Introduction

Coming last in this collection of essays on one’s work is a privilege and a challenge. It is a privilege not only because one has now different texts articulating different facets of a common concern, but it is a privilege in that it shows that my attempts to rethink the issue of acting with all the conceptual baggage that comes with it has been useful for others, even if they (dis-)agree. Thus, the position alone could tempt one to provide just an overview and impose some weak order, familiar from the ‘contrast and compare’ genre. But one also could do worse, by creating the impression of a synthesis by opting for selective attention, in order to show how we all mean the same thing. Such an approach might be all the more tempting since we all seem to agree, due to the post-modern turn in social theory, that the world out there does not provide us with unadulterated and free-standing facts which serve as last appeals.

These observations point to the challenge part of the task, especially for someone who has warned of last words and grand theories. Similarly, in insisting that we filter our experiences through categories and concepts defining what is normal and making sense, or what is deviant or out of bounds, I can deny neither that these ‘bounds’ are not only logical distinctions – although they serve as criteria of intelligibility – nor that they are merely cognitive. Since they are norms, they not only state regularities but provide – through their counterfactual validity – for the enactments of ‘rules’ and the reproduction of social order, whereby alternatives are excluded and dominum is exercised as rule. Consequently, the notion of a ‘full view’ – attributed to theories when conceived from the point of the ‘view from nowhere’ – seems a doubly problematic metaphor for the social world where the observed order is based on rule-following and intersubjective understandings, some of which are clearly ‘fictions’ (such as corporations, or representations of a ‘people’, comprising also the dead and future generations), or they entail certain ‘truths’ that are held and declared, rather than found and available for inspection.