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Pierpaolo Donati University of Bologna See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305347437 The ‘Relational Subject’ According to a Critical Realist Relational Sociology Article in Journal of Critical Realism · August 2016 DOI: 10.1080/14767430.2016.1166728 CITATIONS READS 7 704 1 author: Pierpaolo Donati University of Bologna 152 PUBLICATIONS 1,183 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Gift as part of the paradigm of philosophy of relation View project relational sociology View project All content following this page was uploaded by Pierpaolo Donati on 15 May 2019. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Journal of Critical Realism ISSN: 1476-7430 (Print) 1572-5138 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yjcr20 The ‘Relational Subject’ According to a Critical Realist Relational Sociology Pierpaolo Donati To cite this article: Pierpaolo Donati (2016) The ‘Relational Subject’ According to a Critical Realist Relational Sociology, Journal of Critical Realism, 15:4, 352-375, DOI: 10.1080/14767430.2016.1166728 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2016.1166728 Published online: 15 Jul 2016. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=yjcr20 Download by: [Professor Pierpaolo Donati] Date: 15 July 2016, At: 13:13 journal of critical realism, Vol. 15 No. 4, August, 2016, 352–375 The ‘Relational Subject’ According to a Critical Realist Relational Sociology Pierpaolo Donati University of Bologna, Italy The article aims at clarifying the viewpoint of a critical realist relational sociology when dealing with the notion of ‘relational subject’.Theterm ‘relational subject’, as developed by Donati and Archer, The Relational Subject (Cambridge:CUP,2015),indicatesindividual and social subjects as ‘relationally constituted’,i.e.inasmuchastheyacquirequalitiesand powers through their internal and external social relations. The validity of the relational (not transactional, and not relationist) perspective can be seen on different levels in social ‘collective’ subjects: on the micro level (for example, in the couple relation), on the meso level (civil associations and organizations) and on the macro level (for example, in citizen/state relations). keywords relational goods, relational realism, relational sociology, relational subject, relationism The concept of relational subject In his later work Philosophy and Social Hope, Richard Rorty makes an intriguing statement: ‘Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into Downloaded by [Professor Pierpaolo Donati] at 13:13 15 July 2016 another set of relations, and so on forever’ (1999, 54). This ontological perspective raises a question: when we speak of a subject (as an individual or collective agent/ actor), should we conceive of it in this way? Moreover, should we think that Rorty’s new pragmatism can be the right way to interpret the famous sentence of Marx (sixth thesis on Feuerbach) according to which ‘the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each separate individual. In its reality it is the ensemble (aggregate) of social relations’? In this article, I will try to reply to both questions basing my arguments on what is called ‘critical realist relational sociology’. A subject is, first and foremost, an agent/actor apprehended in their individuality as a human person. Indeed, the human being qualifies and distinguishes herself with respect to all other living beings by being a person who possesses her own © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group DOI 10.1080/14767430.2016.1166728 THE ‘RELATIONAL SUBJECT’ 353 subjectivity (see Archer 2000). The problem that the human and social sciences must address is that of understanding and explaining how this subjective individuality forms itself from the moment the newborn begins to interact with the external world, that is, the world of nature and people with which she enters into relation, something that happens even before birth when the child is still in the mother’s womb. The path indicated by relational realism tries to avoid both subjectivism, whatever may be its form (including autopoiesis and self-referentiality), and its opposite, which today is represented not only by positivism (‘objectivism’), but above all by ‘relationalism’. For relational sociology, saying that subjectivity consists of the person’s ‘consciousness’ (or Mind), as rationalist and idealist thinkers assert (from Descartes to Hegel and after) is quite reductive because no subject is an isolated monad. Likewise, it is reductive to maintain that consciousness exists if and in as much as it is formed by its relations, as relationalist thinkers would have it, based on the argument according to which the relation has ontological priority over the existence of consciousness (Emirbayer 1997; Laflamme 1995; Vautier 2008). When Donati states that, ‘in the beginning (of social facts), there is the relation’ (2011a, 25), he does not intend to state that the relation determines in toto con- sciousness. Consciousness (or Mind) is an autonomous reality, whereas autonomy means the capability of a subject to make a selection about whom/what to depend on. What the statement means is that consciousness, in its functioning, must necess- arily relate to an Other than the Self, and that only ‘in relation’ can the person develop.1 Like every social phenomenon, consciousness also has a relational essence in that it is a ‘related’ reality. But this does not mean that the relation ‘creates’ consciousness, but only that it contributes to giving it a form. The relational realism holds that personal subjectivity consists in consciousness (or mind), which operates in relation to itself through the external world that it per- ceives. Consciousness and relationality are co-constitutive. But there is no ontologi- cal priority of one over the other because they exist as autonomous and distinct realities. Consciousness and its relations do not emerge in a simultaneous manner (in which case we would be faced with a central conflation between the subject and her context). Rather, they emerge through different temporal phases in which consciousness and relation influence each other in turn. Subjectivity and the external context are different layers of reality that reciprocally condition each other over time Downloaded by [Professor Pierpaolo Donati] at 13:13 15 July 2016 through the phases that characterize the sequence illustrated by the scheme of mor- phostasis/morphogenesis (Archer 1995, 2013). The question to be answered is: in what way and to what extent do the relations that the individual establishes with the outside (everything that is not-I) influence the subject and go towards constituting her personal and social identity? In the first place, I speak of ‘relational subject’ to refer to the human person in as much as s/he is apprehended in the making of these relations. As soon as we observe the human individual ‘in relation’ to others, we see a ‘relational I’ that not only acts and is involved as Self in these relations, but re-elaborates itself in/through/with these relations.2 The question becomes: is the I that is situated in the existing relation [to ‘ex-ist’ means ‘being outside’ the terms of the relationship] the same I that converses 354 PIERPAOLO DONATI internally with itself? The answer is certainly affirmative, because only the I reflects, but it is the way in which it ‘reflects’ that is different. Why and how is it different? And what does this diversity engender? The I that converses with itself inside its own mind (reflexive inner conversation) has as an outcome the fact of rethinking and reprogramming its own deliberations, which, as such, will influence external relations.3 But one could ask: what outcome is had by the I that reflects, not only on itself within itself, and not only on itself in relation to the world, but reflects in/on/with the relation as such with the Other (the world)? Certainly the outcome will consist of personal deliberations that will influence external relations: but will these deliberations influence in the same way as the purely internal conversation? One can hypothesize that deliberations in/on/ with the relation as such will influence the production of social phenomena in a different way. This is even more true when the relationship with the Other is the relationship emerging from the dynamics of a social network. Let us take the example of a musician in an orchestra when she reflects on the quality of her personal performance and when she thinks about and within the per- formance of the orchestra as a whole and, from this standpoint, evaluates her own performance: are these two ways of reflecting the same thing? This is the problem of the ‘relational subject’. If the musician only thinks about herself, she will seek her personal model of perfection and nothing more (autonomous reflexivity). If she thinks about her contribution as a function of the orchestra, she will seek her best ‘adaptation’ to the orchestra’s performance (communicative reflexivity). If, instead, she reflects on/in/with the orchestra’s performance and on how this per- formance can be improved in the event that the musicians relate to each other in a different way, she will seek to alter the performance of the orchestra as a whole, that is, she will seek to produce a different emergent effect — which is to say, a more satisfying performance of the orchestra. In this latter case, we can speak of meta-reflexivity. However, it is necessary to distinguish between individual and col- lective (or social) meta-reflexivity. The meta-reflexivity of single musicians remains an individual fact that has certain repercussions on the orchestra. It becomes ‘social’ — that is, relational — when each musician looks (relates) to the orchestra conduc- tor who represents and interprets the We-relation.
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