Generative Relations in Parenting and Early Childhood Education: Theory and Practice

Childrearing and education form the domain in which a generative relational ontology becomes visible, testable, and unavoidable. Accounts of relationally constituted subjects ordinarily presume a party who has been seen elsewhere and who retains reserves against which a present relation may be measured. A young child stands outside that presumption, since the faculty by which he would assess a relation is constituted within it. This book re-derives, for a subject in that position, propositions such frameworks have established for subjects who hold reserves. Its diagnostic core distinguishes two levels of relational degradation. At the first, the occasions on which a relation generates have contracted while the grammar governing them remains intact. At the second, the grammar itself has altered, so that every discrepancy is absorbed and the account held of a child stands beyond the reach of anything he does. The two levels are indiscernible under observation at rest, differ in what follows a restored occasion, and pass without distress, since whatever would register a discrepancy has itself been removed. From this the book develops an account of authority in which legitimacy turns on answerability, understood as the condition that what a party does may alter the account held of him. Answerability is distinguished from deference, and is set beside grounds of legitimacy drawn from a subject's conformity to reason and from the goods of a relationship. Nine developmental capacities receive a common treatment, and four generative conditions are shown to cross them, yielding a pattern of covariation that accounts individuating by domain or by logical form leave unpredicted. Quantities defined on relations over periods are proposed as observables, with designs and falsifying outcomes stated for each. Later parts treat conflict as the occasion on which difference is returned, making it the operation by which a constitutive dependence becomes a negotiable one, and treat interpretive and participative justice for parties who stand outside a shared symbolic order. The practical parts supply descriptions of what particular acts accomplish, which leaves a reader placed to be answerable for what he does. The central conclusion remains conditional on a priority of recognition over welfare that the book asserts and leaves underived, and the conditionality is marked wherever it bears.