Abstract

The hermeneutic approach to practice theory treats the relations between the subjectivity involved in collective agency and the trans-subjectivity of concerted practices in terms of interpretive circularity. The paper argues that the conceptualization of a kind of such circularity operating within properly arranged social practices 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 of what becomes disclosed within properly configured social practices. This caesura brings into play the cooperation between agents’ reflexivity and practices’ endogenous reflexivity.