Sociology has suffered from an actionist bias, that is social relations are typically thought of as activities such as interactions, communications and practices. Recent discussions extend the source of action from exclusively human actors to include non-human actors (systems, networks, etc.). However, the importance of activity for the existence and maintenance of social relations is rarely questioned: Without activity (of humans, non-humans, networks, systems, etc.), there are no social relations! On the other hand, social relations’ passivity is mostly unaccounted for. The contribution of this chapter is to highlight the fundamentally reductionist thinking that underlies the actionist bias. Instead, it emphasizes the constitutive features of passivity and interpassivity as the fundamental counterparts of activity and interactivity. The foundation of an interpassive relational sociology is the idea that social relations are not necessarily actively created and maintained by actors (regardless of their status). In fact, the majority of social relations might exist because of the suspension of actions, decisions and communications. The key concepts of this contribution are thus passion (as opposed to action), interpassion (as opposed to interaction), interpassivity (as opposed to interactivity), and what I clumsily refer to as, passor because there is no linguistic term for the passive counterpart to actor.

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Interpassive Relational Sociology

  • Robert Seyfert

摘要

Sociology has suffered from an actionist bias, that is social relations are typically thought of as activities such as interactions, communications and practices. Recent discussions extend the source of action from exclusively human actors to include non-human actors (systems, networks, etc.). However, the importance of activity for the existence and maintenance of social relations is rarely questioned: Without activity (of humans, non-humans, networks, systems, etc.), there are no social relations! On the other hand, social relations’ passivity is mostly unaccounted for. The contribution of this chapter is to highlight the fundamentally reductionist thinking that underlies the actionist bias. Instead, it emphasizes the constitutive features of passivity and interpassivity as the fundamental counterparts of activity and interactivity. The foundation of an interpassive relational sociology is the idea that social relations are not necessarily actively created and maintained by actors (regardless of their status). In fact, the majority of social relations might exist because of the suspension of actions, decisions and communications. The key concepts of this contribution are thus passion (as opposed to action), interpassion (as opposed to interaction), interpassivity (as opposed to interactivity), and what I clumsily refer to as, passor because there is no linguistic term for the passive counterpart to actor.