Page 92 - Composing Processes and Artistic Agency

Orchestrating different forms of knowledge 81

2009: 1349) concur, adding that “practitioners, like others, act in a world
already interpreted and already constituted; they achieve understanding
through being and acting in it, not through isolated cognition of it.” Our non-
individualistic approach does not discard the significance of the individual.
Although agency is socially generated, it is not impersonal, let alone anon-
ymous. Rather, it relates to those persons who have made relevant experiences
and acquired abilities, and are therefore in a position to carry out a practice
successfully and develop it further – so that peers, too, acknowledge their
mastery (see Polanyi 1958).
The practice of composing is anchored in cultural traditions, past experiences
and habituated modes of thinking. That does not mean that it is pre-
determined. After all, present-day actions take shape within their specific
situations: “Our perception of the situation is predefined in our capacities for
action and our current disposition for action” (Joas 1996: 161). This is a core
concept of pragmatism and approaches derived from Vygotsky’s activity
theory (see Gallagher 2009: 35–51; Wertsch 1985: 112, 199ff.). Situations,
however, are not unambiguous phenomena. First and foremost, they are
grasped implicitly. Situations constantly reconfigure existing connoisseurship
and mastery, and thus generate new situation-bounded ad-hoc knowledge.
Furthermore, “situations are not mute, they demand that we take action”
(Joas 1996: 160). This is why John Dewey combines individual situative
experiences with the social nature of “learning by doing” to explain the
development of agency (see Jung 2010: 145–165). Similarly, Fritz Böhle (2015:
34–63) emphasises the co-existence and effectiveness of four kinds of experi-
ential knowledge: as the distillation of already acquired experiences (“wealth
of experience”); as routines that are formed through repetition and practising;
as contextual knowledge; and as sensory knowledge that develops situatively
and is guided by experience.
The concept of knowledge that is emerging here will be central to this
chapter. Like many other concepts, “knowledge” eludes a strict definition.
Rogers Albritton (1959/1970: 233) points out this recurrent problem: “We are
unable clearly to circumscribe the concepts we use; not because we don’t
know their real definition, but because there is no real ‘definition’ to them.”
In addition, within academic discourse “knowledge” is discussed in different
theories (anthropological, epistemological, ontological, sociological, cognitive
psychology), which imbues it with an unavoidable ambiguity. We therefore do
not base our approach on any particular definition, but focus first of all on
the actions of composing. Only in the second stage will we examine the concept
of knowledge analytically so as to determine in detail the many forms of
knowledge. By different forms of knowledge we mean significant differences in
their development, sphere of application, manifestation and intertwinedness with
various practical and institutional contexts. The concept of knowledge, however,
should not tempt us towards implicit ontological beliefs, such as: “Knowledge
exists.” In fact, what we observe – and this is a daily experience – is that
people develop skills and cope with tasks in different situations with differing