Refiguring figurational sociology: Norbert Elias and communicative constructivism

This article brings figurational sociology into systematic dialogue with communicative constructivism, most prominently associated with Hubert Knoblauch. While Elias’ framework powerfully captures processuality, relationality, and the co-evolution of subjectivity and social structures, it remains comparatively underdetermined regarding the mediational and material conditions of communication in late modernity. A comparison between these theories becomes particularly dynamic at the level of subjectivity and identity formation. While Elias conceives subjectivity through the long-term intertwining of psychogenesis and sociogenesis, emphasising the historical formation of self-restraint, affect control, and reflexive individuality within changing figurations, communicative constructivism reformulates these processes in explicitly communicative and relational terms. Knoblauch argues that the subject should no longer be understood as a substantial or pre-social entity, but rather as an emergent property of communicative action itself. Communicative constructivism radicalises Elias’ processual understanding of the self by relocating the formation of subjectivity from processes of habitus formation to communicative, performative, and mediatised practices. Further argued here is that Elias’ concept of figurations - dynamic networks of interdependence constituted through ongoing processes of sociogenesis and psychogenesis - can be productively re-specified in light of contemporary transformations of societies. Communicative constructivism addresses this gap by foregrounding the embodied, objectified, and technologically mediated character of communication. It demonstrates how processes such as mediatization, translocalization, and polycontexturalization transform the very texture of interdependencies, producing configurations that are no longer territorially bounded or institutionally stabilised in classical ways. In this perspective, figurations are not merely evolving but are refigured through the multiplication and overlap of communicative contexts, resulting in heightened tensions, asymmetries, and novel forms of power.