On the material supports of subjectivity: Mead, the self, and the new mastery of nature

Abstract

The pragmatism of George Herbert Mead has been fundamental to the sociological understanding of the self. However, the complexity of his work is largely unrecognized in the discipline. This mainly affects the way in which Mead intertwined discursivity with the materiality of experience in his conception of human subjectivity. Through a metatheoretical analysis, the present article proposes a straightforward approximation between Mead’s theories of the self and the act to contemplate the incidence of processes encompassed by the latter upon the former. Based on this movement, and after a dialogue with Francis Chateauraynaud’s pragmatic sociology, the article suggests a new Meadian-inspired sociological alternative to the concept of self, attentive to its material dimension and centered on the concepts of outer and inner grasps. The current discussion about the ontological politics in the context of a new mastery of nature allows for an empirical exercise of the argument.