Relational Degradation: The Reconfiguration of the Relational Subject - Discussion I

Problem. A class of relational deformations resists the vocabulary in which relational harm is ordinarily described. Some have no identifiable perpetrator, some proceed without malice, and some are assembled entirely from judgments no party was wrong to make. The vocabulary of act, intention, and fault has nothing to attach to in such cases, and this is argued to be a consequence of a premise it carries without stating: that the subject is prior to the relation. Approach. The paper proceeds deductively from the ontology of generative relational being, on which the subject is not an entity standing in relations but is what is generated within them. A consequence follows by definition rather than by inference: any degradation of a relation is a change in the conditions under which subjects are generated. Seven cases are examined, not as evidence for the thesis but as exhibitions of the paths by which the alteration transmits. Findings. Two corrections cut against the natural formulation. Degradation does not diminish the subject's dynamics but reconfigures them, and the reconfigured dynamics are frequently the more intense. And the reconstitution of subjects cannot be the wrong, since every relation reconstitutes its participants. A criterion is therefore required, and it cannot be framed in terms of generativity without collapsing into the utilitarian norm the framework exists to displace. The criterion the ontology entails is revisability: degradation is present when the reconfiguration forecloses the possibility that the conditions of generation be further revised through common experience. Contribution. Revisability is proposed as the sixth principle of the ethics of relational reproduction, and as a meta-principle rather than a further virtue: it governs not relations but the five principles themselves, since any principle that has lost its revisability may degenerate into an instrument of the party it was framed to constrain. A second result concerns distributive justice, shown to be limited in principle, and not merely in execution, with respect to abandonment.