Theodore Schatzki

This book develops an original Heideggerian account of the timespace and indeterminacy of human activity while describing insights that this account provides into the nature of activity, society and history. Drawing on empirical examples, the book argues that activity timespace is a key component of social space and time, shows that interwoven timespaces form an essential infrastructure of social phenomena, offers a novel account of the existence of the past in the present, and defends the teleological character of emotional and ceremonial actions.

This essay sketches an expanded theoretical conception of the roles of nature and technology in history, one that is based on a social ontology that does not separate nature and society. History has long been viewed as the realm of past human action. On this conception, nature is treated largely as an Other of history, and technology is construed chiefly as a means for human fulfillment. There is no history of nature, and the history of technology becomes the history of useful products. The essay discusses the changes wrought in these understandings by a social ontology that depicts social existence as inherently transpiring in nexuses of practices and material arrangements. The first implication is that the domain of history should be expanded from the realm and course of past human activity to the realm and course of past practice–arrangement nexuses. In turn, this wider conception transforms the significance of nature and technology in history. Until recently, most accounts of the relationship between society/history and nature have presumed that society and history are separate from nature. On my account, by contrast, nature is part of society: a component of the practice–arrangement nexuses through which social life progresses. Human history, consequently, is a social–natural history that encompasses the varying presence and roles of nature in human coexistence. Technology, meanwhile, is not just useful products, and not just a mediator of society/history and nature. It also is something through which humans manage social life and the nature that is part of it, largely by drawing nature into this site and thereby conjointly transforming society, technology, and nature in history; and something that, over time, plays an increasingly central role in the nexuses where social life transpires. Through technology, in short, social–natural history takes form and advances

This essay pursues two goals: to argue that two fundamental types of time—the time of objective reality and “the time of the soul”—meet in human activity and history and to defend the legitimacy of calling a particular version of the second type a kind of time. The essay begins by criticizing Paul Ricoeur’s version of the claim that times of these two sorts meet in history. It then presents an account of human activity based on Heidegger’s Being and Time, according to which certain times of the two types—existential temporality and succession—meet in human activity. The legitimacy of calling existential temporality a kind of time is then defended via an expanded analysis of activity that examines where the two times meet there. The concluding section briefly considers a conception of historical time due to David Carr before showing why history is a broader domain encompassing human activity where the two times meet