The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change

PRACTICES

Now and again, I have suggested that social orders are not self-standing or self-propagating configurations , but that they instead exist and evolve only in some context encompassing them. The current chapter argues that this context is a nexus of social practices. To say that the social orders through and amid which human coexistence transpires are established in this nexus is to say that the relations, meanings, identities, and positions of their components (as well as changes in these) are beholden to certain organized bundles of human activity. This state of affairs entails, in 5 9 turn, that human lives hang together, not just through social orders, but also through social practices. As discussed in the following chapter, the overall site specific to human coexistence is a mesh of orders and practices. 1. Contexts and Social Nominalism The expression “context” has assumed virtually mythic allure in recent decades of social and humanistic theory. Like the word “practice,” it has become an expression with which a theorist can point toward an encompassing and richly, perhaps indefinitely textured something—local circumstances, the wider situation , a surrounding space, or receding horizon—in whose hands lie the being and determination of his or her specific object of attention. This intuition of indelible embedment is the opposite side of the equally pervasive and insistent antiatomism of recent years, which contends that nothing is what it is when considered in isolation: If things are not self-determining or ontologically freestanding , determination and being must be referred elsewhere. Context, at bottom, is simply that portion of what is that something is beholden to for its character and existence, the sum-total of everything other than itself that determines these. By “determination,” I should explain, I do not mean causal determination alone, but any manner in which something contributes to the being, existence, or transformation of something else. Unfortunately, too often the word “context” has become a wand for empty gestures, a word a theorist marshals to acknowledge the absence of self-sufficiency and self-determination and to point toward the surrounding force field of determination without inquiring further into the precise identity of this force field or its determining modus operandi. The two chief contemporary philosophical sources of the term’s fascination are the texts of Jacques Derrida and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Derrida argues that no text is self-standing.1 Rather, every text exists only in a context of other texts. Taking seriously the meaning of the Latin root com (of which con is a variant)—together, with, joint, or jointly—Derrida goes a step further and contends that every text is a context: What a text is derives from and, in turn, helps determine what the other texts in whose context it exists are. Texts 6 0 The site of the So c ial 1 On the following, see, for example, Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), ; Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. compose a texture by way of their labyrinthine references to one another, and what a text is is caught in this web of references. Derrida maintains, further, that anything that exists in a context is a text. This thesis makes clear that by “text” he means not script alone, but any articulation of intelligibility, that is to say, of being. “Textuality,” accordingly, is a web of intelligibility-being. Because, finally, this web always “exceeds” whatever articulations it has received, the meaning of something always outruns extant articulations of it. Together, then, the theses that texts are contexts and that anything existing in a context is a text entail that any articulation of intelligibility is part of the web of intelligibility and that anything intelligible (anything that is) is so within this articulated but inexhaustible and never-settled web. Later Wittgenstein, by contrast, focused primarily on language and contended that linguistic meaning is not the product of a fixed principle or relation (e.g., reference), which determinatively, inexorably, and stably assigns meanings to words. Rather, the meaning of a word depends on the circumstances of its use, for instance, the activities as part of which it is used, what is going on in the immediate setting of use, the history of its usage, who speaks or writes and to whom, and what stands fast as “self-evident” for the people involved.2 Together, these...