The Facticity of Practices
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12974/2313-1047.2018.05.3Keywords:
Ensembles of concerted practices, Cultural forms of life, Hermeneutic circularity, Trans-subjectivity, Endogenous reflexivity of practices.Abstract
The paper sketches out the philosophical project for a hermeneutic theory of social practices. The theory gains its interpretive character by modeling the relations between the subjectivity involved in collective agency and the trans-subjectivity of concerted practices in terms of hermeneutic circularity. The main task of outlining such a theory is the overcoming of a dominant paradigm that consists in decomposing all assemblages of practices into manifolds of discrete elements determined by human agency. The strategy of overcoming this paradigm paves the way for working out a kind of conceptualizing the hermeneutic circularity which enables the autonomy of social practices. The paper argues that this conceptualization helps one to find a way out of the depressing dilemma between agency and structure.Actions and activities – as they are situated in and entangled with interrelated practices – neither causally determine nor impose norms on the ways in which practices are interrelated in their performances.An autonomous ensemble of social practices projects its being upon a horizon of possibilities which agents choose in accordance with their desires, plans, intentions, projects, moods, ambitions, presuppositions, prejudices, background and tacit knowledge. In the hermeneutic theory of practices, there is an important caesura that takes place in the passage from what human agency strongly determines to the authenticity manifested by the modes of being-in-concerted-social-practices.
References
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Against this background, habitus might be regarded as an intermediate link between habits and everydayness disclosing an authentic lifeform. Roughly, the “system of durable and transportable dispositions” – Bourdieu’s shortest definition of habitus – is “something more” than a concerted habits within a social group because the former involves “embodied understanding”. Habitual behavior reduces embodied understanding to a pre-reflexive resource for executing (collective) bodily habits. But when dispositions to bodily comportment encode meaning that this comportment gradually articulates, then embodied understanding taking place in agential behavior mediates between the encoded meaning and the comportment’s meaningful outcomes. In this case, embodied understanding works within a horizon in which practitioners – in whose behavior an appropriated habitus is inculcated – articulate their everyday form of life. Thus considered, the concept of habitus (as “structuring structures” of behavior) has both an ontic interpretation in terms of (an extended reading of) habitual behavior, and an ontological interpretation in terms of the everydayness of practices disclosing and articulating lifeforms.
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Practices’ endogenous reflexivity is not a self-referential mechanism, and should not be confused with what Niklas Luhmann addresses in terms of self-referential social systems – or systems distinguished by communication – that by means of self-reference constitute their identities and differences. Self-reference seems to be, in Luhmann’s theory, a trans-subjective mechanism that avoids, however, a purely objectivist construal. For Luhmann, this kind of selfreference does not result from the agency of agential behavior. It is to be attributed to the autopoiesis of the socialcommunicative systems. (In his critique of Habermas, he also treats communication as independent of agency.) A concrete manifestations of social systems’ self-reference are selfreferential structural integration and self-referential constitution of elements. Yet all these claims rest on the metaphysical dichotomy between (biological) life and meaning. Luhmann’s approach to self-reference suffers from the same metaphysical hypostatization of levels of organization that characterizes any version of system theory. See Luhmann N. Essays on Self-Reference. New York: Columbia University Press 1990; pp. 8-14.
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I admit that normative entities are not natural kinds. Yet this statement is hardly to be defended in terms of scientific realism. Paradoxically enough, one can treat – via a scientific-realist ontology – normative units as natural kinds. Such an ontology does not dispute that natural kinds might be also man-made entities. From the viewpoint of scientific realism, natural kinds are kinds revealed by science. A class of clinical norms revealed in the scientific study of the etiology of an illness is a classic example for a “normative natural kind”. If one goes on to reduce the class of these norms to non-normative entities, one is jeopardizing the conceptualization of the illness under study. Yet one should also regard as normative natural kinds those classes of social norms, rules, standards, normative patterns, etc. which are revealed (in the sense of scientific realism) by means of objectivist social-scientific theories. (There is a dubious moment in the scientific-realist approach to natural kinds that is quite relevant to the present discussion. It is science – so the argument of this approach goes – that is entitled to decide how to define the category of kinds and what can be accepted as constituting a natural kind. But if this is the case, then the whole approach to natural kinds crucially depends on the normative concept of scientific rationality: Science decides what should be counted as natural kinds by bringing to bear its own normative criteria and standards for objectification. By implication, all natural kinds are in a sense “normatively laden”.)
