Taking the Biographical approach seriously – what does it mean for the concept of biographicity?

Abstract

The article starts from the dialectic relationship between “the biographicity of the social” and “the sociality of the biographical” – a relationship especially underlined in the works of Bettina Dausien (e.g. 2006). Starting from here, we have not only to look at “what” is reconstructed here, but also “how” this reconstruction is presented . By this, the complex powerful social processes of “addressing” and “being addressed” come into the center of interest (Rose/Ricken, 2018:).

Addressing and the way people let themselves “being addressed” (Althusser) – if and how they let themselves being addressed – this question opens up for processes of subjectivation, as has been conceptualized by Judith Butler and earlier by Michel Foucault: within subjectivation, people undergo a (powerful) process of submission, but within the same process and at the same time they become subjects. It is this paradoxical simultaneity of two movements – submission and becoming a subject – which makes the concept of subjection so fruitful as an analytical tool. The concept of subjection also gives space for the modifications, in which people could (and do) respond – and thus to their agency, and their (maybe subtle) subversion. Judith Butler would frame this with the concept of resignification.