Abstract
A foundational assumption of social theory is that things change: structures, institutions, organisations, groups, cultures, and selves all are contingent and subject to transformation. Herein, this malleable foundation is termed transformativity, drawing attention to a specific conceptualisation of change, which predominates and displaces other accounts of change, elaborated via a typology of change that positions transformation between reconfiguration and metamorphosis. Transformativity posits society as contingent, open to reconstruction, but assuming that change acts upon a substrate, which is continuous; altered, yet retaining identity through time. Transformativity is situated culturally by tracing historical conceptions of change from ancient to modern. Next, Turner's liminality, Foucault's power relations, and Butler's performativity are analysed in depth as influential contemporary models of transformativity. Furthermore, transformativist thinking animates governmentality, neo-liberal capitalism, technological thinking, and cultures of self-work. In particular, transformativity intersects with contemporary ideas of ‘experience’, incorporating notions of contingency and change into modern experimentalism. While transformativity facilitates critique and social change, this implies a gradualist model of slow purification and refinement, which may be inadequate to deal with contemporary challenges.
Is this the ‘great age of transformation’ to which everything must submit? Neurologists discuss brain plasticity and social media platforms rewire our minds (Malabou, 2008). DNA is not destiny, as it can be triggered by environmental stressors that rewrite our genetic code. Perhaps soon scientists will declare that the ‘laws of physics’ are contingent, local customs, true for our galaxy but altered elsewhere or contradicted in parallel universes (Hacking, 1999). Perhaps not. Certainly, social theoretical ideas of transformation and change, the insistence that society, politics, culture, and personality are not fixed but malleable, suffuses contemporary thought. Centuries ago, Darwin made being human a contingent historical evolution while Marx and Engels analysed the ‘uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions’ (2018[1848]: 27). Today, few if any dispute that ‘things change’ and almost nothing is taken as eternal, except, ironically, change itself.
That things change is not contested herein; the actuality of alterations, reconfigurations, and transmutations is bracketed in order to explore how ‘transformation’ is conceptualised – the discursive production or social construction of ‘transformation’ by the actors who claim to discover, precipitate, and undergo it. Herein, this malleable foundation of social theory is styled as transformativity, albeit that a single word can hardly account for the plethora of conceptions and metaphors of change. Certainly, similar ideas about the possibility of change are shared from social theories to social policy to governmental intervention to popular culture. Ambivalence about transformation abounds; educationalists hope for transformative pedagogy that emancipates but simultaneously worry that teaching homogenises or reproduces class distinctions. Few if any refuse or deny the reality of transformation, but how it is conceptualised is rarely examined.
The quotidian word transformation is displaced here by transformativity, to highlight that this is a specifically modern account of change: transformativity designates less a process than a constitutive mode of thought. ‘Transformativist thinking’ insists that selves and society are contingent and constructed, and subject to transformation over time. Whether through agentic actors or structural developments or historical processes or mere chance, transformations allegedly happen. These are not metamorphoses, but involve the unfolding of existing qualities, jettisoning older elements, self-purification, or ‘social learning processes’ – transformativity assumes there is some sort of substrate that is ‘transubstantiated’, altered but continuous. Transformativity is dramatic, not mere reconfiguration by adding experiences to a life or skills to a repertoire or new technology or ideas or people to a society; it is not a mere alteration of elements but a change of substance or quality.
Analysing transformativity is challenging, because almost all perspectives already encode this ontology – it is a prime assumption of our ‘human sciences’. Rather than examining transformativity within governmental reason or modern capitalist or neo-liberal projects, which are commonly critiqued as dominating power relations, this article examines three key theorists of transformativity – Turner, Foucault, and Butler – selected for the transdisciplinary impact of their work and the resonance of their conceptualisation of change. To be clear, this is not a ‘critique’ of these theorists as excessive or even ‘ideological’ transformative thinkers. Rather, these are exemplary representatives of transformativity in general – indeed, I have drawn extensively on each of them here and elsewhere. Nonetheless, the centrality, even dominance, of transformativity needs to be recognised, scrutinised, and perhaps pluralised. Herein, this is primarily a theoretical concern, but beyond this, how we conceptualise change may have pragmatic consequences for how we pursue it. Firstly, however, to provide context and alternatives, historical metaphors of transformation are briefly examined.
Transformative metaphors
How change is conceptualised is contingent upon culture and history, and often alters over time – discourse is a quintessentially malleable foundation! Remarkably, a pronounced version of change – metamorphosis – is largely confined to legend, story, considered a form of magical thinking. Sudden changes of shape or being, even with a complete break in consciousness, are found in many cultures, by anthropologists, folklorists, and historians. One famous articulation is Ovid's Metamorphoses, which recounts numerous myths, emphasising shape-changing, continuing into the volatile politics of Ovid's day: ‘All is subject to change and nothing to death.… All is in flux. Any shape that is formed is constantly shifting’ (2004[ca.8 CE]: XV, l. 165, l. 178). Partially this is a Heraclitan philosophy: ‘All things are in perpetual flux.’ Interestingly, many of those transformed within Ovid's narrative retain consciousness of their former form, as do protagonists in contemporary films and novels where minds and bodies are swapped. What emerges here is a sense of transformation that is largely imposed from the outside, sudden and total, but also involves discrete components; a human becomes an animal, or some other creature, yet remains mentally themselves.
A further Greek concept underlies the transformativist perspective that all is contingent and constructed; the khora, discussed by Plato in the Timaeus, a cosmogony that insists that everything emerges from nothing: ‘That which is to receive all forms should have no form’ (Timaeus, 1959, 51B). Such a matrix was problematic in Platonism, a form of ‘non-being’ famously problematised as undermining all being in the Statesman (Horvath, 2013). Indeed, ‘formlessness’ was a problem for the theory of ‘eternal forms’, yet for these forms to be embodied, a contingent substance was necessary. While obscure, some notion of the khora or social indeterminacy from which creations and inventions might spring is generally present within most social theories of change, such as Bauman's ‘liquid modernity’.
Both philosophy and theology adopted and adapted Greek words to describe change and conversion. There are two main terms, epistrophe and metanoia; the former is an awakening, an experience of seeing the light, for instance, Plato's cave allegory or Paul's road to Damascus, whereas the latter means a change of mind or heart, leading to a changed life conduct (Foucault, 2005). Indeed, this relationship wherein belief, knowledge, or even ‘truth-telling’ informing action and life conduct and reshaping subjectivity looms large in our contemporary sense of transformativity. Thus, there can be conversion to a creed that transforms, but also the gradual reform of conduct – through confession or pastoral power (Foucault, 2014). Regardless, the individual as somehow author of their self, their ideas, and their actions is maintained, as an agent involved in change, no matter what aspect or substrate of themselves is changed.
Metamorphic, sudden, complete change was incompatible with medieval Christian thought, as the theological principle of full bodily resurrection allowed nothing to pass away or be transformed (Bynum, 2001). Medieval ‘descriptions of reform or deterioration are filled with metaphors of unclothing or adding’ (ibid.: 131), for instance, in being ‘shriven’ by confession, being separated from sins or transgressions (Foucault, 2014). During the Renaissance, the invention of purgatory imagined a place where souls could be reformed (Le Goff, 1984). Slowly, ideas of transformation were invented, with the emergence of a cultural sense that ‘identity is labile, problematic, threatening and threatened, but metamorphosis is as much its guarantee as its loss’ (Bynum, 2001: 182). Thus, medieval ‘Western’ thought rejects ancient notions of metempsychosis – the transmigration of souls – and insists upon the persistence of some substrate through change, some soul or consciousness that conjoins temporal points.
Strikingly, Old and New Testament texts provided a series of metaphors of transformation, perhaps more directly influencing modern thought when reread through Protestantism (Boland and Griffin, 2021). The biblical metaphor of malleability is well known: ‘Just like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand’ (Christian Standard Edition, Jeremiah 18:6) or ‘We are the clay you are our potter, we are all the work of your hand’ (Isaiah 64:8). The potency of divine power as much as the transformability of souls is expressed here, foregrounding the possibility of salvation through transformation. Another metaphor of transformation is the idea of burning away the dross and straw to reveal the steel and gems within, from Colossians, an image that largely inspired the idea of purgatory (Le Goff, 1984). Another striking biblical image is that of being refined in a crucible or purified, which is particularly pursued in Ezekiel, a prophet marked as a ‘tester and refiner’ who delivers a message that events will refine the people – especially the faithful, ‘as silver is melted inside a furnace’ (Ezekiel 22:22). Gradually this develops into a metaphor of complete transformation for those who turn away from wickedness: I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. (Ezekiel 36:25–6)
These metaphors of transformativity can be traced into the Reformation and Enlightenment, through to Marxism and the human sciences. Alchemical ideas, heretical yet popular in the Renaissance, also feed into the idea of transformativity, as alchemists from Albertus Magnus to Newton attempted to transform substances by breaking them down into infinitesimal pieces, then remoulding them in furnaces or crucibles (Horvath, 2013). For Horvath, secretive alchemical knowledges were transposed into modern governmental sciences, creating social alchemy, uprooting populations from locality and custom, and remaking them through institutions and industry.
Similarly, the 18th-century conception of Bildung, expressed in innumerable Bildungsroman – building on Protestant genres of redemption narratives – expressed a transformativist conception of personhood: ‘Transformation and rebirth are enduring meanings that belong to the religious concept of bildung’ (Koselleck, 2002: 177). Incrementally, this self-creation became secularised as an ethic of personal self-creation, and discourses of Bildung normalised ‘that conduct of life which is always moving on the path of self-discovery’ (ibid.: 184). Alongside governmental power and institutions that transformed selves, self-making became an active individual ethic in the 18th century. Strikingly, the ideal of Bildung as a ‘transformation of the self’, promoted through universities in the 19th century, has shifted from a general cultivation of character and social responsibility to an emphasis on ‘flexibility’ as required by the labour market in recent decades (Hamann, 2011). Not quite protean malleability, labour market flexibility nonetheless emphasises the capacity of self and society to be continuously reconstituted.
Through historical linguistics, Wierzbicka (2010) traces how the world view of British empiricism entered culture more generally since the Enlightenment. This empiricist cultural attitude is particularly expressed in the word ‘experience’, which is now so central to the social sciences (McIntosh and Wright, 2019). Rather than simply meaning accumulated knowledge, like skills or wisdom, or just memories, the term experience has come to signify ‘an event seen from within’ (Wierzbicka, 2010: 39). In contemporary parlance, experiences are usually subjective – ‘lived experiences’, but also social, ‘the experience of industrialisation’. Thus, an experience is akin to an experiment, both demonstrating something and transformational. This is particularly clear in the meaning of religious experience, taken for instance by William James to signify a ‘conversion’, a dramatic form of transformation. Importantly, experiential transformations are not metamorphoses, but lived through, so that a substrate of self or society perdures: ‘What was happening in the experiencer's mind included thought that had the form of a contemporary record’ (ibid.: 73). While somewhat specific to anglophone cultures, this generalised modern attitude of an empirical attitude positions the self as both an experimenter attempting to understand their life and society and a subject of experimental transformation.
While every strand of thought composing contemporary transformativity cannot be traced here, the broad philosophical and theological antecedents of contemporary social theory are discernable. All is changed, but not changed utterly; whether it is the self, an organisation, a whole culture, or a population, something is retained, a substrate upon which change is wrought, a division between the essential and unchangeable and that which is in flux. The intersection of these metaphors of transformation, which very often concern the self and sociological ideas about the collective as a site of transformation, emerges clearly in historical thought about progress, crisis, and transformation.
A typology of change
Contrasting conceptualisations can be helpful in specifying transformativity, so here a tripartite typology of change is offered, comprising reconfiguration, transformation, and metamorphosis. Drawing on Weber's approach to ideal types, these broadly reflect historical examples, as outlined above. Importantly, transformation is the middle term here, clarified as not merely reconfiguration but less drastic than a metamorphosis.
To describe change as a reconfiguration implies that there are some relatively stable elements whose position or relation is altered. The integral substance, character, or quality of these elements persists through change. However, the reconfiguration of these elements matters; it is not merely ‘rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic’. Social theories rarely describe change in this manner, but behavioural economics and rational choice theories frequently imagine that reordering incentives for self-interested agents will generate changes in outcome, without necessarily changing the agents, who remain rational actors, atomistic nodes in a network (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). Strikingly, Norbert Elias’ processual sociology employs the word ‘figuration’ – with the illustrative example of a sporting match being changed by the positional redistribution of players or changes of rules. 1 A crucial aspect of reconfiguration is that it is largely reversible, because reverting to an earlier configuration undoes the change, except insofar as memory makes a difference. The relative scarcity of this mode of thinking change is perhaps evidenced by discussions of the ‘new normal’ and ‘post-Covid’ world, where returning society and the economy to its prior configuration is largely deemed impossible. Yet the swiftness with which pandemic lockdowns and restrictions reconfigured society perhaps speaks to the power of reconfiguration to enact real change.
Our middle term, transformativity, has already been discussed at length, but to distinguish transformation and its near neighbours – transmutation, alteration, and even transubstantiation – from reconfiguration is helpful. Whatever elements are transformed are not merely placed in new relation or position unto others, but substantially changed, in the sense both that the change matters but also that this happens to some sort of ‘substance’ – the self, society, culture. As a middle term, transformativity exhibits both change and continuity, where whatever is transformed is recognisable yet palpably different. Illustrating the characteristics of this part of the typology, into which most examples of contemporary thought fall, is almost unnecessary, as transformativist thinking is almost axiomatic, which is why examining it more deeply is the challenge of this article.
Metamorphosis presents a limit case for transformativity. Within metamorphosis, the elements that might be reconfigured or transformed are more or less completely changed, recognisable only because one has completely replaced the other. A chrysalis becomes a butterfly in nature, a man becomes a wolf in myth. The persistence of consciousness in metempsychosis is already a gesture towards transformation, as it mingles change and continuity.
There are probably no recognisably social theories of change that employ the metaphor of metamorphosis, not even the most revolutionary theories, such as Marxism. This does, however, suggest a useful example to illustrate this typology. For Marx, bourgeois revolution ushering in capitalist production was already transformative: ‘Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions.… All fixed, fast-frozen relations … are swept away.… All that is solid melts into air’ (Marx and Engels, 2018[1848]: 27). From feudalism through capitalism to communism, dialectical transformation through conflict is anticipated, though without offering any blueprint for utopia. However, one example where change is anticipated in detail is the ‘withering away’ of the state.
While the concept of the state withering away was initially introduced by Engels in Anti-Dühring using the less evocative phrase that the state ‘just dies out’, perhaps the most consequential account is Lenin's State and Revolution. This insists that ‘there must undoubtedly be a special stage or special phase of transition from capitalism to communism’ (Lenin, 1992[1918]: 77; original emphasis). The theory stipulates a series of steps, firstly the arming of the proletariat and the seizing of the means of production. However, because the proletariat were socialised under capitalism, they temporarily retain notions of ‘bourgeois right’, and therefore a socialist state must regulate production and consumption temporarily. Only gradually, with time, can the workers learn to adopt and put into practice the motto ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. Little by little, as this new way of producing and consuming emerges, the need for the control of the state disappears, so that the state is not ‘smashed’ by revolution; it is retained and run by socialism, but, eventually, fully withers away.
This account of change involves reconfiguration and transformation. The workers take up arms and seize the means of production, reconfiguring pre-existing elements. However, this shift in possession is insufficient to enact the full change anticipated by Marxist theory, which deploys a proto-sociology of economic habitus to understand why workers are steeped in bourgeois culture, and must slowly be re-educated. This is recognisably transformativist thinking, and Lenin insists upon the ‘gradualness of the process and its spontaneous nature’ (1992[1918]: 80). There is no place for a magical metamorphosis within this theory, even though society is radically changed into something thoroughly new. Indeed, the continuity between capitalism and communism is quite marked: ‘The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory with equality of labour and equality of pay’ (ibid.: 91). However, along the way, selves, society, economy, and culture are utterly transformed.
While provisional and skeletal, this typology of change also allows us to identify more and less transformativist social theories. As above, Elias’ figurational sociology emphasises how apparently substantive differences are a product of contingent dynamic relations. Latour's actor–network theory can account for change in terms of the addition of new nodes to a network or the redistribution of relations within them. Following Latour's conception of theory as an account – ‘Without economics there are no economies; without sociology there is no society’ (Latour, 2007: 257) – one might equally argue that without ‘transformativist thinking’ there are no transformations. In the eyes of the actor–network theorist who is an immersed ethnographer of social change, all change is granular addition, subtraction, realignment, (dis)connection in a complex composition that appears as a ‘transformation’ only to the bird's eye view of social theory, which takes shortcuts in describing social change. By contrast, social theories of metamorphosis are scarce; one outlier might be Braidotti's post-humanist Metamorphoses, which declares that ‘thinking is about change and transformation’ (2002: 124). Here, society is imagined in flux between bodies, culture, and technology, never fixed but indeterminate and vital, animated by becoming, decomposition, erasure, and metamorphosis. Strikingly, for Braidotti, power is not just a relationship but a quality within being, potesta the capacity to become something else.
To go beyond this typology and understand transformativist thought in depth, we turn here to Turner, Foucault, and Butler. Tracing the intricacies of intellectual history is less important here than recognising that transformativist thinking animates social theory in general.
Transformative liminality
The once obscure word liminal has come to enter the lexicon of newspapers and everyday life. 2 Liminality denotes a transitional stage, an in-between situation, undefined by structures and institutions, filled with potential for creativity and critique (Thomassen, 2014). It is by now a truly transdisciplinary perspective, the key thinker of which is Victor Turner, who adapted a tripartite model of rites of passage from Van Gennep (Szakolczai and Thomassen, 2019). Dissatisfied with structural functionalism, Turner described rituals as providing a ‘time outside time’ wherein culture was not just ceremonially reinforced, but subject to question, challenge, and innovation – captured in the concept of ‘liminality’ (Turner, 1967, 1969). Arguably, this reflected the zeitgeist of counterculture, hippies, and principled protest, yet similar perspectives are articulated by Bakhtin's idea of the carnival and even Weber's notion of charisma. What matters is less the originality of Turner than the wider resonance of ‘liminality’ as a transformativist concept.
Briefly, Turner suggests that society is ordinarily structured, but that fluid, uncertain situations require rituals to enact change – whether this occurs naturally through seasons or the human life cycle or through political crisis such as succession or war. Thus, change is enacted ritually, with three distinct phases. Firstly, there is the suspension of order, where novitiates are separated from the community and reflect upon structures from a distance, guided by a ceremonial master. Secondly, there is liminality proper, where novitiates who are ‘in-between’ are subjected to trials and enact a symbolic performance. Thirdly, the community is reintegrated, with novitiates re-aggregated to their new role. Primarily, this describes rites of ‘status-elevation’ such as coming of age, but the pattern equally describes community-wide rites. During the ritual, existing structures can be reinforced, but they can also be questioned and challenged, through questioning and critique or subversive performances (Boland, 2019).
Significantly, liminality enables transformation, of novitiates, of communities, of social structure: ‘Subjectively there is in it the feeling of endless power’ (Turner, 1969: 139). Rather than rituals being reduced to wooden ceremonies (Boltanski, 2011), the idea of liminality suggests that ‘anti-structural’ transitions are unpredictable and alive with potential. For Turner, liminality is ‘the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all’ (Turner, 1967: 97). Thus, liminality asserts transformativity – structures are contingent constructions, and special transitional moments, from rituals to crises, hold out the possibility of change. The appeal of this theory is not just limited to its sixties-era countercultural optimism, but also its resonance with long-standing Western ideas of change: novitiates ‘have to be shown that in themselves they are clay or dust, mere matter, whose form is impressed upon them by society’ (Turner, 1969: 103). Rather than ‘social constructionism’ being reserved for academic or intellectual approaches, here it appears as a cultural idea – for Turner a universal, but perhaps having more local resonances with historical ideas of malleability.
For Turner, liminality is also an opportunity for subversion: ‘Liminoid phenomena … are often parts of social critique, or even revolutionary manifestos’ (1982: 54–5). Rather than just enabling social change, liminality serves as a space of freedom, autonomy, or potential from which new forms can emerge. Not only does liminality allow for the disintegration of existing structures; it enables new modes of being: ‘Experience must be linked to performance for there to be transformation’ (Turner, 1985: 206). Such creativity or novelty must be enacted or manifested somehow, which foreshadows Butler's ‘performativity’. While largely giving rise to academic celebrations of ritual, transition, and change, other scholars point out the existential uncertainty, anxiety, and even boredom connected to extended liminality (Horvath, 2013). Szakolczai and Thomassen (2019) describe modernity as ‘permanent liminality’, an endless series of chronic crises without resolution. Howsoever evaluated, the influence and circulation of Turner's model of transformativity is extraordinary. Indeed, this oscillation between structure and change can be detected in Giddens’ structuration theory: ‘All reproduction is necessarily production, however, and the seed of change is there in every act’ (Giddens, 1993: 108). This position is generic within contemporary sociology.
Transformative power relations
Influential across multiple disciplines, Foucault provokes suspicion about any discursive ‘truth-claims’: any theory can be an exercise of ‘power-knowledge’. Yet, despite his methodological commitment to ruptures, discontinuity, and promiscuous hybridisation (1977), herein Foucault's work is taken as articulating a version of transformativity.
Foucault's diverse works are generally historical, with his writings on prisons, asylums, and sexuality identifying a ‘transition’ in modernity, with the emergence of ‘governmentality’ between the 16th and 18th centuries – a mode of power that considers people and populations as transformable. Transformations of subjectivity and society are equally identified in the subtle, frugal governmentality of neo-liberalism (Palacios, 2018). Eventually Foucault delves back to ancient Greece and early Christianity, exploring ‘technologies of the self’, social practices wherein individuals ‘transform themselves’ (1988: 18). From these detailed studies, Foucault theorises power relations and subjectivity, and while there are numerous variations within his conceptualisation – from discipline to bio-power to governmentality to bio-politics – a concise starting point is ‘The Subject and Power’ (1982).
Against any metaphysical conception of ‘power’, Foucault (1982) insists that there are only ‘power-relations’, strategic situations wherein conduct is guided and such governance resisted; nothing but acts and ‘acts upon acts’ occur within these tactical struggles. Concepts like domination or ideology are unwarranted here; rather, analysis needs to follow the intricacies of relations, the deployment of force, resources, and knowledge. Without some degree of autonomy there are no power relations; ‘Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free’ (Foucault, 1982: 790). Yet, through power relations, subjects are also formed, becoming shaped and empowered but reconstituted by techniques, practices, and struggles. Thus, ‘power-relations’ serve as an arena for contestation and change, and ‘subjectivity’ as the target of interventions. Indeed, political stakes are implicitly reduced to struggles over subjectivity, per Foucault's much cited phrase ‘Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are’ (quoted in Butler, 1997: 101; see also Dean and Zamora, 2021).
Clearly, this depiction of power relations is transformativist: from individual subjects to whole populations subject to pastoral power, the idea of malleability predominates. No essence is attributed to the self, but against disciplinary institutions or normalising discourses it is possible for the subject to resist, subvert, and contest, by forms of counter-conduct and by refusing categorisations. There are long-standing debates about whether Foucault is a determinist who reduces individuals to docile bodies who are the puppets of power, or whether his theory imagines subjects as resistant and potentially critical. In either version, power transforms, society and selves are malleable, all institutions and disciplines are contingent and constructed.
Yet this elementary scene of power is not culturally neutral, but inspired by Foucault's extensive historical works, from psychiatrists interviewing inmates to inquisitorial torture to practices of confession. Beyond the architectures of power encoded within disciplinary institutions, Foucault's earlier work concerned modes of subjectification – how individuals were transformed through power relations. These ‘truth-games’ are the thread which he traces back to ancient Greece and early Christianity. Philosophical ‘spiritual exercises’ and Platonic dialogues were oriented towards both truth and transformation: ‘For the subject to have the right of access to the truth he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself’ (Foucault, 2005: 15). Relations between masters and novitiates, or even between partners in dialogue emerge here as central to how subjects are formed, even though Hellenistic subject-formation was largely self-directed, asking, ‘How must I transform my own self so as to be able to have access to the truth’ (ibid.: 178), with an emphasis on changing conduct rather transforming a metaphysical ‘selfhood’.
These philosophical exercises are adapted by early Christian practices of confession; initially public displays of sackcloth and ashes, then monastic confession, which becomes institutionalised over centuries into penance, required annually after 1215. For Foucault, ‘This notion of conversions, of the return to the self, of the turning to oneself … is one of the most important technologies of the self the West has known’ (2005: 208). Particularly, confession presents a power relation, between the penitent who must tell the truth about themselves to their auditor, displaying obedience, submitting to judgement, expressing contrition, doing penance, making atonement. By contrast to philosophical exercises to evaluate and administer one's own life conduct, Christianity renders self-formation into a pastoral power relation, between monks and abbots, penitents and priests, unto all the disciplinary relations between institutional power and subjects, whether in schools, factories, prisons, or hospitals, or beyond. Effectively, the scene of ‘power-relations’ in Foucault is not neutral but implicitly modelled on the encounter of confession.
The theme of confession emerges in Foucault's lectures initially, described as a colonisation of everyday life as early as Abnormal, but less pronounced in his books until The History of Sexuality: his quotable ‘Western man has become a confessing animal’ (1990: 59) refigures Aristotle's ‘political animal’. Eventually he moves towards an extensive analysis of confession: It involves establishing a relationship of obedience to the other's will and at the same time establishing, in correlation with, as condition of this obedience … this obligation constantly to tell the truth about oneself with regard to oneself in the form of confession. (Foucault, 2014: 308)
Transformative performativity
While Butler's works are diverse and complex, the concept of ‘performativity’ as rendered in the extraordinarily influential Gender Trouble provides another transformativist account. Importantly, for Butler, social life is not a ‘performance’ according to any theatrical metaphor, and, furthermore, any easy distinction between individual actor and social role is rejected (Butler, 1990). Rather, ‘performativity’ refers to acts that transitively constitute a subject: just as ‘performative speech acts’ conjure the situation that they purportedly describe, performative acts generate the social and personal characteristics that they supposedly reflect. In brief, Butler argues that ‘performativity is the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed’ (1996: 112). Usefully, this positions performativity as concerned not just with surfaces or appearances, but with the production of ontological assumptions about reality.
Initially, performativity is particularly focused on gender; for instance, a gendered gesture, rather than expressing internal, essential gender, is an act, imitated interpersonally and socially sanctioned, that by interpretative inversion appears like the ‘core’ or ‘truth’ of personhood. ‘That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality’ (Butler, 1990: 173). While there are long-running controversies about relativism here, what is interesting is how Butler's formulation allows for the possibility of transformation. Rather than gender being a biological given, it is performatively iterated, thereby variable across time and space. Furthermore, this radical indeterminacy of gender allows for the possibility of subversion and alterity, performativity that goes against the grain of hegemony and resists power – a model that goes beyond gender to posit almost anything as performatively enacted. Beyond the subjective ‘performativity’ of gender – whereby essence is not expressed but identity attributed socially – Butler (2015) offers a ‘performative theory of assembly’, whereby larger political groupings, such as a protest rally or social movement or even a nation, are not given but articulated and claimed by performative speech acts, for instance, claims that elections reflect the ‘will of the people’. Subsequent commentators have historicised performativity as a specific cultural mode of speech (Lorenzini, 2015).
Drawing on the work of Foucault, among others, Butler applies a model of performative constitution to subjectivity: ‘In other words, the “coherence” and “continuity” of “the person” are not logical or analytic features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and manifested norms of intelligibility’ (1990: 23). Thus, character, personality, or identity are all performatively enacted, on an individual and collective scale, ranging from life narrative to shared concepts that define personhood. Interestingly, Butler (1997) identifies a circularity within Foucault's ideas of self-formation, wherein the subject forms themselves by acting and reflecting upon themselves, yet who or what is this ‘proto-subject’ that brings the self into being and acts upon itself, before that self is constituted? Or, in other words, what is the substance upon which transformativity works?
Through a performative account of self-formation, Butler posits the subject as transitively enacted through an encounter with power wherein the self is subjectified but necessarily deploys power to other purposes, establishing conditional, partial, situated agency. Thus, subjectivity is generated partly through resistance but also through illusions, the disavowal of being performatively created through social powers. Strikingly, this leads into metaphors of internal struggle and even self-purification: ‘Consciousness is now divided into two parts, the “essential” and “unchanging” on the one hand, and the “inessential” and “changeable” on the other’ (Butler, 1997: 46). Establishing subjecthood entails drawing on external power, to empower one's agency, and thereby inscribing power within the self. Resistance and subversion are thereby partial, complex operations; indeed, Butler (2004) describes critique less as a discursive practice adopted by subjects than as a risky transformation of selfhood against power.
Evidently, Butler's concept of performativity, self-formation, and resistance is transformativist, creating an account of human action and society in general that is neither voluntarist nor deterministic but allows for change in negotiated and nuanced ways. This theorisation explicitly builds upon Foucault's work on power relations, perhaps critically in places. The linkages to Turner are less clear, yet his later works on liminality emphasise the importance of ‘performance’ as a way of not just articulating change but enacting it, producing something new symbolically (see Turner, 1982). Indeed, both Butler and Turner are crucial in Alexander and others’ formulation of the ‘performative turn’ (Alexander, Giesen, and Mast, 2006). Following our discussion of Foucault above, Butler can equally be considered as reprising extant Western accounts of the self, particularly from confessional ethics; Butler's engagement with psychoanalysis leads to the suggestion that ‘what remains unspeakably absent inhabits the psychic voice of one who remains’ (Butler, 1997: 196). That is, there is some substrate of the self, disavowed and foreclosed by the encounter with power, that persists. The long-standing dialectic between structure and agency encoded here also contributes to the idea of transformativity, modelling the present as persistence but also potential. Moving from these three thinkers to a general theory of transformativity is our next challenge.
Transformative theories
There are labyrinthine debates on each theorist’s work, but one clarifying gesture is to apply them to themselves: if, per Butler, ‘performativity is the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed’ (1996: 112), then these accounts are discourses that install the ontological effect of ‘transformativity’. Identifying ‘transformativity’ is possible largely by following the nominalist procedure of dissociating words and things, a key step in constructivist and Foucauldian thinking (Hansen and Triantafillou, 2022). Following Hacking (1999), asserting that something is a social construct entails the assumption of contingency and the possibility of change, both key parts of the transformativist ontology. Such a critical attitude to concepts, questioning their relationship to reality, is also characteristic of liminality (Boland, 2019). But, beyond simply asserting that each theorist ‘constructs’ transformation, what emerges here are the broad contours of transformativity.
Within reason, Turner, Foucault, and Butler are broadly compatible; for instance, it is plausible to assert that subjectification or performativity occur under liminal conditions (Szakolczai and Thomassen, 2019), or that liminality is a performative social assemblage (Alexander, Giesen, and Mast, 2006). There are salient differences, of course, but each of these theories allows for a dynamic, transformativist conception of change. While harmonising these distinctive thinkers risks simplification, there are clearly compatible elements within how they conceptualise subjective transformation: liminal initiations, power relations and performativity all conceive of a subject with a ‘before and after’, undergoing an experience that transforms them, so that they both gain and lose characteristics, but something persists. Within this process, the subject encounters power, structure, or normative performances, yet the moment of transformation is an encounter that also allows for resistance, anti-structure, and subversion. Thus, the subject is both potentially transformed by society and also capable of transforming and recreating itself. 3 Broadly, this transformation occurs through attaining some sort of critical knowledge, or, in theological terms, an epiphany accompanies conversion.
What emerges here is a sort of dramaturgy of transformation, focused upon the appealing figure of the individual – not quite a blank slate, but the relatively malleable figure ‘coming of age’. Encountering external forces, the subject is passively transformed, but also actively reacts and forms themselves, acquiring critical knowledge along the way. Yet the process is iterative and perhaps interminable. Writ large on a social canvas, this model is visible in how historical changes to nations, civilisations, and globalised modernity is conceptualised (Koselleck, 2002). Evidently, each of our theorists is concerned with individual transitions, whether ritual novitiates, disciplinary inmates, or subversive performances, but broadly the same mode of thinking about change pervades how they conceive society. Clearly, the outline genealogy of transformativity offered earlier showed how concepts of change emerge from concerns about subjective or personal change, from conversion to coming of age, but contemporary thought positions such agentic or actor-focused accounts in tension with circumstances or structure. Indeed, following Foucault, pastoral thought thinks the individual and group together, omnes et singulatim.
Perhaps the crucial term uniting these three figures is experience. For Turner, liminality becomes more than just a moment in a rite of passage, but more or less consubstantial with experience: undergoing, passing through, being transformed. The etymological semantics of experience in per, an Indo-European root, is central to his late works in experiential anthropology (Turner and Bruner, 1986). Similarly, Foucault's whole oeuvre is concerned with experiences of discipline, being governed, sexuality, and so forth (Tirkkonen, 2019). Furthermore, Foucault even makes experience the grounds of critique (Lemke, 2011), including the ‘experimentalism’ of dandyism in modernity. Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power (1997) posits experiences of abjection and resistance to power at the core of the performative constitution of the subject. Similarly, her account of critique is not voluntaristic, but depends on subjects experiencing power as threatening their very being or identity.
Experience is a key category within contemporary social theory (McMylor, 2005) and everyday discourse (Scott, 1991), and is even quite powerfully deployed within social policy debates (McIntosh and Wright, 2019). Debates about the importance of lived experience and how it feeds into standpoint theory have been ongoing for decades (Scott, 1991; Van Zoonen, 2012). Importantly, experience is not static semantically, but has been reconfigured significantly, not just in the translation of the Greek term into Romance and Germanic languages, but in the modern reconceptualising of the word experience alongside the term experiment as modified by empiricist thought (Wierzbicka, 2010). Whereas experience in Shakespearean times meant acquired wisdom, today it means something like an acquired sense datum that is interpreted and shapes the self – or even a collective subject in phrases like ‘Modern society experiences technological disruption’.
Considered through the lens of transformativist ontologies, experiences are quasi-experiments undergone, reshaping oneself, society, and even the environment. The ‘test orientation’ of modernity, as diagnosed by Marres and Stark (2020), highlights how knowledge, truth, and meaning are generated by framing events, processes, and even accidents as tests or trials, akin to scientific experiments that reveal ‘reality’, albeit provisionally or partially. The ‘science’ invoked here is old-fashioned empiricism, characterised by the ‘scientific method’ of repeated experiments with variation, held to reveal the nature of things, if adequately interpreted using logic, or ‘critical thinking skills’ in contemporary parlance. Beyond the scientist’s experimental search for knowledge, perhaps there is also something of the alchemist’s search for power, where experiences are sought for their transformative quality (Horvath, 2013).
Beyond the personal level, modernity itself becomes a great experiment: contemporary governmentality is styled by Foucault as an adaptation of pastoral power that seeks to transform subjects and society. From cradle to grave, a host of interventions, incentives, and normalising discourses exert subtle and transformative power. Neoliberal capitalism seeks to disrupt static societies by installing market competition, mobilising resources, making connections: ‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul’, as Thatcher declared (1981). Individuals are remade as entrepreneurial subjects, investing in themselves, exchanging their labour and assets. All these tests of the self and society, trials that may reveal reality or enable us to ‘tell the truth about our lived experiences’, are experiments oriented towards transformation.
According to this widespread and implicitly accepted ontology, life itself is a series of experiences that constantly transform us, individually and collectively. This reflects, perhaps, underlying theological models wherein all ‘worldly’ life is contingent, ‘change and decay in all around’ – a perspective hardly limited to Judeo-Christian cultures. Contemporary sciences find the natural world constantly subject to change, from the life cycle of cells through to the evolution of whole species and the mutations of DNA. Yet, beyond religion and science, is transformativity always the best model for understanding social change?
Conclusion
Social theory has frequently typified modernity as a project of transformation – for instance, Bauman's analysis of ‘solid modernity’ (2002). From state-level governmental interventions to liberals ‘letting the market decide’, modernity is posited as a sort of experiment oriented towards transformation. Transformativity extends from the individual, an unstable, ongoing project of self-transformation, to the social – varying through time and space, history and geography. This mirrors the reflexive individualism of modernity per Giddens and Beck, or the ‘until further notice’ character of Bauman's liquid modernity: ‘There is no state of modernity, modernity would cease being modernity the moment that process ground to a halt’ (Bauman, 2017: 68). For optimistic or progressive social theories, this experimental transformation is a rational emancipatory project, and even for dialectic or conflict thinkers, this history is the working out of tensions that will generate a worthwhile future. Much social theory is mordantly pessimistic: from Weber to critical theory to much contemporary thought, modernity appears to be a Faustian pact wherein meaning is exchanged for power, and disaster looms (Yair and Soyer, 2008). Even in this ‘tragic vision’ of modernity, transformativity is in evidence, wherein ‘instrumental reason’ and so forth transform society, which becomes akin to a juggernaut out of control (Giddens, 2003).
Historically, these versions of social theory inherit the 18th-century notion of ‘civilisation’, understood as both an emergent property of society and a moral project (Elias, 2000). While the zealous crusades for modernity, enlightenment, and rationality are now mired in ambivalence and critique, the ontology of society as self-transforming persists, whether it be an unfolding of incipient potentials or a purificatory jettisoning of ossified elements. Explaining social change posed theoretical problems for Enlightenment-era philosophers as much as it does today, and the transformativist model has been extraordinarily influential and consequential. However, there are other modes of thinking that are displaced by it, not just ancient notions of metamorphosis, but more modest notions of reconfiguration, addition, subtraction, rearrangement, and so forth, which are more concrete and less metaphysical. There is no metonymic ‘subject’ or ‘society’ that needs to be ‘transformed’ if we pay close attention to the complex array of actors and objects in a configuration (Latour, 2007).
How we conceptualise change matters. For instance, political critiques that rely on consciousness raising or ‘changing hearts and minds’ proceed on an implicitly transformativist ontology, wherein there is a substance, whether figured as subjects or society, that needs to be transformed (Boland and Moore-Ponce, 2023). Evidently, such an approach requires decades, if not centuries, of slow social and cultural change by itself. For instance, the longue durée of feminism involves resistance to patriarchy through critiquing sexism to transform society and selves. Fortunately, alongside these transformations there are reconfigurations, changes in institutions, such as labour and property laws, new sexual harassment and workplace bullying policies, leave entitlements, flexible working, or even changes to the architecture of offices. Such reconfigurations would not take place without cultural critique and the sense of contingency and potentiality created by transformativist thought, but more concrete thought about how society can be reconfigured is also necessary.
Without downplaying any political agenda, the challenges of inequality based on gender, race, or other discriminations are joined by the contemporary problem of climate change. This is based in part on capitalist exploitation, which might return us to the problem of transforming class consciousness, another problem of slow transformation. Others might suggest that patriarchy or colonialism created this problem. Certainly, the rate of the destruction of nature might abate if structural wealth inequalities and the international order inherited from historical oppression were cancelled by revolution. Yet even a strong socialist state, before it ‘withers away’, might be unsustainable. Regardless, the problem of sustainability would still confront us, since global warming is thoroughly ‘baked in’ and several tipping points are occurring now, such as the collapse of glaciers, the disappearance of Arctic summer ice, rampant wildfires, the thawing of permafrost, and the loss of crucial rainforests. To change our attitudes subjectively or socially is insufficient; only radical institutional change that reconfigures society will make a significant difference now. Reconfiguring domestic life and property relations; slowing down and resetting agriculture, fishing, transport, communication, and work; controlling and co-ordinating global energy supplies; and resource extraction, alongside rewilding of habitats, may make a difference.
Broadly, we all know such measures are needed, and swiftly, but meanwhile we wait for society to deliver these transformations or offer piercing critiques. This paucity of imagination is something that social theory can address, by offering alternatives to transformativist thinking, which already exist within our cultural history. Foregoing the obsession with ‘changing hearts and minds’ and identifying practical reconfigurations might be a useful beginning. To do that, we need to have serviceable models of change, beyond transformativity.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
