Towards a Generative Relational Theory of Subject Formation: A Preliminary Inquiry into Early Development

The study of early development ordinarily takes the subject as given and traces the capacities it acquires. This paper takes the prior question as its object, namely how a subject is formed at all, and argues that the subject is the relational outcome of development rather than its starting point. It carries forward a research programme that has replaced the individual with generative relational being and the sign with a generative relational epistemology, and it now replaces the cognitive ability, as the unit of analysis in early development, with the relational capacity. Generative relational capacity is defined as the capacity to enter, sustain, transform, and reproduce shared relational fields, and the classic findings of developmental research, joint attention, gaze following, social referencing, and theory of mind, are reread as empirical manifestations of one developing capacity rather than as discrete cognitive modules, with the attributions called theory of mind and the earlier scene of joint attention taken as showings of the same capacity in different registers. The account is then opened onto its social-ecological condition. Subject formation proceeds within a relational ecology, the historically and culturally organized configuration that makes some relational fields possible while constraining others, and is never a sealed dyadic affair. A comparative note on institutional childcare sets three grammars of relational-field formation beside one another, and finds in each a distinct configuration of achievement and cost, with no one of them a model. On this basis the political economy of subject formation is restated. Capital does not shape the child directly; it reconfigures the relational ecology, and its most recent frontier, beyond the extraction of value from the sign and from relation, is an invasion of the generative process itself, a reach that damages the formation of a subject together with its own subsequent power to generate. The account closes, in the manner it requires of itself, on the questions that a generative developmental psychology would have to take up.