In trying to understand the formation and the effects of knowledge derived from experience in a non-individualistic manner, which seems to be what you are trying to do, I think that actor-network approaches can be helpful, since in that kind of work, agency belongs to networks more than to individuals. So a community group could be seen as a network whose knowledge and whose governance habits outlast any one individual. However, as we all know from personal experience, one does need some continuity of human actors; we all have seen how the disappearance of certain key individuals can result in a loss of network memory. There is some literature out there on "urban assemblages" - I can't think of any one article that stands out but try searching with that as a key word.

Thank you Mariana !  Did you publish or write yourself on the topic (experience based knowledge formation and the collective use of it ) ?  I'll certainly use your suggestion on urban assemblages.  

Mariana, I've found your book "Law's dream of a common knowledge" so maybe there you elaborate more on the idea of knowledge formation based upon experience (I'm also rereading Geertz on local knowledge also).  

To narrow down my question or hypothesis: I wonder if the very specific constraints of an urban area (historical, spatial, morphological, social-spatial) inscribe themselves in ways of seeing, ways of valuating situations, ways of acting/coping with the environment. The question is raised in an context of empowerment and partially based on twenty years of fieldwork pointing at this possibility (I've included an article).  I've quit the concept of Habitus which I used earlier, because when one reads Bourdieu's integral theory (and not a la carte, see Michèle Lamont), habitus precludes any form of agency and area /community bound empowerment.  

I 'll follow your suggestion on ANT - e.g. Latours "reassembling the social".  

Thanks again for your answer !  

Hi Paul,

ich agree with Mariana that theories which emphasize distributed agencies are helpful. Besides ANT and assemblage theories the concept of dispositif/apparatus introduced by Michel Foucault is also useful.

If you want to discuss Dewey and Pragmatism you should contact Klaus Geiselhart, who is part of this network as well. He works a lot on Dewey, Pragmatism, experience and Geography.

Mainz, Germany

Dear Blondeel,

Formulating your question, you write,

Am I right in claiming that the renaissance of classical pragmatism ignores the role of experience and action in understanding area-bound agency?....

Classical American pragmatism and especially John Dewey provide good theoretical arguments for such a claim: long term experience with an environment, establishes specific knowledge patterns that are relevant to both daily live and the formulation of common goals. My question now is that in the actual renaissance of classical American pragmatism, there is almost no attention to such dynamics of agency.

---end quotation

I believe that there exists some considerable tendency, in the recent revival of pragmatism, to over-emphasize a universal, normative stance which neglects consideration of particularities of experience and action in particular areas or geographical regions. Your emphasis on "people being able to share experience- and action-based knowledge," and their being thereby "better equipped to phrase their local and social needs," is a welcome point. A politics of exclusion could adopt few more effective means than depriving others of such experience and opportunity for interaction. 

A theme I developed in critical perspective is a case against (manipulative) "insider trading," in analogy with the (in the U.S.) illegal financial trading practice of buying or selling stocks of companies on the basis of privileged or insider information which is not available to the general trading public. I noticed a related theme in the news here, yesterday, concerned with arms purchases by the Defense Ministry and a group ("Seilschaft")  inside the ministry apparently overly familiar and standing to benefit professionally from its relation to particular arms producers. Apparently, such arrangements are not "corrupt" in terms of legal definition, but the comment was made that this is certainly not the sort of thing one wants to have going on. Similar doubts arise in the U.S. regarding people going directly from government to industry or to lobbying firms, and the "revolving door" of related personal politics.

Any particularities could in principle add to the advantage of "insiders," but the general theme is one of "propinquity," as I think you may see.

H.G. Callaway

Hello Paul:

I'm not sure if I understood well your claim. But, a good revision of post-pragmatism sociology, Goffmann, Garfinkel, woud be usefull for understanding the contextual dynamics of social action. For example, in a current research on Street Level Bureaucracy, here in Brasil, We found that the LIpsky Hypothesis of rationalization and cognitive reduction in a public services are not good predictors of social action in local slums communities. The paper are coming soon for publishing, maybe in three months.

Best Regards

Silvio Salej

You seem to be trying to write as though both agency and consciousness are more definite than is observably the case.  ln fact, one does not "do" anything unless others respond as though one does, and it is not a sharp "yes" or "no" whether they respond so or not.  A sense of who does what is socially constructed.  Consciousness is something else.  Garfinkle struggles with it.  Read and I discuss it as some length but perhaps too formally in Human Thought and Social Organization under the idea of "instantiation."  The relevant eariier literature is not pragmatism per se but symbolic interactionism, which overlaps.  Actually, Raymond Firth, in We The Tikopia, pays a lot of attention to how ideas appear in behavior and how one finds this out, but you have to read him carefully.  His understanding appears in how he records his conversations and justifies his interpretations of them.

Extract from my PhD

Dewey highlights that experience comprises of the transactions between mind and matter; where thinking individuals interact with a physical world. He states ‘all conduct is interaction between elements of human nature and the environment’ (Dewey, 1922:10). As highlighted by Almeder, whilst there are differences between strands of pragmatism, fundamentally, ‘all pragmatists are united in the belief that human existence inherently involves the active practice of making meaning through interaction with our environment’ (Almeder cited in Stark, 2014:88). It is argued that knowledge is generated through our transactions; our experiences, which occur within an environing context that consists of both social and physical realities. Dewey notes the importance of the physical environment in stating that ‘an experience is always what it is because of a transaction taking place between an individual and what, at the time, constitutes his environment’ (1938:43). The social dimension of the environing context is highlighted by Dewey’s colleague Mead who notes that human action is socially contextualized and human conceptualisation is a social reflection he states ‘we play the roles of all our group […] The inner response to our reaction to others is therefore as varied as is our social environment’ (Mead, 1913:377)

The relationship between the individual and their environment is viewed as two-directional.  Dewey states that ‘Where there is experience, there is a living being. Where there is life, there is a double connexion maintained with the environment’ (Dewey et al., 1917:8). He believes that we are simultaneously ‘of this world’ (shaped by our social environments and history), and ‘in this world’ (part of the world’s physical reality and able to affect the physical environment). Whilst every person’s action (agency) is affected by their environing context, influenced by the physical world, historical events and social constructions (structure), every individual is also regarded as having agency; an ability to make choices and to act on them.

......

pragmatism is an approach that asserts that all experience is situated within an environing context that consists of material and social realities. When Dewey talks of transactions between mind and matter, aka experience, he is not just referring to ‘the totality of transactions between sentient organisms and their environing situation’ (Webb, 2007:1070). Thus, the concept of experience encompasses historical and collective experience that changes and informs our current and future transactions; our physical world, our personal and collective histories, as well as the actions of other individuals, are all acknowledged in shaping future experiences.