Activists and Emotional Reflexivity: Toward Touraine’s Subject as Social Movement

Abstract

Activists are embedded in the world that they are endeavouring to change. However, to become a Subject, capable of truly creating society, Touraine argues that individuals need to be deintegrated. Achieving such deintegration involves developing skills in self-reflection. This research examines the practices of a cohort of Australian activists in developing these skills. In contrast to Touraine’s normative-cognitive framework of self-reflection, these activists engaged in practices of emotional reflexivity. One of these practices was called re-evaluation counselling. It was only by reflecting through and on their emotions that they were able to identify and change the processes through which they both participated in and challenged hegemonic constructions of the world. If Subjects are to become social movement in late modernity, more attention is required on the emotional dimensions of de-integration. In moving towards this end, this research uses the concept of emotional reflexivity to build upon Touraine’s theory of subjectivation.