Patterns are formed through the production process resulting in 'knowledge'.
Patterns are maintained and entrenched through a range of communicative actions. Such patterns are not only established in language, but also in other actions related to choices made in practices. It may be that whatever the form a pattern takes, it has some communicative effect.
Patterns are not confined to disciplines. Patterned relationships between practices are not always obvious. In order to analyse such patterns, a different rationality may be required. De-respresentifying language and artifact may be a point of departure. It does not help to ask: what does 'x' mean. It may be more useful to ask: how does 'x' function.
Following an academic style of reasoning it may seem (for instance) that painting and page layout have little in common, but the strategies producing spatial stuctures such as visual hierarchy are common to both practices. Such strategies support the same function: structuring time-space.
Such patterns may be analysed through: (1) the way objects of knowledge are produced, (2) the subject position available to the maker, historian or critic, (3) the concepts employed by the same, and (4) the strategies employed to act (either through speaking or making).
Asking "HOW" instead of "WHY" may appear foreign to some, and may even be perceived as opposed to common systems of knowledge production. It is possible that the analysis of such regularity will always seem opposed to some academic processes. This perceived opposition, however, is not the only possibility for the relationship between those who ask "why" and those who ask "how". It is possible for those who ask "how" to use such analytical methods to help change the patterns of practices that ask "why".
This possibility may well be a source of new life in stagnant practices.
