Corpos, pessoas e aprimoramento humano: porque estas distinções importam

Meu título é deliberadamente provocativo porque nem todos os Teóricos Sociais acham que isso importa. Algumas das abordagens teóricas atualmente em voga insistem veementemente que não. Estas são geralmente associadas aos nomes de Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze e Felix Guattari. Seus denominadores comuns são a rejeição do antropocentrismo, a substituição do 'agente' humano pelo 'actante', a recusa em distinguir o objeto do sujeito e uma rejeição de uma ontologia estratificada em favor de uma ontologia plana. Como tal, essa visão poderia ser resumida como um Manifesto pelo ‘Poder das Coisas’, significando a 'capacidade de coisas inanimadas para animar, agir, produzir efeitos' (Bennett, 2010: 6). A coisa que manifesta o poder - o actante - é algo que age ou a qual atividade é concedida por outros. Não implica uma motivação especial dos atores individuais humanos, nem dos humanos em geral” (Latour, 1996). Em vez disso, são ‘intervenientes’ ou ‘operadores’; para Deleuze e Guattari, termos estéreis deliberadamente distanciados da ‘humanidade’. Embora uma massa de literatura (ver, por exemplo, Braidotti, 2013; Hailes, 1999; Haraway, 1991; Wolfe, 2010) se seguiu (incluindo a tentativa de Bennett para reabilitar o Vitalismo), não direi mais nada sobre isso, porque os anti-humanistas deliberadamente anularam a importância dos problemas especificados no meu título

Lze najít pojítko mezi vysvětlením a porozuměním?

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Can explanation and understanding be linked?

The problem of linking 'explanation' and 'understanding' remains unresolved - as Weber left it. This paper challenges the view that their reconciliation is impossible, as some theorists have maintained. Their case is that the entities involved - subjective meanings and objective relationships - are too ontologically different to be combined. From the stratified ontology of Social Realism, which acknowledges that different properties and powers pertain to different components and levels of social reality, this is no barrier in principle to their combination. However, in practice Realists have not given an adequate account of how 'subjectivity' and 'objectivity' are linked, which also weakens Realism's solution to the 'problem of structure and agency'. This paper offers a refinement: the human power of reflexivity is viewed as mediating between our subjective concerns and our objective social contexts. Reflexive deliberations account for what agents actually do - and they do not all do the same thing - under very similar social circumstances. The introduction of reflexivity enables the (socially) objective and the (personally) subjective to be combined into a single account of socially structured and structuring action

Emotions as commentaries on human concerns

The papers in this volume represent a broad array of approaches to the analysis of emotions. Some come from well established traditions in social psychology and micro sociology - traditions such as symbolic interaction, expectation states research, interaction ritual theory, and power-status theory. Others come from more macro-oriented theorizing in Europe; another set comes from meso-level analysis of organizational structures; and still others come from the opposite end of the intellectual continuum and explore the physiology and evolution of emotions. The goal of the volume is to sample the range of work in an area that did not exist there decades ago in sociology and to see the theoretical and research programs that sociological theorists and researchers on emotions are pursuing. The sociology of emotions is now a broad-based intellectual movement, with the result that no one volume can fully capture the diversity of work being performed by sociologists. Still, this volume attempts to provide readers with a review of some of the more creative work on emotional dynamics in human groupings

La riflessività e la trasformazione della società civile

Human reflexivity works through internal conversations and has a long history and a future of increasing importance for social institutions, citizenship and civil society. In the course of this article, Archer advances three propositions. Firstly, that different socio-historical periods are associated with the dominance of a particular mode of reflexivity (the pre-modern generating Communicative Reflexivity; modernity favouring Autonomous Reflexivity; and the nascent morphogenetic society encouraging Meta-reflexivity). These are generated from the contextual ‘continuity’, ‘discontinuity’ and ‘incongruity’ that respectively characterise the situations shaped for social subjects in the three periods. Secondly, she maintains that the predominance of different modes has entirely different (aggregate) macroscopic consequences for society. Thirdly, she will ventured that each dominant mode has a particular and differential impact upon the component institutions of civil society. The analysis also documents the connections between the modes of reflexivity practised and the proclivity or reluctance of their practitioners to engage in political involvement, participate in social movements and associations, albeit at the individual level

Routine, reflexivity, and realism

Many scholars continue to accord routine action a central role in social theory and defend the continuing relevance of Bourdieu's habitus. Simultaneously, most recognize the importance of reflexivity. In this article, I consider three versions of the effort to render these concepts compatible, which I term "empirical combination," "hybridization," and "ontological and theoretical reconciliation." None of the efforts is ultimately successful in analytical terms. Moreover, I argue on empirical grounds that the relevance of habitus began to decrease toward the end of the 20th century, given major changes in the structures of the advanced capitalist democracies. In these circumstances, habitual forms prove incapable of providing guidelines for people's lives and, thus, make reflexivity imperative. I conclude by arguing that even the reproduction of natal background is a reflexive activity today and that the mode most favorable to producing it-what I call "communicative reflexivity"-is becoming harder to sustain