ABSTRACT
The chapter aims to interrogate the multiple aspects of the concept of trans-subjectivity as ontological characteristics of interrelated practices that at once situate and transcend human agency. The hermeneutic theory of practices defends the primacy of trans-subjectivity over inter-subjectivity as the site of shared cognition and mutual recognition. Assembled and concerted practices are autonomous if and when they are capable of fore-structuring (of re-contextualizing, to temporalizing) the factual being of any particular constituent practice. Fore-structuring is temporalizing and spatializing. The most important dimension of the interrelated social practices’ ontological distinctiveness is that they are – in their ever-changing configurations – constantly temporalizing and spatializing (a) their own interrelatedness and (b) what becomes meaningfully constituted and articulated within this interrelatedness (including any one constituent practice). The articulation of meaning within a properly arranged ensemble of practices also concerns the tendency to make room for what becomes articulated. Taken together, the tendentious spatializing and temporalizing specify the chronotope of a characteristic hermeneutic situation of the articulation of meaning within concerted practices. An ensemble of practices produces in such a situation temporalized and spatialized meanings. The chronotope where this production takes place can never be localized and reconstructed in terms of a structure. The chronotope is permanently in motion, and inseparable from the characteristic hermeneutic situation.
