Abstracts
Abstract
The article advances a type of relational sociology that is sensitive to the continually ongoing formation of beings and relations over the course of time. While the dynamic and fluid character of relations has been stressed by other relational scholars as well, the article suggests by drawing from the work of Simmel and anthropologist Tim Ingold that to attend to the coming-into-being and change of beings and relations, we need to alter the very grammar of considering relations: instead of fathoming them as connections between entities, we had better examine them as lines of life along which things become, act, change, move, and grow. This is to interweave the concept of relations with the notion of life, which the article conceptualizes by turning to the life-philosophy of Simmel. Instead of regarding life as encapsulated inside living organisms, Simmel considers it as form-giving immanent in the world’s incessant processes of becoming.
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Appendices
Biographical note
Olli Pyyhtinen is Associate Professor of Sociology at the New Social Research programme and the founder of Relational Studies Hub (RS Hub) at the Tampere University, Finland. His research intersects social theory, philosophy, science and technology studies, economic sociology, and the study of art, and he is the author of for example The Simmelian Legacy (Palgrave, 2017), More-than Human Sociology (Palgrave, 2015), The Gift and Its Paradoxes (Ashgate, 2014), and Simmel and the Social (Palgrave, 2010), and has co-edited the volume The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel (Anthem Press, 2016) together with Thomas Kemple. Currently Pyyhtinen is leading a multidisciplinary research project on gift practices in contemporary society and working towards a book which reconsiders relationality through the figure of the Third.
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