HOW ELSE?
The sharing of process can be achieved through the trade or swapping of techniques or ways of doing things, a form of skills exchange or knowledge transfer. Here, understanding how involves an augmentative and accumulative undertaking, for increasing the range or repertoire of one’s process toolkit, adding new knowledge and practices gleaned from others or elsewhere. There is a pedagogical aspect to this modality of how. How do you do that? Here, the question ‘how?’ is often coupled with the answer ‘like so’. Observe the imperative of the step-by-step guide or technical manual, united by a shared attempt to communicate and teach the procedural knowledge of how-to. A how-to approach attempts to demystify a given process, render it as a succession of instructions or stages, lay it factually bare. Yet how can be proper and improper, it can be diligent or deviant. How can both tow and deviate from the line. Within some fields of practice or tradition, the principle of how is instilled through training or technique, the perfection of a notionally correct way of doing things. In other contexts, how emerges through self-discovery and is necessarily singular or idiosyncratic. Without due attention, how can stabilise into rigid formula or protocol, the unquestioned dogma of convention or of common sense. Recognise the stiffening of how into rules or regulations. Test and unsettle ingrained habits of knowing how through enquiry into the possibilities of how else?
From Emma Cocker, How Do You Do? (Nottingham: Beam Editions, 2023)