GRK 1608: Self-Making. Practices of Subjectivation in Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspective

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The status of the subject and its capacity for agency has become one of the key issues of current times. The apparent dominance of market mechanisms, technical automatisms, and genetics is juxtaposed with a demand for lifelong learning, flexibility, creativity, and compe-tence. At the same time, people engage in new forms of protest and resistance, self - model-ing, and self-liberation by means of dropping out and abstention. Subsequently, what seemed to be a ¿decline of the subject¿ in debates of the humanities in the 1980s, now appears to us as a radicalization and pluralization of the subjectivity of the subject. This is no longer about the sovereign subject, but rather the emergence of (intrinsically) fragmented subjectivities in disparate historical contexts. Consequently, we look beyond conceptual considerations to the process of subjectivation in (everyday) social practices. As an analytical category, subjectivation allows us to unearth the phenomenon of self-making across historical epochs. With its focus on practices, subject analysis, we argue, is interdisciplinary: it incorporates material arrangements, discourses, and techniques within which and through which subjects form themselves and are being formed. During the first phase of our graduate research group the focus was on how people grow into specific subject forms and the mutability of these forms. However, our empirical studies have made us aware of the ambivalence and challenges of these formation processes and the need for negotiation, reflection, and criticism in practices. Thus, our empirical studies have brought to light a blind spot of current practice theories: they fail to address how the capabili-ties of self-orientation and (critical) reflection ¿ both characteristics traditionally associated with an autonomous subject ¿ are acquired in practices. However, these issues must be tackled if we wish to comprehend not only social reproduction, but also transformation, inno-vation, and transgression without arguing for the return of the autonomous subject. Therefore, in the second phase of our graduate research group we will focus on the simultaneity of the formation of social order and its subjects in contingent historical practices. The interrelation of three research fields (formation of dispositions; actualization of action potential; trans-formation, criticism, and exit) brings to the forefront the emergence and appearance of (re-flexive) abilities through which individuals make themselves accountable as subjects. The programmatic aim of our concept is an interdisciplinary praxeology of subjectivation.