Practice, Space, and the Duality of Meaning

Abstract

The paper aims at a rewriting of the concept of meaning as a connection between the social and the material, a multiple connection, perhaps the only possible intrinsic connection between things as different as ‘practice’ and ‘space’, and a major condition of what has been recently addressed as ‘inherent relatedness’. Drawing mainly on Niklas Luhmann's theory of self-referentiality, I propose a reinterpretation of relatedness as a property of meaning. That property is defined as a duality of meaning—ie meaning as an event in our experience, yet in itself an experience of reference to acts, places, and other meanings. It implies that the very definition of meaning is referential—it is never self-contained or centred; it, rather, alludes always already to other meanings, acts, and spaces, referentially crossing boundaries while reasserting sensual and perceptive qualities. This renewed concept of meaning is proposed as a way to unveil relationality while actively keeping the subject's experience of identities and different materialities at work in the relation between practice and space. The paper places this key ontological problem and the quest for a relation between the social and the material into a particular, overlooked aspect of the society–space relation: the moment of sociation of practice and its informational, linguistic, and material conditions—a turn to communication and a ‘referential approach’ to the materiality of the social world.