Our fundamental ontological premise is then used to redescribe social relations by stipulating different dimensions of social reality. The social dimension captures those situations in which the radical contingency of social relations has not been registered in the mode of public contestation whereas the political dimension refers to those situations in which subjects responding to dislocatory events re-activate the contingent foundations of a practice by publicly contesting and defending the norms of that practice. On the other hand, the ideological and ethical dimensions of social reality capture the way subjects are either complicit in concealing the radical contingency of social relations (the ideological), or are attentive to its constitutive character (the ethical). (14)
In articulating this basic ontological standpoint, we take our principal objects of investigation to be practices or regimes of practices, where our aim is to critically explain their transformation, stabilization, and maintenance. Drawing on Heidegger, we claim that such an inquire will always have an ontical and ontological impulse. (15)