ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the claim of practices’ ontological autonomy goes together with an insistence on the entanglement of agency with the configured and endogenously reflexive practices. Unfolding the scenario for analyzing this entanglement in hermeneutic terms requires deepening the methodology of the double hermeneutics which also proves to be useful in the construction of the hermeneutic theory of social practices. The chapter briefly turns to a critique of a program of “empirical ontology”. Criticizing the sheer empiricism of this program allows to specify the point at which the implementation of the double hermeneutics becomes indispensable for studying systems of human and nonhuman actants in which entities are enacted in multiple ways. In a next step, the contours of the intended version of the double hermeneutics are sharpened through a critical analysis of Anthony Giddens’s version. The claim that there is an integral circle of interpretation uniting emic and etic conceptualizations begins to emerge. Finally, the focus is put on the narrative dimensions of the double hermeneutics. The double hermeneutics rests on a complexity of narrative interpretations. The nexus of reflexivity and narration is of special importance for the suggested version. Practices’ endogenous reflexivity is expressed by a kind of pre-narrativity. Practitioners constantly narrate their form of life, which shows that their judgmental reflexivity operates through narration. Finally, radical reflexivity – that might in some cases take the form of a “narration in a psychoanalytic self-dialogue” – involves narrative techniques by means of which the researcher dialogically situates herself in the research process.
