, to which his mother replies by asking him how many fires he’s built, suggesting, although she wouldn’t have put it like this, that there’s a difference between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge, and that the latter trumps the former. At this point Grandpa Joe chimes in, pushing the point further with caustic irony: “Don’t you criticize him,” he says, “he probably read that in a book!”

Another story: Grandpa Joe was an avid fan of professional wrestling, which he would watch regularly on TV. One day my dad walks into the living room and, seeing wrestling on the television, tells Joe that it’s “fake.” Grandpa Joe responds that if it’s fake, Dad could “just go ahead and fix himself a match.” Similar to my grandmother’s remark about the fire, Joe’s statement contains a wisdom unavailable to my father —wrestling is only “fake” if you insist upon an arbitrary distinction between what’s real and what’s not. Scripted wrestling may seem fake when one insists on comparing it to unscripted sport, but what about when compared to other scripted events, such as theater? Or when a chair is cracked over your head, or your body is slammed into the mat, and you feel pain? Grandpa Joe, while not making recourse to a philosophical argument, understands wrestling in a way my father doesn’t because, as a fan, he is part of the wrestling community, and he implicitly accepts the rules of the wrestling match and all they entail.

When my dad tells these stories in our family, he tells them out of love and affection, and also, I think, to keep something alive and pass it on to me and my siblings. I listen to the stories and recognize that Joe was the possessor of a sort of knowledge that I don’t have, a knowledge that comes from growing up in a certain time and place — in this case, early 20^th century Appalachia, which I can only learn about secondhand. This sort of knowledge arises when one is, as literary theorist Stanley Fish puts it, “an agent embedded in practice” or a “fully situated member of a community.” My dad, being a good storyteller, casts himself in the role of “the outsider who assumes the posture of an analyst,” and in this way allows me and my siblings to experience the contrast between two ways of knowing: practice and theory.

Fish uses the terms I’ve quoted in a 1987 article titled “Dennis Martinez and the Uses of Theory,” which appeared in The Yale Law Journal. He begins by relating an anecdote about the baseball pitcher Dennis Martinez, his manager, Earl Weaver, and sports journalist Ira Berkow. Martinez and Weaver, being “agents embedded in practice,” or, experienced ball players, talk before a game, and Berkow, the “outsider analyst,” asks Martinez what “words of wisdom” Weaver told him. Martinez responds that Weaver told him to “throw strikes and keep ‘em off the bases.” Fish then imagines that Berkow, looking for a story, is disappointed because he expected some sort of theory, which Fish defines as “an abstract or algorithmic formulation that guides or governs practice from a position outside any particular conception of practice.” Instead, all Berkow gets is what he perceives as a meaningless sports cliché.

Weaver meditating on the Orioles’ remarkable run of three straight pennants with a combined record of 318 wins against only 164 losses!

Fish’s goal in his article is to contrast theory with practice and to argue that practice is not subordinate to theory; in fact, he writes, they are two different activities with very little relation to one another. Talking about Martinez and Weaver, he says:

What they know is either inside of them or (at least on this day) beyond them; and if they know it, they did not come to know it by submitting to a formalization; neither can any formalization capture what they know in such a way as to make it available to those who haven't come to know it in the same way.

In other words, one learns to play baseball by playing baseball, not by talking about it. This is easy to see with physical activity, but Fish uses this anecdote to provocatively claim that judges, rather than referring to legal theory upon which to base their judgments, actually use theory as a form of rhetoric to explain and justify their decisions after the fact. The process of judgement itself does not rely on theory but is a natural consequence of what can be understood as an “enriched notion of practice,” with the judge being “a link in a chain,” meaning a member of a tradition, or culture, or community, who then acts as a “repository of the purposes, goals, forms of reasoning, modes of justification, etc. that the chain at once displays and enacts.” Fish wants us to understand that an effective baseball player, or judge, or, I might add, fire starter or pro wrestler, is not an independent, rational human being who consults a theory or a formula to then complete an activity; instead, to do any activity well one must have internalized everything that makes up that activity to such an extent that performing the activity becomes second nature. Referring to theory then becomes unnecessary, even counterproductive, because the “theory,” or the understanding of how to do an activity, is inside oneself, in one’s bones, in a way that can’t be fully articulated in language without changing it in some fundamental way.

Grandpa Joe left West Virginia and neighboring Kentucky only once in his life, when he and my grandma drove to the University of Toronto to visit my dad during the first semester of his PhD program in Political Theory. They didn’t tell my dad they were coming, but as the story goes, they’d heard the loneliness in his voice on the phone, and they knew he needed to see them. There are some things, perhaps, that a mother knows, that a beloved grandfather knows, even if they can’t explain why.

Derek Neal

is a writer living in Hamilton, Ontario.