practices, regimes, and logics

Structure of Chapter 4 Ontology

  1. Social and Political practices, Regime
  2. Ontical/Ontological distinction
  3. Radical contingency opposed to empirical contingency
  4. 4 dimensions of socio-political reality
  5. Dislocation: ideological-ethical axis
  6. Public contestation: political-social axis
  7. Political and Social
  8. Radical political demand, Hegemonic political demand
  9. Reactivation
  10. Ideology and ethics
  11. Practices and regimes revisited
  12. Subjectivity

Three-fold typology of logics
Social, Political, Fantasmatic logics which when articulated together constitute the basic explanatory schema of our poststructuralist approach to critical explanation.  This complex of logics provides us with the theoretical resources to characterize practices and regimes, to account for their dialectical relationship, and to explan how and why they change or resist change. 106

Social logics comprise the substantive grammar or rules of a practice or regime, which enable us to distil their purpose, form and content.  Moreover in characterizing a regime, we also describe the context of the practices under study, since a regime is always a regime of practices 106

A regime is just another term denoting the particular context of a practice or set of practices. It denotes the broader context that structures social practices, as well as the new social structure that emerges out of hegemonic political practices.  However, the term regime has for us the advantage of denoting something that is more individual than context, and this is because it already flags the fact that some work has already taken place in characterizing that context in a particular way.  In other words, this characterization process implies that the analyst adopts an active role in constructing the context as a particular regime. (125-6)

In short, the regime/practice complex is primarily a heuristic device that enables us to conduct concrete analysis (126).

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