Toward a Relational Ethics of Generativity

A set of practices ordinarily held apart, the teaching of a subject, the counsel given to a market, the advice offered to a government, the work of the analyst with the one who comes to speak, and the organizing of a community, share a single ethical structure, and the sharing is an isomorphism in the structure specified rather than a mere analogy. Two definitions state that structure. The relational ethics of generativity names the ethic under which the office of a practice is the design and the tending of the relation within which new capabilities, understandings, and subjects can emerge. The generalized language system names the situated whole through which a subject renders a world, comprising a mode of perception, a neural dynamics, a use of signs, a cultural context, a set of habits, and a horizon of expectation set within organizations of several scales, from the family to the firm to the nation. Upon these two definitions rest three claims. The generative ethic is isomorphic across the professions named, working in one medium, the relation, and producing one thing, the conditions of generation. Within such a relation the two parties, each standing in a generalized language system of their own, come to observe a matter that neither held in advance and that appears in the meeting of their systems and in neither alone. And the generalized language system is constituted by the joint structure of a past, a present, and a future, its present alone insufficient to it, since the subject's expectation of a structure yet to come already enters the understanding and the conduct of the present. The account issues in an ethic and in the questions that ethic opens, and it closes on those questions.