Sleight of hand

We can say that practice sees what it intends to accomplish, but it does not see the strategies it uses to produce what it actually does accomplish, a new situation. Althusser shows that practice will give an answer to a question that was never posed: the effectiveness of practice is not the resolution of the problematic to which it addresses itself but a complete change in the terms of the problematic, a change it does not see itself make.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 87

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Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Right? We do it all the time; it's self-delusion, but I think it is a sanity play on our part. We can't live with uncertainty, but we can't live with the knowledge that we forced certainty on uncertain circumstances. So we employ ritual (she calls it "practice" here).

Think about it. And let me know if you agree or disagree...after all, this is just an
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