Horizontal Solidarities and Molten Capitalism: The subject,intersubjectivity, self and the other in late modernity |
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| Authors: | Valerie Hey |
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| Abstract: | Friendship is a generative topic because it covers questions about the self and the social, so encompassing the political, public, personal and interpersonal negotiation of difference. Friends can embody the resistance as well as the enactment of 'fixing' positions as shown within recent ethnographic work on friendship as identity work (Hey, 1997 , 'The Company She Keeps' , Open University Press). Theorised as a practice about making up and breaking up--about coming to understandings and mis/understandings--friendship has been taken as a metaphor as well as a statement about the im/possibilities of citizenship (Hey, 2001, 'Dancing Round Hanbags', University of Lisbon). This collection of Discourse articles on re-theorising friendship is exceptionally timely as the authors contribute to debates about the regulation of childhood as well as new times social theory. They reveal friendship as the site of reflexivity and tradition and in so doing show it as one of the few social and interpersonal relations in which young children can exercise any form of social control. These accounts might then be said to provide a particularly useful reality check upon the competing versions of 'the private (subject)' found in contrasting accounts of late modernity. In this article I seek to set this work on relationship cultures against a brief discussion of the current provenance of the subject in recent social theory. In scanning high abstraction I argue for more modest explorations in the making of inter- and intra-subjectivity associated with feminist poststructuralist work on class, gender and social difference. |
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