Thinking After Closure: 5 Thinking With Practices — Where Theory Must Descend

After commitment, structure, irreversibility, and restraint, a further demand asserts itself — one that theory often resists most fiercely. If meaning, constraint, and consequence are enacted rather than discovered, then thinking can no longer hover above practice without becoming evasive.

Theory must descend.

The Fantasy of External Insight

Much theoretical work proceeds as if practices were objects to be surveyed from a distance: data to be explained, behaviours to be modelled, or surfaces upon which deeper mechanisms are projected.

This posture preserves the dignity of theory at the cost of its relevance. By remaining external, theory avoids contamination by the messiness of use, improvisation, and failure.

But once cuts are understood as enacted within practices, this separation collapses. There is no outside position from which practice can be viewed without already participating in it.

Practices as Sites of Constraint

Practices are not raw activity awaiting interpretation. They are already structured fields of possibility, shaped by histories of prior cuts, sedimented meanings, and negotiated constraints.

To think with practices is not to celebrate them uncritically. It is to recognise that intelligibility is already at work there — often more rigorously than in abstract description.

Practices constrain what can be said, done, and noticed. Theory that ignores these constraints speaks loudly and listens poorly.

Immanence Without Romanticism

A common response to the critique of externality is to romanticise practice — to treat lived activity as inherently authentic or self-validating.

Relational thinking refuses this inversion. Practices can misfire, exclude, stabilise harmful cuts, and foreclose alternatives. Thinking with practice does not mean deferring to it; it means working immanently within its tensions.

Critique does not disappear here. It relocates.

Theory as Participant

Once theory descends, its role changes. It no longer legislates from above but intervenes from within.

Theoretical concepts become tools that must prove their worth in use:

• Can they travel across situations without flattening difference?

• Can they illuminate tensions without resolving them prematurely?

• Can they be revised without losing their grip?

A theory that cannot survive contact with practice was never grounded in possibility.

Learning to Be Affected

Perhaps the most difficult shift is affective. To think with practices is to allow oneself to be changed by what one encounters.

External theory is protected; immanent theory is vulnerable. It must listen, adjust, and sometimes withdraw.

This vulnerability is not weakness. It is responsiveness — the capacity to register when a cut no longer holds.

The Cost of Remaining Aloft

When theory refuses to descend, it does not remain neutral. It defaults to existing abstractions, inherited categories, and unexamined metaphysics.

What presents itself as rigour often conceals inertia.

Relational ontology exposes this cost: distance is not innocence.

Thought That Moves With Its World

To think with practices is to move at their pace — sometimes slowly, sometimes awkwardly, always without guarantees.

It is here, in this movement, that thinking remains answerable to the worlds it helps enact.

This is the fifth unavoidable form of thinking after closure: thought that accepts participation as the price of relevance.

In the final post of this series, we will turn to the last pressure that now asserts itself: how one must write when thinking can no longer rely on closure, authority, or distance.