Vol. 1 (2025)
Practice Theory: Past, Present, Future

Essays

The Subjects of Practices: An Invited Response to the Question: ‘What is the Significance of the Human Being in Practice Theories?’

Published 12-12-2025

  • Thomas Alkemeyer

Thomas Alkemeyer
Institut für Sportwissenschaft, Carl von Ossietzky Universität, Oldenburg

An ammended version of Giorgio de de Chirico's Hector and Andromache (1918).

Abstract

This paper considers the significance of people within practice theory, arguing that they do not merely participate in practices as unspecified individuals but assume specific subject forms through which they develop a practice-related subjectivity. In contrast to both the Cartesian notion of an autonomous subject and its dissolution in holistic accounts of practice, the article proposes a relational understanding of subjectivity as a constitutively conditioned capacity to act. Drawing on Bourdieu, Giddens, Schatzki, Leont’ev, and the concept of subjectivation, it shows how subjects and practices co-constitute one another as transformative processes. Practices are not only structured patterns of action but, following Leont’ev, motivated and meaningful activities oriented toward an ‘objectivity’ (‘Gegenständlichkeit’) in the world. They thus include the embodied, reflexive capacities of participants. Material artefacts and infrastructures are seen as enabling or constraining such agency. The article illustrates this dynamic through the historical emergence of the ‘Fosbury Flop’ in high jumping, showing how innovation arises from socio-material constellations rather than autonomous creativity. People appear as active, reflective moments within practice, whose constitutively conditioned subjectivity enables critique, transformation, and the creation of something new.

Keywords

co-constitution of practices and subjects, objectivity (“Gegenständlichkeit“) of practice, subjectivation, transformation

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References

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