Like Tai Chi, then, meditation can be considered as a complex dialectic of routine and awareness, in which routine, and persistent alertness within a routine, is treated as the medium for exploring and inculcating different forms of awareness. Routine and awareness are not opposites but rather part of one developing experience of flow. Moreover, the logic of both Tai Chi and mindfulness meditation involves recognizing rather than denying structure. Meditation does not envisage a ruptural world without structure (or a world comprising nothing but meditation) but rather a technical distancing from structure in order to deal with it differently. Similarly, in Tai Chi it is only by passing through the mechanics of routine that one can develop more powerful responses to what the world (in the form of an opponent) throws at you. How, then, could we characterize this ethical framing of routine? Routine is the ground both of our awareness and of our unconsciousness; meditation is a formal technique to make its practitioners experience and develop this dialectic; and the formal technique presents itself as a prefiguration of the transformation of all routine into the same object of persistent awareness of skill and habit. Whereas in critical theory one can only awake from the routinization of leisure by rejecting it and the structures that constitute it, Tai Chi and meditation propose that routine must and can be the very grounds of our awakening, and of the cultivation of the strength to carry this wakening from the mat into everyday life.
Routine as Normativity
In our first two examples, routine is clearly unthinking; the issue is simply whether it can be a technology for deepening (hobbies) or transforming (meditation) an unreflexive state. In our last example, unthinking habit is not only valued but regarded as a mark of (Western) superiority.
In studying the internet and mobile phones in Ghana, I used the idea of ‘communicative assemblages’ to think about how people bodged together the resources at hand into stable ‘media’ that could be used routinely by skilled communicators: for example, the flow of people and cassava to a district capital on market day involved the coordination of kin, roads, buses, market prices and much more. The presence of communicative routines testified to highly skilled, reflexive, determined and rational social construction by human agents who knew what they were doing.
Official ICT policies, by contrast, assumed black-boxed technologies – ‘the internet’, ‘the computer’ – which had a double connection to the idea of routine. Firstly, these technologies were expected to generate their own normative routines, and automatically. This is what we conventionally describe as ‘technological determinism’, and takes a very practical policy form: the expectation that placing well-specified kit in an air-conditioned room will generate appropriate practices among the ‘beneficiaries’; and simultaneously the expectation that it will displace all existing routines, such as the communicative assemblages that were already maintained locally. Framed in this way, new technologies generate precisely the opposite view of routine from that which informed my ethnography: for most development practitioners, to develop Ghana into an information society literally meant entering into the routines dictated by the new technologies.
226
• Don Slater