Talking politics,doing theory

Abstract

This response reflects on two major themes running through the questions and suggestions offered by the five respondents in this forum: it seeks to clarify what might be at stake in ordinary language philosophers’ frequent reference to ‘the ordinary’, and what bearing these concerns have on differing styles of critical theory. Along the way, it suggests that the writings of Clive Barnett offer a standing challenge to geographers to reconsider how and why they write, read, and otherwise ‘do’ theory.

In some of his earliest publications, Clive Barnett (1995a, 1995b) posed a series of provocative questions about how and why geographers had begun doing theory. ‘What is theory doing in geography?’ he asked, how did it come to be here, and, now that it is here, ‘What can we hope to do with it?’ These questions presaged a career of critical inquiry into the things geographers have tried to do with theory – a study of the practices, cultures, and economies constituting what Barnett playfully termed GeographyLand.

My initial article in this forum (Bodden, 2025) was an attempt to take Barnett's questions seriously as topics for empirical investigation by bringing them to bear on recent renewed enthusiasm for ‘ontology’ within geography and to draw out the significance of Barnett's criticisms of ‘ontological trumping’ as a style of social and political critique (2017: 5). In particular, I traced the understated influence of the philosophy of Stanley Cavell on Barnett's own ideas about what it means to do theory, and I argued for greater engagement with ordinary language philosophers like Cavell to attend to the ‘ordinary’ dimensions of critique within social life.

The article received five thoughtful and thought-provoking responses, each of which shared an interest in unsettling a status quo of ‘doing theory’ in geography as well as a desire to learn from people's ordinary experiences, practices, and feelings. They also offered numerous and often diverging prompts for further reflection. I am grateful to these authors for their constructive and critical replies. Within the limits of this short response, I will not be able to comment on many of their specific suggestions in any satisfactory way, but I do hope they will serve as occasions for future conversations. For now, I will merely try to speak to two major themes that emerged across each of the responses: the meaning of that slippery word ‘ordinary’ and the implications of different styles of ‘doing theory’.

Grappling with the ordinary

Each of the respondents welcomed philosophical thinking about ‘the ordinary’ as a contribution to longstanding commitments within geography to understand the ways people make their lives in the world, connecting with styles of participatory research (Clarke, 2025; Wills, 2025), the study of heterogenous practices of knowledge-making (De Azevedo, 2025; Huang, 2025), or anxieties about the uncertainty of geographers’ own knowledge claims (Pugh, 2025). The richness of their shared interests is encouraging, but also perhaps some indication of just how ambiguous and polysemic the word ‘ordinary’ can be.

Clarke raises this question explicitly, querying whether my use of ‘ordinary’ might correspond roughly with geographers’ more common reference to ‘the everyday’, which he summarises as ‘those circumstances or practices that occur regularly in people's lives, and so are not extraordinary for them’. He further offers a salutary warning about the exclusions and appropriations that talk of the ordinary might enable, referencing Claire Langhammer's historical analysis of the discursive construction of ‘ordinary people’ – and, by contrast, ‘unordinary people’ – within political debate. Clarke's queries usefully gather a number of common assumptions that underlie geographers’ understandings of ‘the everyday’, ideas which both connect and contrast with what ordinary language philosophers seem to have in mind when they reference ‘the ordinary’.

In geography, ‘the everyday’ usually describes a certain domain of life, consisting of quotidian things like walking to work or cleaning the floors. These can stand in contradistinction to ‘extraordinary’ things – maybe a war or a pandemic – but reference to the everyday can also often indicate a style of analysis that considers the experiences of ‘ordinary’ people living through apparently ‘extraordinary’ phenomena. As Clarke notes, these images of the everyday often rely on a sense of repetition, reflecting a strong if sometimes implicit influence of sociological theories of everyday life, like Henri Lefebvre's.

By contrast, in John Austin's (1956: 7–8) oft-quoted explanation of ordinary language philosophy's aims, reference to the ordinary serves to make a methodological point, not to delimit philosophy's proper topic: Austin calls for philosophers to ‘proceed from “ordinary language” … by examining what we should say when, and so why and what we should mean by it … looking again not merely at words (or “meanings”, whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk about’. In Cavell's writing, at least, the concept of the ordinary is not contrasted with the extraordinary, but with the metaphysical, and this distinction arrives specifically as a matter of voice, as different ways of speaking philosophically in and about the world (1994: viii). The ordinary is offered as a challenge to the ‘craving for generality’ within theorists’ efforts to delineate what a concept must mean (Moi, 2017: 92), and a prescription to look and see what a concept, or a claim, or an action means within the circumstances in which it occurs. That these circumstances are not always – or even frequently – clear informs Cavell's lasting interest in scepticism, doubt, and uncertainty as ordinary concerns that confront us while living with others, as opposed to metaphysical concerns about ‘the unknowable’.

In this, talk of the ordinary reflects a shared concern for people's ‘everyday’ experiences, but seeks to understand them by looking at how people make judgments, come to decisions, revise their opinions, and ground their conclusions in specific instances, in specific circumstances, rather than interpreting those instances as necessarily day-in, day-out expressions of a culture, social system, ideology, epoch, or theoretical framework. Foremost, I think, rather than emphasising patterns of repetition, ordinary language philosophy reflects on mundane scenes of learning – frequently dramatised in Cavell's philosophical vignettes, particularly his recurrent readings of Wittgenstein's ‘spade reaching bedrock’ – to raise questions about the subtle changes, deviances, question-asking, and conclusion-drawing that go specifically unobserved when a picture of life as a sequence of ‘everydays’ is accepted. Ordinary language philosophy, ordinary language, and ‘the ordinary’ can be about something as innocuous as the weather or as excruciating as the genocide in Gaza: to talk about either in an ‘ordinary’ rather than ‘metaphysical’ voice requires consideration of the ways people struggle to learn how to respond amid the often-uncertain realities of their lives.

Critical voices and charitable readings

An appreciation of ordinary language philosophers’ interest in how we learn and how we work out what to do throughout our lives can help to clarify what might be at stake within critiques of metaphysical philosophising – and what bearing such criticism has on geographers’ own perennial ‘turns’ to philosophy. The simple reminder that inquiry is a regular part of life, and certainly no special preserve of the university or university theorist, resituates our reasons for philosophising beyond disciplinary debates and within the wider and shifting life circumstances that lead someone to question, to reflect, and to seek or challenge an explanation. Rather than struggling to dispel confusion once and for all, philosophising in an ordinary voice investigates how we are to come to conclusions for now, how we take a next step. This makes philosophy an ongoing task, but also a shared one, and it underlies the tendency among ordinary language philosophers to write in the first-person plural as an invitation or provocation to consider what ‘we’ think, to call for a response.

Clive Barnett's pointed questions about geographers’ own appeals to theory echo these concerns, as do his later calls for geographers interested in issues of injustice to ‘shift theoretical register from political philosophy and back toward social theory’ to attend to public practices of claims-making, problematisation, and response (Barnett, 2017: 161). Situated within questions about what it means to ‘do theory’, Barnett's interest in an ‘action-theoretic’ style of analysis might have the most to offer if it is viewed not so much as a novel and competing framework for explaining social action, but rather as an effort to remind geographers of the ‘ordinary’ qualities of their own interpretations and critiques – placing them as one among the many forms of claims-making people employ to work up, make public, challenge, revise, and contest ‘normative concepts’ in their lives. This perspective opposes the pervasive depiction of theory as a ‘lens’ capable of interpreting the world for us just as soon as we pick it up (see, e.g., Cresswell, 2013: 6). Barnett's arguments challenge the academic theorist and university geographer to take responsibility for the claims they use the concept of theory to make, calling for something like Ian Hunter's (2009: 23–24) empirical investigations of philosophical theory as ‘ethical instruments … means by which individuals are inducted into new existential relations to themselves and their world – rather than as quasi-scientific theories of the subject or the cosmos … philosophies as paideia rather than as theoria’. ¹

In this sense, I agree with Wills’ (2025) suggestion that Barnett's work poses a significant, if subtle, challenge to contemporary cultures of theoretical ‘vanguardism’ among critical geographers. At the same time, I have reservations about any quick attribution of theoretical tyranny to one particular subdiscipline or school of thought. As I see them, the consequences of these ideas should not amount to another ‘turn’ to a different philosophy supposed to provide a more accurate account of the world. Rather than turning to Philosophical Pragmatism (Wills, 2025), or interpretive political science (Clarke, 2025), or, for that matter, ordinary language philosophy as traditions that are ‘ordinary’ in themselves, it may be more rewarding for geographers to investigate the circumstances that occasioned the writings through which we inherit these traditions – John Dewey's pedagogical reforms, Jane Addams’ ‘settlement house’ social advocacy, innovations in ‘civil philosophy’ (Hunter, 2009), or – in the case of ordinary language philosophy – the modern reinvention of the purpose and ‘public goods’ of higher education (Barnett, 2018; Krishnan, 2023).

As much as ordinary language philosophy might challenge geographers to reconsider how they write, this also highlights a need to reconsider how and why they read. Such concerns are reflected, I think, in Barnett's (2017: 278) own proposal to adopt an analytical protocol of ‘charitable reading’, to listen for the concerns and commitments animating theorists’ writing without necessarily indulging their craving for generality. It might further recommend a principle of charitable listening, or learning, when it comes to fieldwork, which Huang's (2025) interest in emergent forms of embodied meaning-making through walking, and De Azevedo's (2025) reflections on the tensions between global ‘democracy indexes’ and locally distinctive forms of democratic claims-making, might illustrate. Attending to how these activities take on social and political meaning for those involved might help shift away from narratives of social and political ‘contagion’ (Bodden, 2022: 401) that treat people as unreflective agents of a culture, political system, or theoretical ‘lens’. In this way, despite the different trajectories of our arguments, I think I share Pugh's (2025) desire to challenge geographers’ claims to be ‘worlding’ others with their writing, and a desire to reconsider how we can learn with – rather than explain – the people we talk to and write about within our research.

Conclusion

My interest in situating Clive Barnett's writings on theory and injustice in relation to ordinary language philosophy stems from a desire to clarify for myself what value and consequence geographical theory might (and might not) have today – what geographers can hope to do with it – and a dissatisfaction with many of the apparent truisms used to justify geographers’ efforts to pursue social and political critique by ‘doing theory’ in this way. Rather than offering a newly ‘imported’ theory itself (Wills, 2025), ordinary language philosophy should stand as an invitation and provocation for geographers to reconsider their own ways of doing theory – to ask anew what their writing, reading, teaching, and researching can do. If an alternative to metaphysical theorising might involve studying what I have called ‘ordinary critical geographies’ to understand how people situate themselves, it should be as an effort to learn with and to respond to them, rather than to construct a new interpretive framework for us to ‘turn’ to for explanation. I am grateful to the respondents in this forum for giving me this opportunity to reflect on some of the possible connections and conflicts a commitment to ‘the ordinary’ might find within geography, and I hope these conversations lead to many more occasions for us to learn together in the future.