Figuration as our key tool for methodological and theoretical reflexion on issues related to the precarious brings together distinct but complementary strands of thought from the humanities, anthropology and social sciences. Figuration helps us to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue on the recursive relationship between social interdependencies and the cultural imaginaries of the social – a recursiveness through which the precarious comes into being.

Figuration analysis in process sociology

In the social sciences figuration analysis is mostly related to Norbert Elias’ process sociology (Elias / Scotson 1965, Elias 1970). This methodology employs figuration as a term for assessing dynamics of interaction and interdependencies between individual actors or groups. However, in the humanities and cultural anthropology, figuration refers to a whole range of practices involved in making sense of oneself and one’s surroundings.  When studied from a subject-centred perspective, figurations of the precarious can thus prove to be a powerful heuristic category for social and cultural analysis. It helps to reconstruct how people perceive, imagine, and make sense of the social sphere in which they live, without making strong ontological assumptions about how agency is understood and to whom or what it is attributed. Broadening Elias’ concept to a multiperspective approach, we use figurations (as stated above) to refer to the ways in which social subjects perceive, conceptualise, and map the dynamics of precarity and interdependence, in order to act upon them. 

Figuration analysis in humanities and anthropology

It is at this level that a broadened approach to figuration analysis shows a close proximity to ongoing research in the humanities and anthropology: more precisely, that related to a notion of human imagination. This second strand of thought deals with the transversality that figures, patterns or “Gestalten” display in all the complex and entangled dimensions of meaning-making. Figuration includes in this context phenomena that range from apperception via interpretation to articulation. This focus on the imaginary dimension of figuration owes a lot to Castoriadis’ thinking of social imaginaries as “incessant and indeterminate creation of figures/forms/images” (1975, 7). It delves upon how subjects develop their own images and ideas of such figurations – with the difference that they do so from within the very social dynamics whose conditions they attempt to understand. Hence, these imaginary practices of figuration may include multiple forms of narrativisation, picturing, performativity, or embodied knowledge in ways that may well reach beyond Western notions of human agency to include non-human, metaphysical, natural, or technological co-agents. Accordingly, the concept of figuration allows us to grasp or express complex dynamics of precaristion in concrete, experience-based figurations, scenarios, or else patterns of interaction. Such an approach will help us to develop a theoretical and methodological toolbox with enough flexibility to handle the various challenges in the field and to grasp the interdependencies between social actors, including their perspectives and imaginaries. 

For more details cf. Susanne Goumegou / Sebastian Thies: “Figurations of the Precarious. Rethinking Studies on the Precarious in the Global South from a Subject-centred Perspective”. In: Handbook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities (Series Transdisciplinary Souths), edited by Sebastian Thies, Susanne Goumegou and Georgina Cebey, 151–180. London: Routledge India.