Now it is clear that those who stress the role of causal mechanisms also go beyond the field of self-interpretations. For example, though Elster stresses the indeterminacy of their triggering and interaction, he uses mechanisms to provide a causal connection between phenomena and events. But he brackets the ontological conditions of possibility of these mechanisms, and underplays their organic and dynamic relation to self-interpretations and their contexts … Elster short-circuits the passage through the subject by conceiving mechanisms as a set of ‘abstract essences’ or free standing ‘tools’ that are not tied to any ontology, and which can be applied to different contexts without modification (159).
For us by contrast, logics are always linked to a particular field of self-interpretations. Social logics, in particular, provide access to the practices under investigation, enabling us to grasp the point of a practice or institution, as well as the rules and structures that organize them … Social logics require therefore a ‘passage through the self-interpretations of subjects’, and they provide a bridge between description/characterization and explanation/critique.
In any fully-fledged critical explanation of a phenomenon, political and fantasmatic logics have to be articulated with a range of social logics together with the empirical contexts they inform and within which they function. The entire logic of explanation thus requires the passage through self-interpretations (160).