Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 22 Issue 8

Volume XXII Issue VIII Version I 14 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 © 2022 Global Journals A Locating Media in Cultural Theories relationship between information and receivers. In an increasing range of genres, digitization has enabled the audience to recall instances of broadcast; for movies, net streaming eliminates the difficulty of acquiring movie contents. By digitization, media is freed from the physical impediments of a recording medium as well as the temporal synchronization imposed on the audiences by the analogue broadcast. Now released from the materiality of media that has hitherto tied culture to a specific topology of time and space, signs in media mark a distinctive mutation in the mode of the recipients’ being in the world. With the peripheral placement of signs as objects, print media are no longer effective in generating communities. Media or culture after media affect the composition of the public, mapping recipients into a new network of information with no alibi of materiality attached. The task of exploring the significance of the transformation in media has been assigned to a series of ethnographic studies on media culture. To narrow the scope of my discussion, I focus on the relation of this development with the theory of practice, primarily with reference to the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu places emphasis on the experience of subjects and facilitates a sociological investigation of the implications of their practice to the sustenance of collective cultural systems. Bourdieu arrived at this approach through critique of empiricist perspectives in sign theories. In structuralism, the objective materiality of the sign promises a science of meaning via empirically discernible patterns of representation. Practice theory departs from this endeavor and adopts phenomenological insights into the body. In this shift of focus, the centrality of the sign is replaced by the complex network of sensations accessible by means of rigorous analysis of practice. Just as signs reveal hidden signifieds based on opposition to others, the body technique conveys the inner sense of being (and also becoming), achieving a conceptual transcendence over the physio-psychic duality inherent in structuralism and semiotics. The notion “habitus” extends this premise to the life world of the subject. The practice theory in this synthesis of post- structuralist imagination compounds ethnography with the body’s capacity of both doing something and also tracing the process of internalization so as to restore the meaning of the act; reflective observation enables an actor to retrieve her/his memory, test the validity of the retention, and utilize the memory in the future. The crux of the theory revolves around the social implications of practice seen in the generative perspectives by reference to the sustenance of the life world. Yet, the fundamental question in the practice perspective concerns the way in which the consequence of practice is substantiated. While it can be placed, at least in theory, in reflexive awareness in the bodily mechanism of retention, the process defies analytic overture. If its Durkheimian manifestation, as possibly social facts of a certain kind, obtains a definitive monumentality of its own, it poses a considerable challenge to articulating the subjective microcosm of practice as its part and parcel in constitutive terms. At a purely functional level, actors engage in practice and thereby locate themselves in a given topology of the social world. At the same time, they live in an imagined reality that their positioning substantiates as tangible events. Although highly synoptic, the generalization, on one hand, helps us recognize the importance of understanding which type of knowledge is at stake in the practice perspectives, and on the other hand, the implications of adopting the practice orientation for ethnographic research. Referring to the status of knowledge retained in a normalized lifestyle, Merleau- Ponty gives us a clue on the first point: But if habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an automatic reflex, then what is it? It is a question of a knowledge in our hands, which is only given through a bodily effort and cannot be translated by an objective designation. 10 To see how practice can be embedded in autonomous structures of time, thereby leading to a knowledge in the body, making reference to tightly coordinated collective acts shared by a group of individuals is useful. Retention of physical sensations from bodily engagements gives rise to a phatic sense of communality. Routinized daily worship in a religious order transmutes the physicality of the acting body into a seat of awareness. Indian culture abounds with practices that prioritize bodily engagement over discourse for acquisition of a spiritual state. In tai-chi, practitioners conceptualize an imperceptible flow of energy and embed the notion within physical motion. Linked with arcane metaphysics, systems of temporarily ordered flow of action defy logocentric designation because they prescribe highly organized disciplines on the body. In such practice, a generative source of reflexive memories assumes a central place. Likewise, the practice perspective that Bourdieu constructed presupposes communities organized by an operational discipline of some kind. This is because of the nature of the knowledge in question; just as the transmission of knowledge in the body requires some form of physical manifestation, the theory necessitates the interpretation of practice without objectified designation. Although the focus on internalized retention of practice prioritizes the subjective terrain, as semiotics does, unlike the latter, the former lacks an objectified marker of the contents. Without a language of its own, practice presupposes co- habitation of actors in a shared life world. In analytic terms, this necessitates empirical markers of knowledge obtained through practice. Practice thus requires practicing communities as empirical evidence to 10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , trans. by Donald A. Landers, Routledge, 2012, p. 144.